Josh Goldberg | Personal Strength Through Disclosure

So let’s talk about a few of those things that sap our strength, that keep us from building personal strength. And the first will come as no surprise, and it relates to our past training and experiences, especially as children. Much of what we believe about ourselves has either been told or done to us. What we think we are capable of is so often shaped and limited by the external world. This is a major reason why I’m so passionate about the damage that labels like PTSD, anxiety, depression can do to people. They are limiting factors on our strength, on our capacity, on our life. When we look at this past training and we look at the ways in which we were raised, we think about the sorts of messages we’ve internalized—about what we’re worth, about our value, about whether or not we have to do certain things in order to prove our value. But our past training, or past sadness, or past fear—these are things that inhibit our ability to be as strong as we want in the present. They create confidence issues. They cause us to struggle. They cause us to believe we’re not worthy of certain things. And so being able to confront those, to work through them, is what gives you the ability to claim your full strength, to live fully, unfettered and unencumbered by those misguided and false beliefs and ideas.

The second thing that inhibits personal strength is that red sine wave—those unhealthy habits and bad influencers. The people we surround ourselves with and the habits and practices that we engage in each and every day have a great deal of cause and effect in terms of our willingness and ability to struggle with our personal strength and to build personal strength. And the way we treat ourselves and treat our mind and our body determines a lot of that.

The third thing is our attitude. We can be a victim or a victor. General Mattis said victimhood in America is exalted today. If I’m a victim, if I don’t give a—if I don’t care, if I don’t believe that my actions can create change, then I won’t do anything to create change. I will remain weak—weak in mind, weak in body, weak in spirit. And so the idea of what it means to be a victim—to be a victim of circumstance, to allow other people to define you and to tell you what your limits are—that is something that most people in their life will go through and struggle with. We have to re-find our strength, our agency, our inner warrior, to combat those beliefs and notions, to remind us that we can visit that place of victimhood, we can feel sorry for ourselves for a little bit, but then we have to remember who we are.

The fourth thing that causes people to struggle when it comes to personal strength is shame and guilt. And these are internal enemies that create a sense that we’re not a good person—these fault lines inside. It’s important to note the distinction between guilt and shame is that guilt is “I did something bad,” and shame is “I am bad.” But if you do enough things to cause you to accumulate guilt and you don’t deal with it, you will start to accumulate shame in substantial ways, and you’ll conclude that you’re bad and that everything you touch will turn to—. Those notions diminish our power and our strength. We have to have three to five people in our lives that we can disclose to, to find absolution and some measure of forgiveness. We have to realize we’re all made of crooked timber and that we all sometimes feed the bad wolf.

The fifth thing is a lack of honesty. When we’re not being truthful, transparent, or forthcoming, those behaviors they inhibit our ability to be strong and create an almost split personality-like aspect to life.

The sixth is best captured in the words of the Buddha: “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is a choice.” Suffering is when we seek to hold on to a world that is not available to us. In the world of PTG they call it counterfactual thinking—wishing that what happened never did. But that isn’t possible. We have to find a path to acceptance, to recognize that we’re not fully in charge, and that it isn’t or wasn’t our fault. The best way to think about this is in the words of James Stockdale, who spent almost seven years in the Hanoi Hilton. And his guidance has been coined as the Stockdale Paradox—the idea that on the one hand we must have a complete understanding of just how bad our situation is, and if you’re in a Hanoi Hilton prison camp, it’s pretty bad. And you have to maintain faith that no matter what, you will have the strength to be able to not simply endure your experience, but to prevail and to thrive because of it.

The seventh and final thing that saps our strength is anti-congruence, or hypocrisy. It’s saying one thing and doing another. The goal is to have our thoughts, feelings, and actions aligned. And when we try to live different ways in different parts of our life, we sap our strength substantially. And for me, I worked at two big companies. I worked at ExxonMobil. It’s a place where to thrive you had to be a chameleon. You had to be whoever you needed to be in each meeting, in each encounter, in each new job, each new assignment. It’s exhausting. And it saps you of strength. And the thing I’m proudest about in my life now is that I’m the same person every day, in every meeting. Occasionally, I’ll shave if I have to go to a meeting where I think it’s appropriate—occasionally, we’re talking like four times a year—but as a general statement, the way I look, the way I talk, the way I am is the same. If you met me one-on-one, privately, if we were at a meeting, if I was at work, I’m the same person. And because of that—because that stems from a deep sense of authenticity—it brings all of my strength and all of my power with me, as opposed to dividing it up and trying to be different things to different people in different circumstances.

Certainly, as combat veterans, as first responders, you know what strength looks like. And you know that you feel, at times, like calibrating it, moderating it, because it may be too much. But be yourself. Be true. Because we struggle when we try to be different versions of ourselves. We become an actor in the movie of our life.

So that’s a list of seven things that we think are the causes of struggle when it comes to building personal strength. But those are just our thoughts. I’m interested in yours. So the first thing I want you to reflect on is: What causes you to struggle when it comes to cultivating personal strength? The second is: What do you need to do to overcome those obstacles, in terms of resources and resourcefulness? The third is: What do you need to do to be able to successfully cultivate personal strength?