Broken Open

Most people survive hard seasons. Fewer actually grow from them. In this episode, George and Tony get honest about what struggle is really doing to you — why difficulty alone doesn't build character, and what separates the people who come out stronger from the ones who just come out tired. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:19

Hey everyone, welcome to The Honest Hour, the show where we have real conversations about the things that shape who you are, how you lead, and how you connect with the people around you. I'm your host, George Adair, and with me as always is my co-host, Tony Diorio. Tony, welcome. Good to be here, George. Let's get into it. Excellent. If this is your first time with us, welcome. On our podcast, we work through difficult situations. We align core leadership principles with real life problems and address how the world around us will shape our perspectives and maybe even our lives. On the honest hour, we will be challenged, provoked, and lead in ways that will enlighten your view of the world around us. All right, let's get into it. Today's episode, broken, uh broken open. We're addressing the struggle, what the struggle is really doing to us. And I want to start with something I think most people feel but rarely say out loud. We've all been told that hard times build character, that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And somewhere along the way, that phrase becomes so overused that we stopped actually believing it. We say it, but do we trust it when we're in the middle of it?

SPEAKER_00 1:42

Well, George, I think it's extremely important. How do you see this paradigm in your life? And when did you realize you were even in it? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

It's a great question. And I gotta say, I think everybody's gone through multiple struggle situations where they found themselves in a place that they was very uncomfortable, but they did not expect. I can recall certainly a time when I was asked by a girlfriend I was living with out in San Diego to move back to Colorado. And I was in San Diego at the time loving it. I loved you not. It's San Diego. It's San Diego. And so I just remember the very difficult struggle. Even though I was in my early 20s, it still was difficult to make that decision whether I wanted to come back to Colorado or stay in San Diego. And I can just say that that that moment really shaped me because ultimately I had to give up something that I thought was my future. I thought that I needed and wanted. Surfing, right? Yeah, that's right. Surfing on the beach, you know, hanging out at Pacific Beach, Ocean Beach, man. Those places are classic. Hard to give up. But I did. I had to give it up. And I came back here to Colorado, which uh ultimately I found my wife and my wonderful family that I've now have today. Never would have done that before.

SPEAKER_00 2:58

Tell our beginners, was that the girlfriend, or did you find the wife after the other one?

SPEAKER_01 3:01

Well, let me let me be honest. It was not the girlfriend. So I think there was a lot of things working here. Yep. And I made the right decision ultimately. Sounds like it.

SPEAKER_00 3:09

I've known it in a while now, so it sounds like it.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

Yeah. Well, let's get into some research. I'd like to I'd like to give a little bit of research on this show so that it kind of kicks us off into what we're going to talk about. It also gives us a little information into what the data is showing us around the world and maybe just around uh the United States, but it kind of helps us to pole vault into some of these questions. Well, this particular one is from the journal, the traumatic stress uh journal, that they found that up to 70% of people who experience significant adversity report at least one area of post-traumatic growth. This means that they ultimately came out stronger on the other end, and they were probably more connected to the things that mattered.

SPEAKER_00 3:53

With the post-traumatic piece of that, though, George, does that make you mentally stronger, or is there some mental piece to that statistic?

SPEAKER_01 4:01

Aaron Powell That's a good question. And now here's the catch to the to the statistic that I um wanted to add, and I think this is the most important piece of it. So the the catch is only those who actively processed the experience uh rather than simply enduring it saw lasting transformation. This was uh a report from Tadeshi and Calhoun in 2004. So tying those two bits of data together shows the picture.

SPEAKER_00 4:32

But it insinuates that there is a mental gain to it.

