Becoming a Resilient Person

Ball seven times and up eight.

Japanese proverb, our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall. Confucius, if you’re going through hell, keep going. Winston, Churchill, that which does not kill us makes us stronger, obviously famous quote from Nietzsche. Why are the best quotes about resilience? Why is that there are some really good ones. They’re inspiring. We look and look up to people who accomplish incredible things. Should you be someone who went through something extraordinary? If you went and climbed Mount Everest, or you ran 100 miles, or whatever? People are interested in hearing about how you did that. So what is it about personal resilience? It’s it’s we respect it, we admire it, and we all go through it. We all get it. Because life is a real mofo. It is hard. Life is challenging, constantly coming up against new challenges and obstacles and getting knocked down. And can we get back up? Can we dust ourselves off? Can we recover? Can we do the things that we need to do to keep moving forward. I don’t know. I think that we all want that. I was curious. I was thinking about it recently. I thought, you know, what are we universally excited about or happy? What makes makes me happy, regardless of the human being, when I hear about somebody accomplishing something, what is it that really makes me happy? Universal thing, universally agreed upon thing. And I thought, well, when somebody has a baby, pretty happy about that, usually when somebody loses a ton of weight, I’m like, wow. How’d you do it? Tell us all about it. Interested in learning about that. But I think that somebody brought it up to me, when somebody beats a sickness, when somebody somebody beats cancer, or whatever it is that is, without question, universally agreed upon thing, this is a wonderful thing that you did. You were able to overcome. As we all know how awful it is. I don’t have to have cancer myself to witness and appreciate what a horrible thing it is, and it’s true of of all diseases and sicknesses. Got a cold, it’s terrible. All you want is to to feel better. So that is a universal human thing is we recognize suffering. We recognize just how terrible it is. So we celebrate and are happy when we observe somebody else go through it, when we go through it ourselves. Take it one step further. We respect people who are caregivers. I have the utmost respect for people who make sacrifices to care for others, parents, single parents. Oh, my goodness. All the respect in the world for people who have done that, first responders, firefighters, police officers, members of our armed forces, those who willingly put themselves in harm’s way. Instead of avoiding chaos, they run toward it. It’s amazing. And as much as you and I perhaps try and avoid chaos in our lives, it finds us so whether your vocation demands that you move towards the sound of chaos or you’re trying to avoid it altogether, it’s going to find its way to our doorstep. Chaos, adversity, bad things. It’s a bummer. Like I don’t know that. I wish that it wouldn’t happen. I was going to say I wish it wouldn’t happen, but without the good, you cannot have the bad. And so the story goes. But another thing that I know for sure is that I want control. I want as much control of my life as I can have. I want agency. I want to feel like I through my own actions, can influence some of the circumstances of my life, knowing full well that I have very little control over the things that happen to me, but I have absolute control. Control of how I think, feel and respond to those circumstances of my life. But it doesn’t happen on its own. I can desire that, and I don’t know that everybody wants it. I don’t know that everybody wants personal agency. I don’t know that everybody wants to have as much control as they can, because that suggests that you’re accepting responsibility for certain things that suggest that you are seeking out and wanting to take responsibility for certain things in your life. And as I’m talking it’s becoming obvious that there are certainly a good number of people who want the opposite of that. They’re interested in, in arguing for their limitations, in being victims and holding on to the whatever the worst thing that ever happened to them, letting that define them and using it as a rationale for why it is that they do not have the things that they want. And sometimes it’s a very real thing. Sometimes it’s a very real thing. Circumstances of one’s life prevent you from doing the things that I’ve been talking about, but for a lot of us, it’s just a matter of now, I’m not interested. I’d rather have somebody do that on my behalf. I would rather hand that responsibility over to somebody else, because it’s a weight that is too heavy for me to carry. That’s not me, and I assume that it’s not you as well. I want control. I want agency, and fundamentally, what that means is I want to be a good self manager. And one step further, I want to know, and I want to understand what personal resilience means and how to put it to work in my life. And it’s not obvious, and it’s obviously, it’s also not an automatic thing. It’s not hardwired into us to be good self managers to be able to recognize what it takes to employ personal resilience in our lives, and then to consistently do it. So that’s what I wanted to talk about, is what are some good steps to doing this? I work, and have worked my entire career in a very entrepreneurial environment, so client building, and when I started, I didn’t know anything about it. And when a lot of people come into an entrepreneurial endeavor, they’re not they they lack the skills, particularly if they’re coming to it from a traditional corporate environment working in nine to five, where there’s obligations and expectations on when you’re going to arrive at a certain place, what you’re going to do while you’re there, how long you’re going to be there, and that kind of stuff. There’s meetings that you need to show up to all of a sudden when you become an entrepreneur. Now, there’s not that structure. We don’t have that structure. And you know, you think about everybody’s favorite movie, Shawshank Redemption and red, the Morgan Freeman character, he got parole finally, and he’d been in the prison for the majority of his life, and he had become what they referred to as institutionalized, and so all of a sudden, one of the lines is he had to ask permission to go to the bathroom, and he gets out, and he goes to work at the grocery store, And he’s constantly asking his manager, who’s a young guy, if he can go to the bathroom. The guy finally said, hey, you know you need to go to the bathroom. Just go to the bathroom. But it was in an environment. It was in a new environment that he wasn’t thriving in, when he was very much thriving in the structured environment. So that one’s kind of a bummer, because he ends up, obviously he didn’t end up back in prison. He made the decision to, I’m just remembering back to the movie. Now. He’s remembering back it was, it was Brooks who didn’t make it,

