Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Finding Strength in Your Struggles with Dr. Robyne Hanley-Dafoe and Deborah Heisz
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for Episode 494 of Live Happy Now. This week, we’re doing something a little bit different, by sharing an episode from our sister podcast, Built to Win. In this episode, Live Happy CEO and Neora Co-CEO, Deborah Heisz sits down with Dr. Robyne Hanley-Dafoe to talk about resilience. Robyne, who’s an author, speaker, and educator, specializes in workplace wellbeing and is a sought-after expert on resilience. She shares her inspiring personal story and tells us about the practices we can use to become more resilient and build our personal and professional lives. Let’s have a listen.
[EPISODE]
[0:00:44] DH: Welcome, Robyne.
[0:00:45] RHD: Oh, I’m so excited to be here. Thank you for the invitation.
[0:00:48] DH: So, I think it’s fair for our listeners to get an idea of why this is your focus of study. I mean, I’ve heard your story, and it’s fascinating to me. Share with us a little bit about how do you start getting in the resilience space?
[0:00:59] RHD: So, my journey into being somebody who studies human resiliency and performance was definitely not linear. I was somebody who experienced a lot of
adversity during my adolescent season. It was a very, very dark season. I really struggled academically. I think what happens so often is when we struggle academically, we start to struggle socially as well. It was just this really difficult time for myself and my family.
I was very fortunate though, because my gosh, my family loved me so hard, but helplessly. But eventually, we got to that point where my family decided to relocate. We moved to a new community where I was able to do the work, I was able to get clean, I got sober. I started getting ready to re-enroll in school because I had dropped out in grade 10, and I was starting to build my come back. It was a very exciting time for my family.
Then, unfortunately, or fortunately, I ended up experiencing this like catastrophic car accident. I was in a situation where I was a new driver, I was driving home late at night, and just with this brand-new license, and a snowstorm rolled in. Where I’m from, the snowstorms are plentiful. Unfortunately, though, I didn’t know how to drive well in the snow. My vehicle ended up sliding off the road, it went down an embankment, and it ended up crashing in through the ice of the Otonabee River. I was trapped, drowning in my car.
In that moment, I noticed that, like I wasn’t feeling scared. In that moment, I was really more angry and I was really angry because I felt like I couldn’t protect my mom from what was about to happen. I tell you, when you’re going through a difficult season and you have people who stand by you, we want to protect them sometimes more than we want to protect ourselves. When I started to think about my mom in this moment, so if you imagine like drowning, entombed in a car, I started to think about my mom.
One of the first things that came top of mind is how she used to always tell me that I could do hard things, that no matter what, Robyne can do hard things. In that moment, I just really leaned into that, borrowed her confidence almost to see if I could figure out a way out of that situation. Now, I wasn’t able to get my seatbelt off, or even open the door, because the water pressure had already started to crush this vehicle. But I was able to take my fingertips, dig them where the window met the door, pull off the window from the track, so I could pull it down the door. I was able to swim out the window.
What was quite remarkable that evening is that, there just happened to be a gentleman, by the name of Joseph, and he was driving along the road. He sees my car tracks in the snow and Joseph ended up pulling his truck over. He saw me out there holding onto the edge of this iced water, and Joseph grabbed wood, and a chain from the back of his pickup truck. He used the wood to make an X to support his body weight. He crawled out onto that ice, he slid out the chain, he wrapped around my body, and he dragged me to shore.
Now, he was awarded the Governor General’s Award for Bravery, for risking his life to save a stranger, which is the highest accommodation for bravery. What was so remarkable, when I woke up a little later in the hospital, my mother was there. One of the things she asked me was, how I did it. “How did you get yourself out of that?” In that moment I recall sharing with her, “It’s because you told me, ‘I could do hard things.'” Now, in full disclosure, she did lean in afterwards and say, “That’s not really what we ever had in mind when we used to tell you that.”
