Josh Goldberg | New Possibilities & Service

I want you to remember that the point of everything we do at Boulder Crest isn’t to help you feel better—that’s a side effect. It’s to help you do better in your lives and in the lives of the people you love and care about. In posttraumatic growth terms, this idea is known as serving as an expert guide. An expert guide is somebody who helps another person who’s struggling to translate and transform their struggle into deep strength and profound growth.

And when we think about service, and in particular service and new possibilities, there’s really two aspects of it. One is serving yourself. We have to find ways to open those blinders and expand our horizons, coming back to the quote that I shared from Schopenhauer—that we mistake the limits of the world for the limits of our field of vision. And the best way that we can break out of those limits and break out of our boxes and be open to creative and new things and new possibilities is really in three ways. One is by reading books, another is by traveling to other places and cultures, and a third is through other people. And those three things enable us to best serve ourselves and to catalyze change and growth and possibility as we walk forward.

And the reason why we have to serve ourselves is because, as you know, we have to be able to lead ourselves first. We have to lead from the front. We can’t be a hypocrite. We can’t be incongruent, and we can’t be trying to help somebody else do things that we’re not capable of doing or haven’t done. We can’t do it if we’re static and rigid, if we’re held back by fear, or we’re stuck in sadness. We have to inspire people by the example of our deeds, not just our words. It starts by serving yourself, and then—and then—you can do the essential and critical work of serving others.

So I want to spend a bit of time talking about the different ways in which you can use new possibilities to serve others. The first and most significant is by telling your story—and telling your stories in lots of different ways and mediums: through song, through writing, through pictures, through just telling it to people that you care about, and telling it to people you don’t even know. When you think about the ancient definition of a hero, it’s an ordinary person who endures an extraordinary experience and returns to share the lessons that they learn so they can enrich the lives of other people. This is the story of PTG. And in the process of doing that, what you get to do is to liberate others to be able to acknowledge their own struggles, their own challenges, and to spot and seize their own growth opportunities. And then, as they grow, they can do the same for other people. It is a beautiful domino effect. This is what being an expert guide is all about.

The second thing you can do is to give people permission to grow, to change, and to evolve. And if you remember a quote from Mandy Piper, she said that you have to know posttraumatic growth exists in order for it to happen. You have to know it’s okay to have good things happen after really bad things. You have to know it’s okay. There’s an aspect of permission. And how do we offer that? We do that through our example. We do that because we’re willing to take chances. We do that by role modeling our life and the journey of our life. We do that by going out and figuring out how to continue to navigate the story of our lives and the chapters of our lives—finding a successful second career, out of getting out of the military and the first responder profession, developing and nurturing different kinds of relationships, moving to different places, taking chances.

When you reflect on all the times in your life that you’ve seized new possibilities, you realize how important it is to help other people understand that how things are isn’t how things have to be. That we are capable of writing our own story and taking that pen back. I think back to my story of somebody who was really captured by the essence of what success meant in the civilian world. It was getting married, having a good job, having the right kind of house, the right kind of cars, the right kind of friends—and I didn’t have a lot of role models who encouraged me to believe that struggle had value. That getting out of the rat race was actually something that was a good idea. But the few people that I found who encouraged me to go in that direction, to take the road less traveled, had major, major impacts on me and my willingness and the courage to take that leap.

Think about the role you can play for somebody else in those terms—not just in terms of enabling them to struggle, but also giving them hope about what could be. Think about the first time you ever heard the words posttraumatic growth. What did that mean to you? The idea that after trauma, it wasn’t stress and disorder and dysfunction, but growth was possible. Think just about sharing that idea. Think about what that could mean to somebody else.

In addition to that, I want you to think about those concentric circles that we so often talk about. As you think about serving others through new possibilities, you have your support network of people who you need to support, who need your support. You have family members. You have community. You have folks you served with. There are people all around who need your assistance and your support and your strength to be able to have the confidence and the courage to try something different.

And the last thing I think about when I think about service and new possibilities is the idea that the people I’ve met in my life who are the most interesting have many chapters. I think about Ken Falke—from his hockey time to his Navy time to his businessman time to his philanthropist time to his grandfather time—people who consistently reinvent themselves. They don’t dry up, like that Joseph Campbell quote who said that hell is life drying up. They continue to challenge themselves and evolve and try new things they’ve always wanted to do or try things that they never thought about doing. They decided to go become an artist or do something with architecture or do something with sports or try something else. It’s people who push the boundaries and realize that they want to explore everything and play till the final whistle of life.

The best role model for me in that respect is my grandmother, who passed away several years ago. Two weeks before she passed away at 103, she signed up for three new classes. The year before, she had taken a meditation course. She had just moved into an independent living home and had new friends. So I saw someone at the end of a long life continuing to live and seek new possibilities and seek new opportunities. And that’s my wish for my own life, and it’s my wish for your life as well.

So I want you to think about the idea of service and new possibilities, and I want you to think about when someone helped you in this respect. Maybe it was a coach who inspired you to try out for a team. Maybe it was a friend who encouraged you to come to a Warrior PATHH or a Struggle Well program. Maybe it was the person who inspired you to want to join the military or become a first responder. I also want you to reflect upon and think about a time in your life when you helped somebody else spot and seize new possibilities. And the third thing I want you to reflect upon is how can you use your unique set of skills and strengths and ability and experiences and struggles to help somebody else seize and spot new possibilities. Think about how you can take this one aspect of PTG and bring it into the world in material ways. Challenge people who are rigid. Challenge people who are unhappy but are happy being unhappy, who don’t understand the value of discomfort and struggle the way you do. And seize those opportunities to be of service to other people.