the other character who was running the library anyway. It’s true across so many different parts of our lives, right? Whether we are in an environment where we’re moving from being a child to young adulthood, to a student, a high school student who goes out to college, very similar. We need to become self managers. I graduate from college, I become an adult, a young adult. I need to learn self management skills. So regardless of what it is that you are doing, there are definitive skills that we need to learn if we are to be as successful as we are going to be as people living on Earth realizing that there is so much chaos and so much pain and suffering. And so many bad things that happen, we need to learn how to deal with these things, and that’s what self management, that’s what personal resilience is, and that is what it is all about. So it’s all about strengthening our ability to bounce back, to adapt. So how do we do that? And it’s, I think it’s really interesting thing,

Unknown Speaker 10:25
that

george grombacher 10:29
it’s a muscle like any other. So there’s a couple of things. Number one, we need to learn the skills that it takes to do it, and then we have to actually do it. So the idea of literacy versus wellness. Literacy is, yes, I understand how to do it. Wellness is, I’m actually putting it into practice, and I’m really doing it. So how do we actually do this? So number one is, I think you need to have a positive mindset, which is kind of a throwaway thing, sort of a vapid thing to say, but if we do not have a positive outlook on the future, then I do not think that we are going to be able to overcome and bounce back and move through negative things, because what’s the point? If I think that my future is going to not be better than my past, what am I bouncing back from? I’ll just get knocked down and stay here. Thanks. I’ll just relax and stay right where I am, versus if I do think that my future will be better than my past, then I have a lot of reasons to be working through discomfort, to be staring adversity right in the face and to do whatever it takes to get past it. So having that positive mindset is really, really important. And I think that perspective, from my perspective, it’s a really, really critical thing to get a sense and keep a sense of where we are on the world, where you are in the world. Think about the good things in your life versus focusing on the bad things in your life, to be a survivor versus a victim. So and then having the ability to reframe negative thinking, to reframe negative events, Napoleon Hill famously said in I don’t know that it was Think and Grow Rich. It could have been his laws of success said that every adversity carries with it the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit. Now might not be obvious, especially when you’re going through it, what the positives are going to be from this really crappy situation that I find myself in, but upon reflection and while you’re going through it, recognizing that, yeah, this is super sucky right now, but I’m going to find my way through it, and when I do find my way through it, I will emerge a better person, a stronger person, a better version of me, better equipped and more personally resilient. So I think that that’s an extremely important thing, to be able to recognize that as we’re going through it, and then once we are through it, to figure out, okay, what have I learned from this? What can I take away from this to make it better? So being a positive person, thinking that my future will, in fact, be better than my past, and reframing negative thoughts, experiences, events, all of these things. I’m extremely fond of saying that we have choice. I get to choose how I think and feel and respond. I get to choose. Nobody gets to choose that for me, self manager recognizes that Nobody chooses or decides for me how I’m going to think about things. I’m going to make up my own mind. Thanks a lot. Second thing is, it’s imperative to have strong relationships. I think that, from a sociological perspective, I believe that life is the sum of the interactions they that we have with other people, so the other humans on the planet, making sure that we have good, strong connections with others covid Caught covid, talking about reframing negative situations and taking positives from negatives. If that’s possible to find positives from covid, I think that it certainly is. It just gave us evidence that it’s really important to have strong connections with other people, because if you don’t, it’s going to be really lonely, you’ll be super isolated. So making sure that you are cultivating and fostering good relationships with supportive people, friends and family. Now, just because you have a family doesn’t mean that they’re good relationships or that they are strong or they are supportive. We all have toxic people in our lives, and I’m not saying that just because somebody is in your proximity does mean that they are the right person to be spending time with and to be investing in. Because if you’ve got a person who is a kind. Constant drag on you, who is a negative human being, who has negative habits, who is not accepted or taking responsibility for themselves or their life, or the circumstances of their life or anything else. They do not desire personal agency. They do not want these things, not the person that I’m talking about, talking about other people who are personally resilient, or at least working to become personally resilient, those are the people that you ought best to be spending time with and developing relationships with, and then ask for help. Because while it does feel like we are going a lot of this alone. We’re not we don’t need to again, talking about what makes people universally happy is when somebody overcomes something. And we’re all overcoming things all the time and going through it all at the same time without really knowing what anybody else is going through. But odds are, we’ve all got some kind of a struggle that we’re dealing with. We’re all in the middle of some kind of a fight. So when you need help, raise your hand and ask for it. I can almost guarantee that there’ll be people who are very willing and hopefully able to give you the support or the help of resources that you are needing. Next, we need to go into the literacy piece of this it is develop problem solving skills. So how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? Journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step. Usually have more than that, but I think that those are the two that I have for you right now. You can’t solve the entire problem all at once. And if you’re a person who looks around and sees big problems that you would like to take a swing at, if you are a person who wants to have an impact, an outsize impact, you need to break down problems into manageable parts, because you cannot eat the entire elephant in one bite. We have to take things step by step, otherwise we will become overwhelmed. That will be disengaging when we’re trying to solve big problems, trying to do it all at once. I got another one. I was just kidding. Rome wasn’t built in a day. There you go. Got three for you. These big problems require big solutions, and big solutions require steps, one thing at a time, and particularly, because we are human beings, we have finite amounts of energy and attention and time. I must recognize that there’s only so much that I can do on a daily basis. Odds are you have lots of different responsibilities and obligations. I’ve got a family, I’ve got I need to go to sleep, I need to exercise, I need to eat, I need to have fun, I need to relax, I need to work. I need to do these things so I cannot, I cannot do it all at once. I need to break things down into manageable things and I need to control, or focus on the things that I have control over, and release control over the things that I do not have control over. That is the very nature of or the very definition of stress and anxiety is worried about stuff that I have no control over. If I have no influence over a thing me stressing out over it is going to be a cause of stress in my life. So concentrating those things that are within our control and recognize the things that are not within our control, the Serenity Prayer is a beautiful reminder of this. I think that something I’m very fond of as of late is the reality that when you are called on to carry something heavy, to do something extremely difficult, will you be strong enough to do so? When God asks you to carry something heavy, are you going to be strong enough to do it? I don’t know the answer to that question. I realized that I was getting older, which sounds dumb, but there will be a point in time where you realize, Oh, I’m getting older. It’s happening to me too, same as it’s happening to everybody else. And I had to ask myself, Is this the body that I want to bring with me into the next stage of my life. And the answer to that question for me at that time was No. I just right around my 40th birthday, 40 ish, and I was overweight. I was not in good shape. And the answer was clearly no on my current habits of diet and exercise, the habits that I want to carry with carry with me into the rest of my life? The answer was no. So we have to maintain