But that so very much became the origin story for why I became so curious about the human condition because, I didn’t think that I had any particular special set of skills, or abilities yet in this moment. In this moment, I was able to figure it out, I was able to figure out my next right step each and every way, and I wanted to learn more about it. So, I ended up getting back into school, and I cobbled together a high school transcript, was able to make it to a college. Then, right from then on, it was just learning as much as I could about this, from both a personal experience but also that professional lens. Because all I want to do now is help other people find what they have within themselves to be able to show up even in the hardest moments of our lives.
[0:05:19] DH: I love that your mom put that in your DNA. You can do hard things. My parents did the same for me. I grew up believing that I could do anything. Of course, in my case is, you can do anything if you can ever just figure out what you want to do. But that was a big part of my upbringing, and it almost made me sad when I recognized in other people that they didn’t know that they could do that, but they can. They didn’t know that they could accomplish whatever it is they needed to do to get to that level, or when the business started to have problems, build it back. Or their personal life started to have problems, build it back.
It’s so huge in life to be able to do that, to give the opportunity to teach other people or to learn more about it. For me, it was like, other people know about this. I want to learn everything about it, so that we can tell everybody else about it.
[0:06:10] RHD: Exactly. Absolutely.
[0:06:12] DH: So, we talk a lot about that, right? We talk a lot about resiliency and how important it is in life. But what we don’t really talk about is, how do you get it? I mean, I was raised with it, it was my environment. You were raised with it, whether it’s environmental because you had to go through hard things or whatever it is, but you knew somewhere that you could do something hard. How do we have people who are not wired that way? What tools can we give them? How do we help them build their resiliency?
[0:06:42] RHD: Yes. I love everything about how you just sum that up because that’s exactly what this is all about. It’s like, some of us are given opportunities where we are in these family systems, where we talk about those values, and those characters that we’re fighters. My family was talked so openly about, as family coming from Scotland to a new country, we were hardy people. We figure stuff out. That was like, again, it was just in this kind of almost like the ecosystem of our family.
But what I think is so important to hold space for is like, I still got off track. So, even though I grew up in this super solid, really dialed in character-driven family system, I still was rudderless for a period of time. I still found my way into this dark season. What I think is so important is what you’re just saying there is like, okay, well, what do we do to rebuild or create these kinds of comebacks, this ability to be able to bounce back.
What I’ve been able to discover in my research, is there’s actually five, what we call pillars, that these are practices that we kind of do each and every day that sets us up for success. So, I can tell you a wee bit about each of them, if that’s okay.
[0:07:54] DH: It’d be great. I’d love to hear it. I do think, one thing you said, I just want to make sure everybody heard that. I’m wired that way. You’re wired that way, but we still get off track. There is no one who spends their entire life on track. There is no on track for 80 years, for 100 years. It doesn’t exist.
[0:08:14] RHD: Exactly.
[0:08:13] DH: We all have challenges of varying size at various times in our life. So, when we’re talking about resilience, it’s not a one -time thing. It’s something that you get the opportunity to utilize. Opportunity may not be the right word, but you get the opportunity to utilize through many stages in your life and through many, many times in your life. Whether it’s the loss of a loved one, whether it’s the loss of your career, whether it’s not being where you want to be at a certain age. All of those things are opportunities and all of us get off track. So, I just think it’s really important because I do think some people think that, when they look at highly successful people, they think there’s some magic there, or some luck there, or they were born that way. That’s just not true.
So, I just wanted to emphasize that before we got back to your five points because it’s such an important thing for people to recognize that they’re not any different than the successful person they see down the street. They just haven’t gotten there yet.
[0:09:11] RHD: Yes, 100%. A way to like – when I’m explaining this to other groups, before we dive into the pillars, I can share with you I think about it as the difference between like chess and poker. Chess is what we call perfect knowledge. As in we can see every move on the board, we can make really great predictions in terms of, if I move this, this is what you’re going to do, because we see all the variables. It’s considered a game of perfect knowledge. We don’t know what they’re going to do per se, but there’s a pattern and there’s these really rigid rules that we essentially know how this is going to unfold.