SPEAKER_01 4:35

Yeah, there's a mental gain. It also insinuates that it has to be an active awareness of what just happened to you. Oh, agreed. You know, and and I think we don't recognize that a lot where we're in the situation, we just want to be out of it. We just want to get through the battle, and we're gonna build a foxhole. We might build a deeper foxhole and a deeper one. And what we don't realize is, man, that ladder that we we walked up to get out of it, we should probably reflect on that for a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. You know, what did it take? Yeah. What did it take to crawl out of that hole? Um, and that's what that's this is saying here. Um and so let's think about it. 70%, that's a that's a s, that's actually not a small number at all, right? That's most of us. So uh when we're in the middle of the hard season, we do say that we're we're seeing some growth, that there was something there. Uh, but Tony, uh Tony and I are gonna try to unpack all this, what's actually happening when life gets hard. Uh so let's jump into it. I've got a few questions that are gonna help shape this episode. And hopefully by the end of it, listeners, you've got a better understanding of how to approach your struggle and what it's gonna take to become stronger, more more capable, and being able to withstand your next storm.

SPEAKER_02 5:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:50

Okay. Let's do it. All right, Tony, I'm gonna ask uh a few big questions here. We're gonna be talking real. No answers are right, so just uh fire away at uh your experiences and and what you have to bring to the table here.

SPEAKER_00 6:05

Fair enough.

SPEAKER_01 6:06

All right, so think about the hardest season you've personally walked through and tell us about it.

SPEAKER_00 6:12

So if I if I look back on my almost 44 years on this lovely planet, I would have to say the biggest transformation from a hard season that I that I've had to experience was in sort of my younger years. So I I when I I'll kind of take you back a little bit through a short story, but from early on, and it to be exact, it was 18 months old. My dad was a teaching professional. Uh he taught golf. And so I was at every lesson, I you know, watched him teach, I absorbed, I learned. Um, that turned into an obsession. And, you know, the fact that my dad had never made it to the tour turned into part of his obsession as well. So it was something we shared. And so what I'm getting at is is from a very young age, I was essentially born, uh bred, taught, told, convinced, all of that, uh that I that I was gonna be a touring golf professional. And so when I graduated college and that we'll call, you know, that dream sort of went by the wayside, I had a massive hard season, right? A massive transition that was in front of me. I had to search deep, pretty deep inside. So I mean I moved back into my parents' house, right? And and you know, while playing and attempting to be one of the top names in the sport, um I made a decent amount of money. So it would the money wasn't necessarily the issue. So you're comfortable. Yeah, it was the you know, how do you launch this into something? Yeah, right. And and if there's an investment, where do you get the ROI? Right. And so I moved back in with my parents. I stayed there for, I think it was a almost a year. Um, but within three months, I got out there and I figured I'm gonna stay within the sporting community. I have a name, I have experience, um, I know the industry pretty well. Uh so I went to the Denver Broncos, because you know, I moved back to my parents' house in Castle Rock and and uh went to the Denver Broncos and had a meeting with one of their general managers, which was shocking to me that they have so many general managers. I thought that was just a single title. It's a lot. But regardless, I had a had a meeting with the general facilities gentleman, was who I ended up getting the attention of. And he gave me a job. So I I literally went from truly playing professional sports to a degree, right, to driving the rookie van. I was a rookie concierge for the Denver Broncos. What that entailed was me picking up the rookies because their cars hadn't been shipped in, or they're right out of college, they didn't have a car, you know, those types of things. And so I had a big panel van that was inconspicuous. They didn't want anybody to know that this was the Denver Broncos, it was an ugly GMC panel van. But I picked them up at their hotel, took them to practice, took them to their workout sessions, and then to dinner, right? To play golf, to parties. Yeah. You know, a lot of the times it was to the bar at night, right? But anyway, that was my job. And so as I describe that, I'm sure many of you listeners sit back and go, that's that's a hell of a transformation, right? You go from top of the social world to really nothing that anybody's dreaming about. You're you have a caddy. That's a great way to put it. You swapped. Absolutely. It's like I became the caddy and switched sports. You're you're exactly right. So I did this for about six months, and I just knew this this couldn't be where I was gonna live. So again, really searched. I met with my friends from college, you know, a lot of the guys that I lost touch with while I was out there on the road got, you know, we sat down, we went to some bars, I was picking some brains. These guys have already started their professional careers to a degree. They're early in it, but they've at least started. So I'm picking their brains trying to figure it out. One of my buddies came to me and he said, you know, you've just got a personality for sales. Give it a try. And, you know, and that made me think, you know, my whole life, I've always been argumentative, I've been, you know, Mr. Controversial. Like, I have no problem just having a hard conversation with people. And so my parents growing up always told me, you know, if you're not a professional golfer, right? Let's put that to the side. But, you know, if you should be a lawyer, a politician, or a salesperson, right? Because just I could speak to anybody, I can hold that conversation, right? Be genuinely interested. So, anyway, that got me thinking. I remembered my parents telling me that. And so he said, we have a junior sales position open at this mom and pop tech company that he works. So it wasn't even tech on my mind, it was just sales at that point. I was young. I mean, we are kind of that end of millennial early Gen X generation, is kind of where George and I sit. And so, with that, tech has been a part of our lives, but it wasn't our lives, right? So it was interesting, is what I'm getting at. And so I, you know, I took the job, I met with the owner, he really liked my personality. Obviously, he told me you have no experience, but he made it, he took, took a chance on me. So he gave me basically an inside sales position. So if anybody that's in the sales world knows you're you're at the bottom. BDRs and inside salespeople, pretty much the bottom. And so I took the strategy, right? I again I knew that this wasn't an illustrious position. So it was okay, you gotta have money. You gotta start somewhere. And so what's the strategy? The strategy has to be just learn everything. Be a sponge. Just every room, every meeting, everything. Just learn. And so I did that for five years. And there were some little advancements, you could say, but it was a mom and pop company, so you're not really going anywhere. Get a little bit bigger territory, you get this, you get that. Uh so I did that for five years and I soaked it up. I became number one and two on the team. I don't want to embellish, especially if Aaron's out there listening. But uh, Aaron was my buddy that helped me get the job, got me the interview, and him and I kind of came where we were tag team in that number one, number two at this mom and pop company. And so I was recruited into a national firm, did the same things, A V systems, broadcast integrations, you know, things like that. But I I was recruited by a national company to come in and do that. What I'm getting at with all this, and I can kind of stop because we're not talking about my career, but it it the point that I'm trying to make is I had no clue. I really reflected on doing something, but the sales thing was just something that I recognized I had a talent for, right? And then I invested, and that's the part that I dramatically, you know, paused to say because I invested in that career, and then I found, hey, tech is interesting enough. Yeah, right. I was, shall we say, lucky or you know, divine intervention, however you want to say that. But the fact is, is tech became a recession proof industry. Yeah. None of us knew that at that time, but it became that, right? So it was like, okay, now we invest more, we invest more. So my first transition was really building who I am today. Now I'm an executive, and I've been an executive of multiple tech firms. Yeah. Um, we'll likely continue to go down that road. Um, but now I see myself in a second transition. Yeah, 21 years later to rinse and repeat.