good well being. I need physical well being. I need mental well being. I need emotional well being. So I need to move my body. I have to exercise. I have to do cardiovascular activity. I have to do weight training. Weight training or resistance training. There’s so many wonderful things that happen when you start engaging in that kind of thing. You need to sleep. You need to recharge your batteries. You need to be able to shut it down and then wake up close to 100% as close to 100% as you possibly get to. So that means you need to prioritize sleep. We need to be fueling our bodies appropriately. So I need to put healthy food into my mouth, instead of shoving unhealthy food, which is everywhere, into our mouths and it’s delicious. I get it. I’m not saying all of a sudden start eating clean and perfect. I’m saying that for the most part, 80% of the time, you need to be eating healthy diet 80% of the time, and then you can f off 20% of the time. So having a healthy body without that, if you don’t have mental clarity and acuity, if you don’t feel good, if you’re stressed out, if you’re overweight and you’re tired and lethargic, you’re not going to be showing up and doing a good job for anybody. You’re not going to be resilient at all. You’re going to be tired next. I think that emotional awareness is a really, really important thing. So as somebody who is personally resilient, you need to be aware of of of how it is that you are feeling, how it is that you are thinking about different scenarios and situations. Because if we’re not aware of our feelings, then it’s the tail wagging the dog. We need to be in control. My feelings do not control me. I experience my feelings, but they do not control me. I feel them, I recognize them, I embrace them, I love them. I love feelings, but they don’t control me. I am in control of them. So emotional intelligence means that you recognize you are feeling a certain way, and then you make the choice on how you’re going to let those feelings impact you. If you’re feeling really sad, that’s fine, then take some time extremely angry. Oh, recognize that, and take some time also. So the last thing I want is for people to bottle up feelings and to ignore them. That is not what I am saying. I’m saying stare directly into them, walk into that feeling, feel it, let it wash over you, good, bad, ugly and different, whatever. But I’m not going to let it control me. Same thing as I’m not going to let outside circumstances control me. I recognize what’s going on, but I am in control of how I think, feel and respond to the circumstances of my life. And that’s really what personal resilience is all about, is recognizing that I have the ability to act in that way, and then I actually do it. So these five things that I’ve been talking about for developing your personal resilience, I think will benefit you, if you focus on them, you think about it, just recognizing that personal resilience is a skill that must be learned, and then a muscle that must be exercised. And if we don’t do it, then it will atrophy, it will weaken, it will go away. We’ll have to go through the process of acquiring it again. And that’s not good. Better to keep things going. Whole momentum, thing, object in motion, is easier to keep in motion than it is to get something that is just sitting there, that is not moving. Get it moving again, starting, stopping. Not good for anybody. I know that you’re perfectly capable, even if you’ve never been in a different scenario. If you’ve never experienced diversity, you’re certainly somebody who can be extremely personally resilient, and if you’re somebody who has been going through a lot, my heart goes out to you. I hope that you’re able to to get what you need and to move past whatever it is that you’re going through. What I know is for sure is I am doing my best. Try to do my best every day for myself and for the people that rely on me and for those who cannot. I encourage you to do the same. So as always, do your part by doing your best. You.