Life, I think, is a lot more like poker. We have no idea what hand we’re going to be dealt with. There are some guiding rules and principles, but it’s this idea about how do you show up with the hand that you are dealt with. It would be lovely if everything was like chess, maybe, maybe not, because perhaps some of the variety that we see in life is what makes it exciting. But I look at this idea that so many, especially when I’m working with parents, and like family systems, or even business owners, they want the chess game. They want perfect knowledge.
The reality is, we need to get a lot better at playing poker. Now, I’m not encouraging poker behavior, but that’s that idea that we’re working with imperfect pieces of knowledge and we do our best to show up. There’s so many variables outside of our control, but there are quite a few variables within our control, and that’s where we focus on, and that’s what really leads us into the five pillars.
The first one we talk about is a sense of belonging. You have to have someone that’s in the game with you. You cannot do this alone. You have to have a trusted ally. Maybe that’s a member of your home team, it might be your family system, but it’s the person that accepts you, even in the bad days, even in the hard times, like somebody who’s going to stand with you. What we see in the research, that one caring, consistent person will make the world a difference.
I’ll share with you one of the observations I’ve seen recently, especially with business owners. We have a lot of friends that are nine to five friends. I refer to them as the nine to five people. Sure, I can call them if I’m going through a hard time. Sure, I could probably reach out for some support. But the question is, you need a one 3am phone call person. Like you have to set a call to somebody that you can call at 3am, and just be like, “This is not okay” or whatever you’re going through, and you trust that they’re going to show up. They’re not even going to ask questions. They’re just going to show up for you. What the research shows is, if you have that one person in your world that will stand with you, you’re pretty much unstoppable when it comes to what you have to navigate. That first one is belonging.
[0:11:41] DH: If you’re someone who’s sitting there going, “I know exactly who that person is in my life.” That just reinforces what they know. But what about if you’re sitting there and you’re the person who goes, “I don’t know who that person is in my life. How do I find that person? Where do I look to find and build that relationship? What do I need to do and how can I have that in my life because that’s really what I feel like I’m missing.”
[0:12:03] RHD: There you go. So, my first question would be to ask, are you that person for someone else?” So, there’s many of us who – we are very good at giving, especially when we’re in these service roles and these industries where we’re, again, we’re in it to win. We’re in it to build and to set people up for success. You’re likely that for other people. So, my question is, is, is there a person, like one person in that network that you are willing to be vulnerable with enough to be like, “Hey, I need to be able to receive that type of support in my life”? Because I often see people say, “Hey, Robyne, I don’t have that person.” Then, I ask them, “Are you that person?” Then, they start listing all of these people that they would show up for. It’s like, “Okay, pick one of those as a start.”
Then, if you don’t have that available to you, okay, then that would be like this invitation to do just a little bit of an inventory. Because what that tells me is, we’ve done a lot of transactions in terms of relationships, but we haven’t gone deep enough yet with the right ones. So, we want to move away from just everything being transactional to actually start to make connection, and we’re social beings. We’re meant to be able to have these deep connections with other people. Again, some of it could be, it could be colleagues, it could be There are your partner, whoever that person is. But just somewhere in your world, you need to be able to have a 3am phone call.
[0:13:25] DH: You know, I love that. Be that for somebody else. I think that a lot of people are that for somebody else, and if they’re not, maybe they should figure out who they could be that for and develop the relationship that way. What’s item number two?
[0:13:38] RHD: Item number two is what we discovered in the research was perspective. Now, this one often gets kind of almost boiled down to be like mindset or attitude. But what we discovered is this beautiful kind of alignment with perspective of being your head and your heart. So, this ability to be able to see the world, but also feel your way through it. Resilient people trust their intuition. They use critical thinking, problem solving, they’re willing to work the problem, and they recognize intuitively how to make what matters most matter most, like what to prioritize. Even that kind of idea of like, you know, who needs me right now on my A-game? We can’t be on our A -game for everybody and every single conversation, but even just having that intuitiveness, and the insight, and self-awareness to recognize, where am I needed and how do I have to show up for that person or that situation. That perspective was the second pillar that we see in our research.