SPEAKER_01 12:48

Well, let me just uh jump in. I think what you you firmed up really nicely for us with this is look, there's there was a very important fork in the road in your life. You had a moment of saying, well, I could be this really great, you know, thing over here. Cab driver. Yep. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:06

I mean, we didn't know what Uber was, but I could have been a damn good Uber driver. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 13:09

You could have been something different. Yeah. But you what you did was you took some time to reflect on the fact that look, there's there's something transitioning here from the great thing that you could have been to, okay, I need to move to something more practical, more sustainable. And I'll give a little bit of research on this. But so so what you what you've told me is you had a you had a storm that hit in your life. And then in order to get out of the storm and find your way through it, you needed to have a moment of reflection, time to ask yourself the hard questions.

SPEAKER_00 13:39

And I didn't hear you say this, so I want to throw this out to the like to the in any Gen Zer that's listening to us. Yeah, you're coming out into one of the hardest markets we've ever seen. The one thing I didn't hear you say, build a plan. Right. You can reflect. Absolutely. You're right on that. You hit it. But the thing is, is if you don't build a plan, you've got no baseline to execute on that.

SPEAKER_01 13:59

I gotta say, though, for the Gen Z or even just that generation, the concept of building a plan hasn't even really formatted in their brains yet. They haven't come to that realization that planning is important. It's table stakes in order to get to the next thing. So, how do they do that? Give us some insights into maybe how you did it in a time where you were young, you know, and probably not all there either. So, how do you do that? How do you get yourself out of it?