george grombacher 16:00
So if I want my iPhone, and my Tesla and my Bitcoin to work, we need to get the metal out of the ground.

Pierre Leveille 16:07
Absolutely. Without it, we cannot do it.

george grombacher 16:13
Why? Why is there a Why has production been going down.

Pierre Leveille 16:21
Because the large mines that are producing most of the copper in the world, the grades are going down slowly they’re going there, they’re arriving near the end of life. So and of life of mines in general means less production. And in the past, at least 15 years, the exploration expenditure for copper were pretty low, because the price of copper was low. And when the price is low, companies are tending to not invest more so much in exploration, which is what we see today. It’s it’s, it’s not the way to look at it. Because nobody 15 years ago was able to predict that there would be a so massive shortage, or it’s so massive demand coming. But in the past five years, or let’s say since the since 10 years, we have seen that more and more coming. And then the by the time you react start exploring and there’s more money than then ever that is putting in put it in expression at the moment for copper at least. And what we see is that the it takes time, it could take up to 2025 years between the time you find a deposit that it gets in production. So but but the year the time is counted. So it’s it’s very important to so you will see company reopening old mines, what it will push also, which is not bad, it will force to two, it will force to find a it will force to find ways of recalibrating customer, you know the metals, that will be more and more important.

george grombacher 18:07
So finding, okay, so for lack of a better term recycling metals that are just sitting around somewhere extremely important. Yeah. And then going and going back to historic minds that maybe for lack of technology, or just lack of will or reasons, but maybe now because there’s such a demand, there’s an appetite to go back to those.

Pierre Leveille 18:33
Yes, but there will be a lot of failures into that for many reasons. But the ones that will be in that will resume mining it’s just going to be a short term temporary solution. No it’s it’s not going to be you need to find deposit that will that will operate 50 years you know at least it’s 25 to 50 years at least and an old mind that you do in production in general it’s less than 10 years.

george grombacher 19:03
Got it. Oh there we go. Up here. People are ready for your difference making tip What do you have for them

Pierre Leveille 19:14
You mean an investment or

george grombacher 19:17
whatever you’re into, you’ve got so much life experience with raising a family and doing business all over the world and having your kids go to school in Africa so a tip on copper or whatever you’re into.

Pierre Leveille 19:34
But there’s two things I like to see and I was telling my children many times and I always said you know don’t focus on what will bring you specifically money don’t think of Getting Rich. Think of doing what you what you like, what you feel your your your your your, you know you have been born to do so use your most you skills, do what you like, do what you wet well, and good things will happen to you. And I can see them grow in their life. And I can tell you that this is what happens. And sometimes you have setback like I had recently. But if we do things properly, if we do things that we like, and we liked that project, we were very passionate about that project, not only me, all my team, and if we do things properly, if we do things correctly, good things will happen. And we will probably get the project back had to go forward or we will find another big project that will be the launch of a new era. So that’s my most important tip in life. Do what you like, do it with your best scale and do it well and good things will happen.

george grombacher 20:49
Pierre Leveille 21:03
Thank you. I was happy to be with you to today.

george grombacher 21:06
Damn, tell us the websites and where where people can connect and find you.

Pierre Leveille 21:13
The it’s Deep South resources.com. So pretty simple.

george grombacher 21:18
Perfect. Well, if you enjoyed this as much as I did show up here your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciate good ideas, go to deep south resources, calm and learn all about what they’re working on and track their progress.

Pierre Leveille 21:32
Thanks. Thanks, have a nice day.

george grombacher 21:36
And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.