[0:14:36] DH: When it comes to perspective, what clues can people use to help improve their perspective? How can they get better at this? Because I’m intuitive, a lot of people are intuitive. Some, just flat-out are not intuitive, and they need different clues to help them develop this skill set.
[0:14:52] RHD: A hundred percent, I love this question. First of all, our perspective grows in relation to our lived experience. So, the more experiences we have, the more fumbles, the more we’ve been able to not waste a mistake and learn from our mistakes. Again, this is why I get so nervous when people think they’re so nervous to fail or drop the ball. It’s like, that’s where you’re going to get the best learning. We don’t, we don’t learn when everything is going smooth sailing. It’s that old kind of adage that, calm waters don’t make good sailors. We need storms in our lives to really challenge us and push our thinking. It also expands our worldly view. When we start taking in other perspectives and kind of seeing bigger picture, how do we start doing that? The first thing is, it’s actually to, again, use strategies that allow you to broaden your horizons by having friends, for example.
I said this recently, if you’re a Republican, I want you to have Democratic friends. And if you’re a Democrat, I want you to have Republican friends. You have to hear the world from different vantage points, because if we’re only ever looking from one perspective, then we have what I would call a perception. We don’t have perspective. So, each and every one of us, we have a perception of things. But as soon as we start to take this bigger view, our perspective is going to grow. A way to do that, again, is, again, talking to people from different belief systems, different places, and spaces just to really broaden our horizons, but also that act of self-awareness, like recognizing our blind spots.
I think it’s so important, especially for business owners and leaders, that there is some checks and balances on your blind spots. What’s interesting though, the higher you go, the more head nodding and yes people you’re going to be surrounded by, because there’s this innate power in that dynamic. You have to have some way to check your blind spots. As a mother of three teenagers, I have plenty of blind spot checkers who are so good at pointing out things for me. Even one of my best teammates that I work with, every once in a while, when I’m needing some feedback, I’ll say, “Hey, I’m asking you to please help me see what I’m not seeing here. Help me know where I need to improve what I need to put my energy or my focus on because I’m
trusting you to be that person that helps me increase my vision in those blind spots.”
[0:17:15] DH: I love that. I also have three teenagers willing to point out exactly where I’m not in the point right now. So, completely understood that comment. What is the next point? What is number three?
[0:17:25] RHD: Number three on the list that we see is the practice of acceptance. Now, this one, a lot of folks get hung up on this one when we think about our resiliency. Because as high performers, probably one of the feelings that we like to experience the least is helplessness. When we start to dive into acceptance, there is a perception of helplessness, because we don’t like not being in control. But part of acceptance is actually recognizing and actually being able to decipher those co-different types of control points.
So, where do you have control, agency influence, and what is outside of your control? What are the things that you aren’t able to impact or influence, and working within your controllables? That becomes a daily practice, because again, intuitively, we’re not going to like the things that we do not like, or circumstances that are outside of my control. Even things like supply chain, political unrest, like the unwellness of the world. There are so many things that we cannot control. The idea and what resilient people do is, they put, again, their agency, their influence, their action to where they’re going to get the best return on their investment.
[0:18:38] DH: I love that one. It is really critically important to not focus on things that I really can’t do anything about, other than as a problem -solving. Okay, we can’t do anything about that, so what can we do instead? Asking those questions as you go through that process. Okay, I know we can’t do anything about another hurricane, it’s going to be here. But what can we do to mitigate its impact on us? Those are the types of questions that we need to go through to be resilient. But also, my personal belief is to keep moving forward. Because if you’re not moving and you’re standing still, you become even less empowered.
[0:19:14] RHD: One hundred percent, yes.
[0:19:16] DH: I think empowering yourself to control what you control is the way I would like to put it. It’s like, empower yourself to do what you can do and maybe the rest of the world will follow. Maybe not, but at least you’re doing what you can do.