SPEAKER_00 14:26

I mean, the the simple answer is you have to look for every opportunity. That I'm just that's the blanket. Okay. But I was lucky. So I I don't know if I'm the greatest, you know, resource to answer this question. And the reason I say that is growing up in golf afforded me luxuries, right? Who are the golfers that sink their time out there? Business is done on every golf course, right? I'm playing with CEOs at 12 years old. Yeah. So I had a call it a mentor program, but I had these individuals in and out of my life. I had the opportunity for four hours at a time to ask them questions, to sit them down, see how they did it, what they did, why they're even interested in whatever they're doing. But I mean, I would sit there, I was very lucky to have the executives of the time and I could bend their ears.

SPEAKER_01 15:10

Well, let's put let's go ahead and uh uh normalize it a little bit for the majority of people who don't have those executives. I think there's still what you're saying here is very critical and important. So if you're going through a struggle right now, uh it doesn't matter if you're in your 20s or 30s or 40s. I think what he what we're hearing here loud and clear is surround yourself with meaningful, impactful, positive people that have um it doesn't have they don't have to have wealth. They just have to have experience. They have to have been through it before. And surround yourself with them and be inquisitive, show you care, speak up, don't be afraid to tell people about where you're at in your life.

SPEAKER_00 15:49

And that's what I mean by seize every always be looking for those opportunities, seize every opportunity because when you're at a farmer's market and you see somebody that looks well to do, that looks strike up a conversation. You know, you don't know he could be a mentor, he could be an ally, he could be your next lead, he could be your next boss. Right. But that's what I mean by seize every opportunity, don't let it pass you by. My goodness, have the guts and the courage to just go up and talk, use them, see if they're a mentor. But yes, surround yourself with those people as much as you can.

SPEAKER_01 16:16

Great. So I'm just gonna uh firm this l this question up. If you're going through a season of difficulty and you're struggling, the first thing you should do is reflect for a while. It's okay to be in a tough spot. Tell yourself that, make sure you're aware of it, but then quickly move on from it and start being active about your plans, about what you intend to do, about meeting people, about getting out there, because you never know when that door to something totally different in your life is gonna open up. And guess what? It's probably gonna be really good for you. That's right. So don't be afraid. All right, so that's question one. Let's move on to question two. Tony, today's job market, you mentioned it, it's a very vol it's it's a volatile market. It's causing a lot of pain. There's a lot of layoffs, there's a lot of struggle and difficulty out there. What it's doing, and people aren't talking about, is it's creating strong, resilient individuals because they have to start being that by nature. AI and the economic upheaval we're seeing is also causing a huge disruption all over America. So there's a perfect storm going on. This is certainly one of those get gritty times in all of our lives. Do you think people come out of these hard seasons stronger and others come out more broken? And if so, what makes the difference?

SPEAKER_00 17:36

I'm a firm believer in sink or swim. Go all in, right? And and you heard we talked about this yesterday, but fail fast, right? So I I think it does absolutely harden people, right? I I think if you are willing to slow down and enable yourself to speed up, you can take in the hardening that you get from it. But you know, you have to reflect on those things as we talked about. You have to look back in order to to learn. So I absolutely think that it hardens people. I think it makes them very different across multiple emotions as well. So I I think it changes who you are. And some maybe sometimes for the good or the bad. I mean, you know, our soldiers, it could very well be for the bad. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 18:18

But us when we're professional people, what's the differentiator from somebody who's going to come out stronger for the good versus come out stronger for the not good?

SPEAKER_00 18:28

I think it's the positivity of what you're able to accomplish, right? If you're able to accomplish something positive, then you feel accomplished, vindicated, validated, whatever, right? You get the positive feelings and emotions. But I mean, if you're a soldier and you've you you're, you know, George and I are very um faith-based men, and so if you're a soldier and you've been taught not to kill and you've been taught peace and you've been taught to love thy neighbor, but you want to protect your country, and now your rifle is pointed at somebody and you have to pull the trigger. How is that gonna change you? That's your hard season, and that's not gonna change you for the positive. So that hardening, you could still be a good man. I mean, I'm not gonna try and insinuate anything negative about our soldiers. You still be a great man. We've seen many of them deal with that, but they have to deal with that. That's the hardening, is dealing with that for the rest of their lives.

