Episode Transcript
Gary (00:01)
Welcome to quiet the noise. My name is Gary LeBlanc. This is a solo episode. Haven't done one of these in a while. And today we're going to be talking about resilience. That is a buzzword these days. And I think with good reason resilience, when you truly understand what it means again, in my opinion, resilience is about bouncing back, right? So.
It's not that we can control the hits we're going to take. It's can we take that hit and how quickly can we balance back from it? And that's really what resilience is. It's about really getting better at almost being predictive about these hits. And it's building that amount of resilience that you can trust. There's integrity behind it. And why that's so powerful is if you feel and believe you are resilient in what you're doing.
You're going to be able to test those boundaries, right? You're going to be able to really look into how far you can take something. And that's in my opinion, where the juice is. So what we're going to do is we're going to start with a physical analogy of what resilience is, right? It's easy to understand. And then we're going to start to apply that to the different modalities. So emotional, social, spiritual, mental, that's what we're going to get into.
And I believe by understanding the physical and looking at what we do to become more physically resilient, we'll be able to better connect with what it feels like to gain resilience in those probably as important or more important areas, depending on what season of life you're in. And I think that's another one of the underlying themes. We all need different aspects of resilience at different parts of our lives. Some parts of our lives, we're flexing different things. You know, there's part of our life where we know we're not in balance.
We know that career has become a very big priority for us and we're not necessarily going to be able to sustain that for a long time. So maybe in that period of your life, you're going to need a lot of mental resilience. And then when you get in your forties and fifties, you're going to realize I need a lot more physical resilience potentially. So again, it depends on that season. What I want to do is today, I want you to leave with the ability to identify what resilience means for you.
But more importantly, for you to be able to become more aware of those areas, you'd like the bolster your resilience. And again, this isn't something you can learn by reading a book. You know, I often use this civil war analogy and I'm like, being in the civil war would have taken a ton of resilience in a lot of ways, mental resilience, probably mostly. So I can read about that and everything. And I can read about these biographies or an autobiography or read someone's journal or diary.
but I'm gonna get zero inkling on what that really means. And I probably won't build any resilience at all. What it's gonna do is it's gonna provide me some tactics to potentially get more of these experiences that are going to bolster my resistance. And there we get to the crux of things. Resilience needs to be earned through experience, in my opinion. And we can weaponize those experiences. So what I mean by that is we can go into those experiences with a...
with an arsenal of how we can become more aware, how we can understand why we're feeling certain ways. And really that's what's going to rewire the brain effectively. It's feeling really feeling where those triggers are. You know, I told a story in one of the podcasts and it's such a stupid story, but it's basically me going to a condo board meeting and I haven't been this triggered in a long time.
And what I mean by triggered, I mean, my core soul adrenaline was, you know, when it's in your blood and you can almost feel yourself vibrating at an almost imperceivable level visually, but you can feel it. It's like pulsating. And last night I felt that way and it's some stupid board meeting, some dumb amendment that doesn't really affect my life at all. But I felt like someone was being a bully and I think that's what it was. It was in that state. It was kind of that fear I always had when I would be faced with a bully.
and kind of that debilitating feeling, right? That's almost exactly what I felt yesterday. And it was so powerful to feel that because I could, while it was happening, I was talking to myself, but after it happened, I really reflected on what the hell happened there. And it was like a three hour, a three hour protracted feeling. You know, it took a long time for that to get out of my system. I should have did a quick workout or something.
kind of get the endorphins flowing and balance that out. But I didn't. But the point being, it was understanding the why I felt a certain way. That was the beauty of it. And I'm going into things with that mindset now. So having that mindset, when I'm going through it, I can be more attentive. I can, you know, pay attention to more of those feelings instead of you go through something and you really haven't connected with any of it. So you don't really gain what you could gain. So.
Let's get into that. Let's give yourself an arsenal to be able to go into these situations and get the most you can out of it. And then you can push your boundaries and then you really start to grow. And when you push your boundaries in areas that are important to you, well, life changes. And that's the beauty of things. And that's when we're talking about quieting noise. That's what it's all about. Quiet the noise in certain areas so you can grow in those areas you want to evolve in. Okay.
