Josh Goldberg | Personal Strength Through Story

So what I want to look at now is eight things that contribute to your capacity to bring personal strength along with you as you walk.

The first—and possibly most important—is a growth mindset. We’ve talked a lot about the distinction between a warrior and a victim. And in a lot of respects, this warrior mindset—the recognition that when things happen in your life, that you’re meant to learn from them—and some of you may be familiar with Jocko, the Navy SEAL, and he’s got his podcast and he’s got this whole talk that’s called “Good.” And it says, something bad happened to you? Something bad happened in your life? Good. What are you going to do with it? And it’s that principle, that mindset. What we know from the research is: people who believe they can grow, will grow. People who believe that they won’t, won’t.

There’s a great study for blood pressure patients. And people who felt like their blood pressure was a family issue, was part of their family history—they would take medicine and their blood pressure wouldn’t go down. They gave the same medicine to a group of people who believed that with the right practices and behaviors they could lower their blood pressure—and it did. It’s this principle of mind over matter that’s so important.

The other part of a growth mindset is creating and entering situations that make you uncomfortable, that start to create some of that fear inside about what could happen and what might be. And as Coach likes to say: get uncomfortable, get right, win the day. Personal strength is all about the willingness to get uncomfortable, to break down those existing muscle fibers so you can build them back stronger and better.

The second thing is a combination of congruency and connection. We know that the more connected you are, the more congruent you can be. When you’re congruent—when your thoughts, feelings, and actions are working in concert with each other—you’re maximizing your power. You’re maximizing your strength. And so working to engage the practices and habits you know that you need to have in your life builds that sense of inner connection and that outer sense of congruence, which is a central part of developing personal strength.

The third is wellness practices. And we’ve talked about the importance of those practices in the areas of Mind, Body, Finance, and Spirit to build your strength, to build physical stamina and mental stamina and spiritual stamina.

The fourth is your three to five—your support network. These are the people who can enable you to develop personal strength, who can help you get back up when you get knocked down.

The fifth on the list of things that can help you develop personal strength is forgiveness. They say that holding on to hate and resentment is like drinking poison and expecting somebody else to die. We have all been wronged and hurt and betrayed. And if we hold on to that outrage and grievance, all we are doing is acting like a victim. And the likely outcome is that we will get stuck. When you can forgive others—when you’re not held hostage by the outside world, by other people—when you have the capacity to engage empathy and compassion and forgiveness, you’re free.

And Viktor Frankl wrote about this idea. When he got out of the concentration camp, the number one thing he carried with him was that he had a fear of nothing. He feared nothing. And that’s an incredibly remarkable and strong place to be.

The sixth on this list is courage. Courage to get uncomfortable, like we talked about. Courage to dive deeply. Courage to do the difficult work. Courage to take on challenges that you might not previously been willing to do.

The seventh is the idea of responsibility and accountability. That’s taking personal responsibility for the things that are within your control and your area of operations. Viktor Frankl talks about this idea when he says that he thinks that to balance the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast of the United States, there should be a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast of the United States. And the reason why is because he fundamentally believed that we had to take responsibility for our actions.

We are so keen as a society, as individuals, to blame other people for what we do. Somebody made me do this. They made me angry. And we know that isn’t true. You get to choose what your attitude is and what your actions will be under any circumstance. Taking responsibility is a big part of cultivating personal strength, because just like the idea that other people can make you angry—when you make other people responsible for things, you sap your own power.

And that leads to the last thing that is necessary to develop personal strength. That’s choice. That’s belief. That’s the idea that your actions can create change under any given set of circumstances. And that’s how we define hope. And that’s what we mean by the word agency. This—this is the belief that what you do makes a difference to the world around you and makes a difference to the world within you.

I always think about the Hanoi Hilton. I think about Viktor Frankl in the concentration camps. They could have made excuses. They could have thrown their hands up. But they chose to go on offense. They chose to recognize that you can be in a prison but not a prisoner. That somebody can take everything—name, rank, family—but they cannot take your right to choose. That can only be surrendered.

So those are eight ways in which we think you can cultivate personal strength as part of your story. Part of what I love about the domains of posttraumatic growth is the interplay between them—how walking through one door can open many doors.

In that spirit, I want to talk about the intersection between the domain of personal strength and the other four domains.

Personal Strength and New Possibilities: We’ve talked about the role that strength and courage play in being willing to tackle new opportunities, to walk through new doors that you might not otherwise have been willing to consider. That could be trying a new class, learning the guitar, throwing yourself into a relationship, or taking on a new job. Those things take courage and strength to pursue new possibilities.

Personal Strength and Deeper Relationships: People aren’t complex. Relationships between people are complex. It takes strength. It takes courage to be willing to do the work, to take a beat, to create space, to speak hard truths. Whether this is an intimate relationship or an agape relationship, it requires incredible strength to allow yourself to be changed and altered by letting people in.

Personal Strength and Appreciation for Life: Appreciation for life isn’t just gratitude. It’s about reconsideration—a refocusing of priorities that you have in your life. And that takes great strength. Because what you’re doing is letting go of what is certain, letting go of what you’ve known, and starting to reflect upon the choices and the things that matter. And I think about my life. I think about how I valued money, power, respect above all. I think about the role that material things played in making me feel like I was better than I was when I was really struggling. And I let all of that stuff go because I realized it was false. But that is an act of incredible strength and incredible courage—to be willing to let go of all that certainty without knowing where any sense of fulfillment or validation is going to come from.

And then we have Personal Strength and Spiritual and Existential Change: By now, you know I love Joseph Campbell’s work. And I’ve shared one of his quotes many times: “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” The cave is in here. That deep sense of meaning and purpose and truth is deep within you. And I think about Yeats, the poet, who said it takes more courage to explore the dark corners of one’s own soul than it does to be a soldier on the battlefield. And so that idea of strength and courage—these are critical elements to walk this journey up that hill, up that mountain of growth and struggle that we talked about.

So I want you to reflect on three questions:

First: What past experience demonstrates to you that you have the capacity and capability to develop personal strength?

The second: What skills, strengths, and abilities do you possess to best equip you to develop personal strength?

And the third: What does your life look like—and who are you—when you are developing personal strength?