[0:19:28] RHD: Oh, exactly. What we see so often is, people get so stuck. Again, they’ll get stuck in those like why questions, “Why is this happening? Why did that unfold? Why did they get the funding? Why did they get the promotion.” Often, when we get stuck in that reverse type of thinking, again, we are in our own way of being able to move forward. Again, what I see so often, especially with when we see where mental health is right now, which right now, folks are in just such a precarious place.
When people are stuck in the past, they’re more prone to depression. When people are too stuck in the future, they’re prone to anxiety. So, it’s this idea of working within what is in front of me, so that way, I can show up how, as you said, in the most empowered way to make the best decision in the moment and recognize that we won’t always have all the information. So, again, this isn’t chess, it’s poker. We don’t have perfect information. We’re just going to play the hand we’re dealt and we’re going to show up, and that’s what we see resilient people do.
[0:20:27] DH: I want to obviously get to points four and five, but I also want to do a little aside here because I want to talk about resilience and stress, and how they’re related. Because when you talked about being too future focused brings anxiety, past focus brings depression, but those are both stress, they’re both outcomes of stress. So, I know you’ve done a lot of research on this as well. How are the two interrelated? How are stress and resilience interrelated, and what impact does that have on how we deal with stress, our ability to be resilient or not, and dealing with stress?
[0:21:00] RHD: I love this question, and we can talk for days. The best way I can describe it is that, our capacity to be resilient is in direct relation to our threshold of stress. What I mean by that is, if we think about our nervous system, our nervous system is designed to keep us safe. Our nervous system is our first line of defense, it wants to protect us. When people say to me, like, “Oh, Robyne, I want to be stress free.” I’m like, “That doesn’t exist. Our biology isn’t set up that way. Our physiology doesn’t allow us to be like stress free.” What we want to do is work within the scope of what our stressors are telling us and how it allows us to enhance performance, not hinder performance.
When we’re in that place of what we would call distress, which means that our levels of cortisol are so elevated. Again, this could be not just from – this could be just emails, it could be the Sunday scares before we get back ready to go back into the office on Monday. Whatever that stressor is, well, our bodies will produce cortisol that’s going to give us energy. It’s meant to put us into action, but it’s the doses of cortisol that we’re getting on a daily basis. Every time you
scroll your phone, every time you hear a newscast, every time you chat with somebody and they’re telling you all about the horrible, no-good things that are happening in
the world, we just kept getting hit with this cortisol.
Then, our body crosses this threshold into what we call the place of distress. When we’re in there, we are not our most resilient selves. Like, at that point, we’re just trying to survive. We’re not growing. We’re not learning. We’re not evolving. We’re not leveling up. We are just essentially in crisis management mode, which is, we’re just trying to get through.
Unfortunately, what I’ve seen in the last wee while in my research is that, we’re meant to visit distress. We’re meant to get to those little moments in the day of overwhelm, but then we rally, we re-regulate, and we’re good to go. What’s happening now, people are just making distress the norm and they are spending all of their time in that place and that’s why we’re seeing folks that are so reactive. People become so positional, everything feels really competitive, everything feels urgent. Like those are all cues that we are spending way too much of our time in that place of distress and our ability to be resilient, to be our healthiest, most wise self, it’s not there.
[0:23:23] DH: How do we get out of that? How does your average person get out of distress? I mean, for me, I do tell people to do this one thing, which I think is completely valuable for everybody. Mind what you put in your brain, don’t scroll, don’t listen to the world’s going-to-end news on the way home in the car, just don’t. Yes, I understand you want to be informed, but you can probably hear the entire days of news in the first 15 minutes, and then you can turn it off and go about your day the rest of the day. So, that’s one of my tactics to avoid getting – being surrounded by these things I can’t control, that are all negative, that are being input into me every day by the outside. What are some other things people can do to get [inaudible 0:24:01]?
[0:24:01] RHD: Well, first I just want to reinforce the heck out of that because you’re absolutely right. It’s like garbage in, garbage out. So, being mindful of what we’re taking in, that is a form of like what we can do in terms of self -preservation. I assure you, the rest of the world will keep you informed enough of what’s going on, that again, you don’t need to be in that place of rumination. So, yes, 100%, we want to minimize the negative inputs. So, that’s number one. Now, interestingly, our bodies naturally have, again, we have these kinds of working pharmacies where our bodies naturally want to be in a place of balance. It wants to heal itself. It doesn’t want to be in distress.