So let's look at physical resilience, right? And this will get a little boring potentially, but when we talk about life engineering, we're trying to build a body that can take a hit. So this is the easiest analogy from a physical resilience perspective. Say somebody puts on some muscle. So that muscle has two main functions that I'm going to focus on anyway. It's a blood sugar. Well, actually there's three. So a blood sugar store, right? So you store blood sugar in there. So you can drink a bunch of cokes potentially when you're depleted.
And a lot of that sugar gets absorbed into this muscle in the form of glycogen, right? It also serves as a battery for amino acids. When you're starving, your body needs amino acids to create all these enzymes, to catalyze all these reactions. So you definitely use muscle for that. And then you use muscle to be mobile, right? Use muscle to be strong, to lift things, to, you know, exist in this world. You know, I had surgery once and when I got out of surgery, my leg was so atrophied. It was almost like one of these.
not claymation things, but one of these puppets, my leg would just crumble. So it's just amazing how important muscle is to our physical integrity. Now, the more muscle you have potentially, the more you can take a hit. So you have that physical resilience and everything factors into that. What we eat, how we sleep, how we move all of that factors into physical resilience. So if we're building that muscle, that structure, that scaffolding, well, I can take a hit with my diet.
You know, I can eat a bit more sugar and it's not really going to affect my blood sugar too much because I have a place for it. So it protects me against diabetes type two. You know, it's, it's that physical being able to take a hit from a, you know, the one off poor nutrition day, you know, then you look at physically and fitness wise. Well, you can, you can take a hit. You can do things you didn't used to be able to do. You know, if you fall down, you probably won't get injured as easy as someone else. Cause that muscle takes so much of that hit, you know, it's.
It absorbs all that energy and allows your body to withstand it. So I think we understand physical resilience enough. And what we want to do is easily we can look at each one of those areas and we can induce adaptation, right? So all these adaptive processes such as when you eat well, you're undoing a lot of the bad habits, a lot of the potentially disturbed dysbiotic gut, right?
a lot of those blood sugar responses, a lot of those imbalances, you're starting to undo that, right? So it's our hermetic practice where eating well actually creates that positive adaptation. And you can obviously do that with the physical, you go to the gym, you progressively overload. So everything is about progressively overloading in the area you want to adapt. Okay. So physical resilience, fairly easy to understand. Okay.
So now we look at that metaphor and we think about mental resilience. So what does that mean? You know, mental resilience is the ability to, you know, be distracted and come back. You know, that's kind of potentially the best example because it's like taking a punch physically. So say we take a punch mentally, right? We're distracted something, you know, our monkey mind is crazy and we have this really stressful thing we're thinking about. And it's that ability to take that hit.
absorb that energy, transmute it and get back to the moment. And this is an incredibly, incredibly hard thing to do. And it's where I spend most of my time. So if we dissect it, well, what are the components there? Okay, well, I'm distracted. I'm distracted with my life. Okay, well, that's always gonna be there. So I got to try to quiet that somewhat because right now I'm not capable of taking those hits. I want to be more resilient.
I want to be able to think about those things and be able to go back to sleep at 4 a in the morning, but right now I can't. So what do I need to do? I need to spend more time with it. I need to potentially meditate to quiet the noise in my head, but not meditate to maintain focus on a dot or on your breath, such as transcendental meditation. It is to meditate to really see what's in your mind, right? To really learn what are those ruminating thoughts when everything goes quiet?
and we can expose ourselves and it's this level of exposure that's going to create this adaptive process. We expose ourselves to it. We feel all the feelings. You know, the heart rate starts to, the heart rate starts to raise and you know, we can feel our cortisol and adrenaline. So what we want to do is we want to in a safe place through meditation potentially or through a nature walk, whatever it is, really understand what those distractions are from that perspective. And then,
over time, we're going to realize that, wow, we're coming back to the moment, we're able to take that. And that's what mental resilience looks like for me. So really, it typically is about meditation. It's also about our ability to reframe things, right? So something happens. And oftentimes, it's the label we give it, it's that framing. And then once we reframe that, it's almost like a light switch, because we get into this.
negative perception of things. And you know, there's evolutionary reasons for this, right? We focus on the negative, it's a protective thing. So we focus on the negative. And there's no ability to see anything positive until we reframe, right? And reframing really means, okay, why am I doing this? And if I'm doing something that's meaningful to me, well, then I remind myself of that meaning. And that's where you get the inertia to overcome that negative, see the positive in things.