SPEAKER_01 19:14

I'm gonna tug on that because you just hit a really good trigger here, I think. There are things that we need to recognize that are not going to be good no matter how you look at it. Right. They're just not. That you can see some things and you can never turn back from that, right? So be careful. There's a study done on post-traumatic growth, uh, which points to a few consistent differentiators. One, people who have a strong support system who can find meaning in these experiences and maintain a belief that they have some agency, even in the situation that uh they can't control, right, are far more likely to grow through adversity rather than enduring it. So I think what's tough to talk about here, but I think we all know it. Uh military service person gets out, they've experienced some serious traumatic situations, and they don't have anybody to lean on, abandons them, the society doesn't really help them, you know, whatever it is, you see those people unfortunately probably end up on the streets. Uh a lot of the time. Yeah. And or in bet any maybe even worse situations. Aaron Powell I think streets and suicide are the big statistics, right? Yeah. Streets and suicide. It's a big statistic. And then you see the ones that are supported, that do have a good caste system behind them, that are ready to weigh in, ready to help out. And yes, they may still go through phases of struggle to get to where they're going, but they're always going in that right direction. So how do people make sure that they have that good system with them when it's not blatantly available?

SPEAKER_00 20:43

Well, I think we kind of touched on it in the last question, even, right? If you've surrounded yourself with truly good people, then your support system's always there. But I also think you know you have it and you know you don't have it.

SPEAKER_01 20:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:56

I I don't think a support system is something where you could sit there and go, maybe Johnny's my guy. I I think you know when you have it and you know when you don't have it. And frankly, if you don't have it, push rewind on the podcast. Go find it. They're out there. Good people are all over the place. It's unfortunate what we see in the media. It's not, it's not what the majority is.

SPEAKER_01 21:18

So instead of somebody who's supporting your, let's say, bad habit, whatever it is, whatever it is, you know distinctly that person is supporting your bad habit. That's probably somebody to avoid is maybe what you're saying.

SPEAKER_00 21:31

I think it's uh it's absolutely what I'm saying. The only people that are uh, you know, outside of that rule would be the ones who just never were taught right from wrong. I mean, you have that in you, your consciousness.

SPEAKER_01 21:42

Yeah. So again, going back to the support system, find good people, find good groups, get involved. So I think what we're saying here uh to sum up question number two is get gritty by being purposeful. We talked about it in question one is having a plan. Sometimes having the plan means just finding the right people to surround yourself. With the support system is critical. It's more critical than you know. It takes a village not just to raise families, but it takes a village to be human. Be sane. Everything that surrounds us today, yeah, just to maintain some sanity. All right. Let's go on. So next question is uh, you know, how does struggle change the way you lead or show up in relationships? And does going through the hard things make you more short or tempered with people? Or does it make you empathetic, or is there something else that it does? What are those outcomes from going through these difficult times? That's a loaded question.

SPEAKER_00 22:39

That's so loaded. Okay. Um I I think they all can kind of tie together. I absolutely think you become more empathetic, but I think you become more empathetic if you find yourself on the success side of it because now you've seen what the struggle is. I also think that empathy, you you as as a human, you want to help the next person maybe avoid some of the pitfalls that you saw in your struggle, right? But I also think it hardens you at the same time. So when you go to mentor somebody and you see them not putting the work in, you don't have compassion for that person because you know what it takes and you see them not investing, not taking the time, not doing the right things, right? And so I think that hardens you from that perspective because I I don't think you have a lot of sympathy for those people. It's just, hey, I know what it takes, I've told you what it takes. You're not gonna listen to me. Now you're wasting my time too.

unknown 23:35

Right.