So, things that people will do naturally, number one is, get outside. The research shows, as soon as you go outside, your body’s going to start to re-regulate, get rid of some of that built-up cortisol, you’re going to feel better. Now, let’s say the nature of your job, you can’t get outside much. Option number two we see is we actually cry. It’s a very particular cry. It’s that red, blotchy cry where we go super snotty and patchy. It’s called a cortisol cry. Essentially, what happens is, the cortisol is getting out of the largest organ in our body, which happens to be our skin, and it’s our body’s way of re-regulating. Which explains why, for many of us, when we feel overwhelmed, it feels like the back of our eyeballs are burning because our body is just trying to get out of the stress.
The third thing that we naturally do is we eat carbohydrates. We eat all those yummy, delicious, wonderful things. That just starts to help us have this break from the relentlessness of that cortisol that we feel. Which explains a lot of people when they say, “Hey, Robyne, I struggle with eating behavior at nighttime.” That’s when they love to take all their sugar intakes. Well, that’s because we’ve associated our appetite with high levels of cortisol, and we eat carbohydrates to help break it down. I get so nervous when people say to me things like, “Oh, I’m not taking carbs.” Well, carbs are actually one of the most important things. It’s the fuel our brains use. So, we want to make sure.
Again, what I think happens, I know I can only speak from personal experience, is that you have all of this cortisol built up in your body. Then, you get home at the end of the day and you’re like ravenous. So, you like eat that cookie and all of a sudden, it’s like, “Oh, I can literally feel my stress melting away.” So then, I just over commit to the rest of that row of cookies. That’s where we kind of get some of that behavior. No shame, no judgment, that stress behavior. It’s not misbehavior. Those are what we naturally do.
Now, there’s a few other things that we can do and we call these forces of recovery in my work. It’s things like connection, a really amazing conversation with the right person can all of a sudden feel like a therapy session. It could literally just be like, “Oh, I needed that connection.” The other one we talk about is music. Music has this amazing way of helping us re-regulate our mood. So, using music as a tool to help us process emotion is another way to re-regulate.
The other one also that I think is underutilized is solitude. We actually need a bit of time where we’re not taking in new information. We’re not scrolling, we’re not taking in new information, we’re actually just essentially alone with our thoughts, just to allow us that chance to regroup, to rally, to settle, and then we can get back into the game. Then, we get back into it, but we have to have some moments of solitude in the day.
[0:27:29] DH: So, I took us off track, but let’s get back to our five. So recapping, number one was, have that person call at 3am.
[0:27:36] RHD: Belonging.
[0:27:39] DH: Number two was, have perspective. Number three was?
[0:27:43] RHD: Acceptance.
[0:27:44] DH: Acceptance.
[0:27:45] RHD: Working with our controllables.
[0:27:45] DH: What you can control and what you can’t control. So, number four is?
[0:27:50] RHD: This is what I think the world needs such a big dose of right now, which is the pillar of hope. It’s choosing to live hope-filled. We need practices that cultivate living a life that is full of hope. We need to trust that better days are ahead, that all of this is working towards some type of good. I think what right now we’re seeing, and this is what I get nervous about when I work with folks, is that, we’re seeing such high levels of despair. Despair is this kind of way that our body loses its ability to hold hope. If we put too much of that negative, and we start to go down that kind of that path, it’s really, really detrimental to society. We’re seeing that all over.
So, cultivating a hope practice, whatever you do to just trust. Again, it’s not this toxic positivity. It’s not saying everything okay when it’s not okay. It’s that, even in like the worst situations, there’s still part of you that trusts that it’s going to be okay, that on the other side of it, you’re going to be all right or your family’s going to be okay. It’s like holding that line that we will not give up hope. Again, when we start to see the state of the world, I think we’re seeing these massive levels of despair, which is making living hope filled more important than ever before.