And now you're dealing with that distraction, but with a fair framing, you know, you've balanced the field somewhat. So this reframing is incredibly powerful as kind of the first step. And then you starting to spend time with how you feel about something and really becoming mentally comfortable with just allowing it to come noticing it. Okay. I feel a few things, but I'm going to be all right. And then you bounce back. Now, again, this isn't a binary thing. So.
Yeah, I'm talking tough. Like maybe I can handle a five, maybe a six on 10 without getting rocked. But if I get a six and a half, seven, seven and a half, just like what happened last night, you know, I can get rocked and I revert back to that unconscious kind of chip mind where I'm just going to lose myself in feeling. And it's typically fear -based. I'll get back to that place and
It's another reminder that, wow, I have some work to do, but we always have work to do. So it's not a binary thing. Mentally, we want to reframe and then we want to be able to transmute that energy into something we can handle and come back to the moment. That's being resilient. That's bouncing back from something mentally, you know, and mental meant mental and the emotional are extremely adjacent. Right. So mental again,
It comes down to me intellectualizing certain things that are happening, but really the affect kind of what it leaves behind is this emotional footprint. When we're feeling something, it's really an emotional process. So in this case, the mental and emotional for me is kind of all mixed into one because it has two aspects to it. It is sometimes a mental distraction, but sometimes it's the emotional affect of that, that creates.
the kind of rewiring that I need. So when we look at emotional and we look at mental, really, it's about that balance. And it's a yin yang thing. It's about intellectualizing what's happening while feeling what's happening. So it's a little complicated, but it's this constant dance between those two. And when I said you could learn and you could prepare yourself, well, that's where the kind of mental part comes in. Like it's 20 % the mental going in with this.
call it a method, call it a fail safe that you kind of get into mentally to get through something, reframe, objectify, you know, process and move forward. You know, that could be a mental construct. I'm sure there's an acronym in there somewhere. I think RAIN is actually, I think that's TeraBrack. That's probably the best one. But it's all about recognizing awareness and it's all about, you know, not judging yourself and moving on, right? So.
That's the kind of mental construct. But the emotional is really that tapestry of feeling. And that's the tough part, right? So I mentioned how you have these triggers and you feel certain ways. So those two things, you're going to kind of be flexing the two, you're going to kind of be feeling something, then mentally processing it potentially while you're also emotionally processing it. And then each time you're just benefiting from learning more and more and you get more granularity. It's like,
more fidelity around understanding all these little things. And then you can really focus your actions better to build more resilience over time in putting yourself in situations that are going to test that, you know, such as me in that board meeting. So that's a, that's a little sidebar with mental and emotional kind of playing with each other. And then lastly, you know, when I think about resilience, I think about almost
my network. And when I think of my network, it's almost like those pillars of meaning in my life, right? In general, you know, my friends, my family, my partner, you know, how resilient is the environment that I've created for myself? And I wasn't really thinking of talking about this actually on this podcast, but that's kind of what came to mind when I started to think about, okay, now that if I look at my environment, where can I take a hit?
You know, be it financially, be it with my friends, be it with my confidence around my friends, the ability to be me with my friends. You know, how resilient are my relationships? How resilient is my relationship with my partner, my family? Where are those chinks in the armor? You know, what do I need to work on in those areas? And I believe the difference between the two as far as the first half and then talking about this.
is when I looked at mental, emotional, and physical, this is almost an inward journey. This is an internal thing. This isn't relationship -based. This is an intra -behavior. I'm controlling that. Well, now when we look at our network, that's the first kind of external projection. And our environment is incredibly key. So we have these eight pillars of meaning. And that is essentially how you're showing up in the world, where you're showing up in the world. That's your environment. It's incredibly key.