SPEAKER_00 23:35

So I think all of that goes in. I also think you have to understand it from a psychological perspective. And from a psychological perspective, this, you know, as much as you can prove anything in psychology for that matter, that's a whole nother show. But from a psychological perspective, you know, we've seen where humans abuse and treat those closest to them the worst. So in hard times, every human needs an outlet. That outlet is typically, you know, the dog, the kids, the wife, the family, the parents, the whatever, whoever's closest to you, the girlfriend, whatever. Yeah, right, they take it. And psychology has told us that the human nature is to take it out on them because we know in our hearts that they're the first ones to forgive us.

SPEAKER_01 24:15

Yeah. Yeah. I want to go back to something you said though. When it comes to success, I think, you know, just reflecting on some of my life experiences, there have absolutely been moments, whether it was executing on a project at work, maybe it was promising my kids something, and I wasn't able to come through. I wasn't able to be successful. And there was, there really was no um moment of, okay, well, I got through that because I continued to be successful in something else. It was just that's done, that's over with. And look, I didn't do good. And so what I want to say is I think what's important there is to recognize the failure, recognize the the thing that didn't go right, and use that for your empathetic or just your way of treating your next situation more attentively. And so I'll go back to a situation at work where we had a an execution on a new overhaul for a networking system, a new network system. Um, it didn't go well in the beginning, the first phase. And so I can recall stopping the team and saying, look, we're not gonna be able to get that back. We've got uh some unfortunate uh feelings out there by our staff. What we can do, though, right now is draw a line in the sand for us, and we're gonna say we're gonna do better next time, and we are. And so what I did is I took all that unsuccess, that failure, and we bottled it up into how we're going to be successful in the future. So I think there's a component that says use it to be empathetic to the person that maybe it didn't go well with. And instead of hardening yourself, where you mentioned there's that hardening. So the hardening could stop you from being empathetic and having a better execution next time. So that's I think critical in all of our minds as as humans is to how do we transform that into something that can be successful in the future.

SPEAKER_00 26:08

Yeah.

unknown 26:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:10

That that may may not have a a correlation. It may just be different, a completely different situation. But you're gonna use it. I think that's just more of how you can positively deal with it, too.

SPEAKER_00 26:19

Yeah. Right? Um Yeah.

unknown 26:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:22

All right. Uh so I think that's that's important. And then I just want to give a little context here. A study published in the Journal of Personality found that people who had experienced high adversity were were rated by peers as significantly more empathetic, but only when they had processed the experience. So we're going back to each one of these stats, all points to are you able to process the experience? Are you able to reflect exactly? Do you have so much armor that you're never able to look back on your failures and say, I did not do that well?

SPEAKER_00 27:00

And here's what happened. And listen, you you gotta I think it's important to say, I it may go without saying, but I think it's important to just put out there that when you are reflecting, you gotta see that from a holistic view. If you enter reflection bias, right? Or bias to yourself and you what your actions were or whatever, then you'll never get the end.

SPEAKER_01 27:20

You know, you said it a couple times, a fail fast kind of mentality. It's it's fail fast, but it's also reflect appropriately, maybe, and have those postmortems. Yeah, absolutely. If you don't have a good postmortem, then you're never and and use that, actionalize that postmortem, then fail fast is just well, let's go fail a bunch of things.

SPEAKER_00 27:42

You don't want to do that. And and I know they sound contradictive, but you've got to slow down to speed up and fail fast.

SPEAKER_01 27:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:48

Right? It sounds weird because as soon as you fail fast, you've got to pivot. Yeah. And when you pivot, you've got to slow down in order to enable the next speed up, right? And so when you're slowing back down, you should have a morning phase. What went right, what went wrong. Because again, going back to the previous question, if you don't have a plan, you're screwed. So you got to build a plan for the next thing, next venture, next whatever, right? And so you should have a morning phase in there where you're going back to reflect and then help that build to the next. But all right, last question.

SPEAKER_01 28:17

What's something you wish someone had told you when you were in the middle of a difficult season that would have actually helped?