[0:29:06] DH: Okay. So, we’ve kept them waiting long enough. What is number five?
[0:29:09] RHD: Okay. This is actually one of my favorites because it’s such a wild card. This was the absolute wild card in the research. Number five was humor. So, we learned resilient people are so funny. But let me tell you though, it is a dark humor. Literally, it is like HR violation type humor. It isn’t, you’re just average kind of G kind of humor. They have this dark streak, but they use it for good. At first, we thought it was just kind of a bit of a defense mechanism that they never took anything too seriously. Or even in these like dark situations, they would say something off color or even funny. But what we learned is, it actually had a biological underpinning.
For example, when you laugh, your body releases a natural tranquilizer and it blocks your pain receptors. So, it doesn’t solve your problems, but it gives people a moment of reprieve. Then, they’re in this really cool place where they’re able to respond versus react. So, it’s just this little switch that they’re able to activate, to be able just to get a pause, and then they’re able to make the next right decision. So, this idea of humor, not taking themselves too seriously, letting things go, it’s been quite remarkable that we see having a wee bit of fun in the process is actually a way that we can cultivate human resiliency.
[0:30:26] DH: Like self-deprecating humor, gallows humor, that kind of thing? Is that what you’re talking about?
[0:30:30] RHD: Yes. Well, definitely not self-deprecating humor. So, it wouldn’t be self-deprecating, but it would literally be, for example – well, I’ll give
you this one we learn that people who swear live longer. And it was interesting, we shared that on social media, and I think in the first week, it had like seven million views. Because, clearly, there’s hope for many of us to live longer with our swearing, but it’s just this idea of just letting things go.
I’ll give you an example. I was working with a large group, health and safety. I was telling them how swearing is good for our health. It helps us live longer. This one gentleman said to me, he worked in construction, and he said, “You know what, lady?” I love when they call me lady. I think it’s adorable. He’s like, “Hey, lady, listen to this.” He’s like, “If you’re ever on my job site and you hear any of the trades saying, ‘Oops-a-daisies’ or ‘Chutes’ or ‘sugar,’ don’t buy that house. You only want to buy the house when they’re dropping F bombs because they’re locked in.”
I love that idea of just the fact that, if something goes wrong and people express how they really feel, then they move on. It’s just this idea of just not carrying things that aren’t ours to carry. Especially, when I think of business owners, one of the things I often share is like I want you to care deeply about your teammates, I want you to care deeply about your clients, but I don’t want you to carry it home with you.” Like, we have to have some way of letting go, because we can’t be on point every single minute of the day. We can’t be all hands-on deck all the time. We need to have time for rest and recovery.
[0:32:02] DH: Well, I love that. This has been a great conversation, probably one of my favorites. I could talk to you for hours.
[0:32:06] RHD: Oh, thank you.
[0:32:08] DH: It’s been wonderful, and it’s something that I think people need to understand, is that we all can develop our resiliency, we all can work towards that. I can’t make you funny, but I can tell you it’s okay to swear is what I got out of that last one.
[0:32:23] RHD: Absolutely, and eat carbs. If that’s the only two things you’ve got. Swear and eat carbs. You’re not wrong.
[0:32:28] DH: You’re not wrong. Thank you so much for joining us today. I know our listeners are going to love everything you have to offer. This has been a great discussion. I hope to
have you back in the future.
[END OF EPISODE]
[0:32:41] PF: That was Dr. Robyne Hanley-Dafoe and Deborah Heisz, talking about cultivating resilience. If you like to learn more about Robyne, discover her everyday resiliency program, check out her books or listen to her podcast. Just visit us at livehappy.com and click on this podcast episode. We’ll also tell you more about the Built to Win podcast and how you can subscribe to it. While you’re there, also be sure to sign up for our weekly Live Happy newsletter. Every week, we’ll drop a little bit of joy in your inbox with the latest stories, podcast info, and even a happy song of the week. That’s all we have time for today. We’ll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one.
