Now, today I want to talk about something that happened the other day as I was talking to a client of mine. I could actually feel it through the video conference they were getting tense. I stopped and I asked him, “Are you breathing?” All of a sudden, you just saw something clear up on them. You saw visually them actually lose about five to 10 pounds of weight. They took a deep breath and just exhaled and they just relaxed their bodies.
What I was talking to them about was a trigger that happened at their work. See they’re a high-level business owner. They run a seven-figure business and they were being stressed out about some of their employees in situations that were going on in their enterprise. Now, when I was talking to about it I could see them getting more and more tense, but I also noticed that they were holding their breath.
Just yesterday, my brother and his family and I decided to go whitewater rafting. They’re visiting my wife and my son and me here in Central Oregon. We decided it’d be a great excursion, and it was. Now we got to the destination at the foot of the river and we met our river guides. There, they went through the typical safety check, telling us exactly what to expect and what we could be doing. Now, most of this float was gentle, you know, class one to two Rapids, so nothing really to worry about. Nonetheless, you’re still going down a wild river.
Earlier this year, I went down to Columbia. I went down to Columbia for a spiritual experience. Went down to Perodua Yage in the middle of the Amazon jungle, an amazing experience that I recommend to many people, not to everybody, but to many.
Now while I was down there, I was trying to communicate with my broken Spanglish the best that I could and oftentimes it would lead to miscommunications and I wasn’t able to actually get the end result that I wanted, because I couldn’t speak the language.
I found myself in a state of complete paralysis. You see what happened is a couple years ago my wife and I sat down and really created the life of our dreams. We truly became the authors of our own story. Within doing this, it created a subset of problems. Now I say problems because these aren’t even first world problems. They’re pretty laughable, really. What we did is we actually moved to beautiful Bend, Oregon to explore the area and got a beautiful house right in the heart of downtown. Now our lease is coming up and now we’ve got a decision to make. Do we renew the lease? Do we get a house somewhere else? Or do we take our adventure van out and explore the United States?
Now what I’m talking about when I say “embrace the suck”, is really that any change, any growth happens on the other end of adversity. You don’t expand and grow unless you’re challenging yourself, pushing yourself, or just doing something different. So, when you think about embrace the suck, what you’re really thinking about is, “How can I be better? How can I take a situation that currently sucks, or are just not enjoying it, or maybe it’s just a little bit difficult. And how do I take that situation and push a little bit further?”