SPEAKER_00 28:26

You know, I hate this question because it's all hindsight, right? Yeah. So um, so it sounds cliche, right? And and the thing is, is um, you know, take this bit of advice, but when you're in in the hardening set, when you're in that downtime, it's hard to listen to this and really break it down, internalize it, interpret it, whatever we want to say, but just it all will go back to normal, right? So and people have said that, and I know again it sounds cliche, but you don't want to hear it. You don't. So what I'm what I'm saying is my answer is hear it. Yeah. Like listen. Yeah. Because no matter what, as long as you haven't killed your work ethic, as long as you have drive, you have value, it will go back to normal.

SPEAKER_01 29:11

Yeah. Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna actually defer. I'm gonna be in an opposition to that. Okay. So my mom always says, she'll call me all the time whenever we're in a situation, or I'll just tell her about a situation and I'll and she'll respond. George, this too shall pass. Yes. This too shall pass. I'm sure her dad told her that and her dad's dad and so forth. Um, it's just passed on from generations. This too shall pass. And I gotta tell you, every time I heard that, it was like, you know, uh, nails on a chalkboard, right? I did not want to hear that. This too shall pass. Of course it will pass, Ma. I know that. Sounds like she came from a Catholic church.

SPEAKER_00 29:48

Yes, you might again, because I'm pretty sure that sounds like a Catholic saying. That's absolutely right.

SPEAKER_01 29:53

So, what I want to say is I actually love this question because what I'm finding is society and culture in in general, they don't want to hear you whimper and whine. They really don't, especially in your own household. They just want to see that you're active, you're you're moving in the right direction, you're going forward. Okay? But I'm here to tell you this our human nature does not support that. I'm gonna I'm gonna challenge you. I'm gonna challenge everybody who's listening right now. I don't think our human nature supports that. Why? Because I think this trauma that we go through, no matter who it is, military men and women, the most brute people on the planet, okay, uh, and the probably the most the most um um fragile all have the same response. That is a uh a shattering of that confidence and that pride and that conviction and that energy that you once had prior to the situation is shattered. Period. Yeah. Okay? So take it from a chemical, take it from a science standpoint, take it from a spiritual diminishing standpoint. Wherever you want to go, go there because what happened is you've been rattled, you've been sh you've been shaken. Think about it as you know, a bomb just hit a bunker, and that bunker is gone. You're not gonna get that bunker back until you start rebuilding, and that's gonna take time. There is a whole construction phase, you need a whole bunch of people to do it. There's a step process that has to happen. I think the human element needs a little bit of time. And I actually heard a good buddy of mine would say it this way that he was in a military family. His dad was actually a colonel, very high up. And anytime they moved, the kids would always cry about it. They would they would come to dad and say, I'm upset. They would cry, they would, they would be visibly angry, and his dad would tell him this Okay, you've got one week. You got one week. And at the end of that week, I don't want to hear another complaint. We're in it, we're here. And so he always was told that. The seven kids in his family or eight were told, go ahead and complain for one week, get it out, and then you're done. And so they they lived by that mantra. It was a go ahead and have your moment, but by the way, you're gonna be back into living and moving in the the direction you need to be.

SPEAKER_00 32:08

So to boil that down, your message, if the question was posed to you, is don't let it shatter you?

SPEAKER_01 32:14

My message is it's okay to be told that you're going through a tough time, that you're gonna need to get active and moved in the direction that you need to go very soon. Hit it head on. That's right. That's okay to have a moment of failure. It's okay to be told you just didn't do good in that, but we're gonna do better next time. It's okay to be human. And I think that's the human spirit is we look at we look at, let's say, our president and we look at other presidents, and we think they've just always been successful their whole life. Man, in order to get to where they have been, you just must be a titan of everything. You've never failed in your life. And you've never had a moment where you're you're sitting in the uh fetal position in the corner saying, I don't know what I'm gonna do on my next step.

SPEAKER_00 33:00

Frankly, the reality is most senators were worth less than our listeners when they got into it, and now they're bully multi-millionaires. Yeah, that's true. But that's another show that we can. I think we should tug on that one.

SPEAKER_01 33:12

I think we should. Um anyway, so that's my last question. We're gonna go ahead and uh finalize that um uh for the questions, um, and we'll move on now to to the rapid fire if we could. Let's do it. All right, Tony, this is for you. Uh so I'm gonna give you five questions. They can be quick answers, they can be just from the gut, whatever you like. Uh, I'm gonna fire them away and uh give us your best answer. Let's do it. All right. The first one one word that describes how you felt on the other side of your hardest season.