And we need that constant feedback to survive, right? We have to survive within this environment. So, you know, we can do the inner work, but then we really have to look at, okay, what am I creating? And again, it's this constant encoding. It's like RNA, right? Our inner being encodes our environment, our environment encodes our inner being. And it's this constant interplay between the two. So.
When you look at your network, when you look at your environment, well, that's where you can be a little more objective. You know, this can give you clues into where the opportunities are on the inside. And again, the resilience of this network is really going to define, it's going to define your life going forward in general. Because when you look at partner, family, friends, career, health, these are massive, massive parts of your life. Well, it's essentially every part of your life.
The rest internal is how you feel about things, but this is really what you're gonna be dealing with. And if your network can't take a hit, it's gonna put undue strain on different areas of your life. So if you look at friends, if there's an incongruency with friends, if you're starting to feel disconnected with friends, well, there's not much resilience in that network, in those connections, because as soon as something goes wrong, there's gonna be, and it will go wrong, because it's gonna almost induce.
a situation that in congruency will create an energetic shift there that's going to have to be dealt with. And if your relationship isn't resilient, then you're going to have a hard time navigating that. And those connections aren't going to be as strong as you need them to be. Friends should amplify our collective energies and our collective potential. Friends that aren't really congruent with who we are. And again, there's no judgment. They are what they are. We are what we are. But what it is.
means is that incongruency is going to create, again, a lot of noise. So what's the resilience in your friends, in those connections, in those relationships with your partner? Where's the incongruency there? Are you guys evolving at the same level? You know, can that relationship take a hit? How big a hit can that take? How could we build more resilience as a couple? You know, when we look at our family, same thing. So in all these different areas of our life, we just have to be more mindful.
of, okay, I'm in a groove right now, things feel good, but it's when things feel good that we should be taking a step back and saying, okay, you know, I'm going to get a hit here. You know, I'm going to get a gut punch in my environment here. Something's going to something's going to bend. How am I looking? You know, if I audit that network, how's it looking? How's it feeling? Where can I take that punch? Where do I have to do a bit of work and be proactive about? So when you put all that together, when you put all that together,
The point of resilience, in my opinion again, the point of resilience is to be able to push, to be able to, when you look at self mastery, be able to really, really get the most out of life. And it ends up dispelling fear because when you're not resilient, you don't feel resilient, you don't believe you're resilient, that fear is gonna control you. And again, it's in different levels. Everybody has a bit of fear, but it's how high are those triggers for you to really start to succumb to that fear?
And that's what we want to do. And the more we can quell those fears, the more we quell the noise, and the more we can put our energy towards something that's going to help us evolve. And that's really the point of resilience. It's believing that we can take those hits so we're not scared of them anymore. And if we're not scared of them anymore, then we can lean in. You know, and leaning into those boundaries of all those areas of our lives. How can I lean in to really evolve my friendships, you know, my relationship with my partner?
my connections with my family, how can I really lean in there? And it's a beautiful place to be. And look, I'm far from where I quote unquote want to be, but it's a great aspiration. And when you look at it, then you say, okay, well, that's essentially what a growth mindset is, right? It's having agency for your future. And that's really what this is all about. We want to believe that we can shift our future and becoming more resilient, helping us foster that is one of the main ways we can.
because otherwise we're in a fixed mindset and we almost have this learned helplessness and we stay within that almost suffocating box of not being able to evolve and it's fear is really the walls of that box. So anyway, I thought it was an interesting time to get into resilience and early on to touch on this concept because it truly is gonna color the rest of what we're gonna do. Again, I appreciate you all. You all.
joining and if you guys want to subscribe again we have episodes once every two weeks some solo but a lot of really great conversations with a lot of really cool people so again thanks for joining me on quiet the noise and till next time