SPEAKER_00 33:45

And I think I said this earlier in the show, but accomplished or vindicated.

SPEAKER_01 33:50

Love it. Yeah, struggle or comfort?

SPEAKER_00 33:54

Which one teaches you more? Without a doubt, I'm a hundred and twenty percent confident it it's struggle, right? I what's the old adage that you know what is something like you know, the struggle hardens men and comfort, you know, softens them. I I can't I can't remember the idea, but yes, you have to To be a titan in this world, you have to face adversity. You can't be that successful without facing some level adversity. So welcome it. Get used to it, deal with it.

SPEAKER_01 34:26

And I think uh to pause on this one for a second, there's a model out there that shows the great civilizations of our history have all had a very similar theme to their demise. And it often didn't relate to holes in their military or gaps in their monetary value.

SPEAKER_00 34:43

Rome had the biggest military in the world at the time.

SPEAKER_01 34:46

And it all came down to the understanding of comfort and what it meant to their society. And so I think we struggle with when we go through difficult times as a country that somehow this is bad for us. That you know, whatever our economic situation is, we've got to get out of it. Instead of saying, no, while we're in it, this is what's going to sustain us for a long time.

SPEAKER_00 35:14

We do need to get out of it.

SPEAKER_01 35:15

Yeah, of course.

SPEAKER_00 35:16

So I just want to put that out there. Obviously, we do need to get out of it and find the prosperity on the other side, but it's being awake during it. Yeah. Right. You you've got to be awake that whole time because otherwise you're gonna continue to repeat it. Yeah. So be awake, take notes, internalize, reflect, do all of that, and then you'll save yourself that same heartache in the future. You're just gonna have to deal with a different adversity.

SPEAKER_01 35:39

Yeah. And you're gonna have to deal with the time it takes to come out of it. Absolutely. And they're all different because it's different. Every generation has a different time to be prosperous again. That's right. And comfortable. All right, third question. What's a belief about hard times that you've since let go of?

SPEAKER_00 35:55

Um, I think for me, what I let go of was questioning myself. So it you know, in the hard times, it's really you have to be validated, right? As as humans, as men, is created uh creating a success, you have to be validated. You have to know that the market, right, that you're in is accepting of you.

SPEAKER_01 36:12

And so yeah, I I I think that would have to a question for if you could go back and remove one hard season from your life, would you?

SPEAKER_00 36:23

No. No, and I say that with conviction. I've had a very good life, very fortunate life. I appreciate you know the things that I have, but I'll tell you one of the hardest points in my life, and it wasn't a transition, but I did something real stupid, you know, in college, or it was the night I signed my letter of intent for scholarship and everything. Oh, sure. Got a DUI. Yeah, yeah. That would be my rock bottom, right? Because I had to spend a few days in jail, which were no fun at all.

SPEAKER_01 36:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:51

But it let it taught you a lesson that you carried my whole life. Didn't go back to. All right. Last question. Finish this sentence. The people I trust most have all been faith-based.

SPEAKER_00 37:01

I like that. I think that's I think that's the only trueness to it, right? When you look at it, they all have their own quirks, so you really can't compare the personality, you can't compare the success because it's different industries, it's different everything. But the one thing that you can say is they were all God-fearing men. And women. I'd have to say there have been some some very influential women in my life too, so I don't want to cut them out, but but still very, very spiritual people. Love it.

SPEAKER_01 37:27

All right. That's going to do it for today's episode of The Honest Hour. Tony, as always, appreciate you bringing it real today. I liked it today, George. Okay. If today's conversation meant something to you, do us a favor, share it with someone who needs to hear it. That's how we grow this thing, and that's how people get better together. And if you're in a hard season right now, I just want to say directly, you're not behind. You're not broken. And this is not the end of your story. Sometimes being broken open is the only way to let something new in. That's our hour. Lead well, live better, and keep it honestly.