Looking & Moving Forward
The following is a conversation I had with Adam Markel. Adam is a best-selling author,
international keynote speaker, and trainer who specializes in helping individuals and
companies make life and career transformations and changes.
2021 is just around the corner. For many of us, this next year is a welcomed start to
new beginnings and possibilities. For others, turning the clock means an end to what
has been an extremely tumultuous season in our lifetime. In my recent sit-down
conversation with Adam Markel, we discuss how all of us can look forward and move
forward into this next season of our lives. Adam is the best-selling author of “Pivot; The
Art and Science of Reinventing You Career and Life.” In addition, he is a leading
international keynote speaker who has reached tens of thousands worldwide with his
message of resilience and bringing more to your life and business. As a former attorney
turned CEO of More Love Media and host of The Conscious Pivot Podcast, Adam
shared with me his insights on how to successfully pivot and move forward this next
year despite the trials and tribulations this past year has presented to us.
This conversation was life changing without a doubt and I know not only will you truly
enjoy this chat, but you will see and feel Adam’s heart as he delivers some very key
insights for pivoting and moving forward.
Adam: Oh my goodness, Robert, thank you so much for having me. And I just want to
say at the outset, I’ve had the good fortune to be introduced frequently, and a lot of
different places around the globe, that was just a beautiful introduction. Really my heart
was swelling as I was listening to you pour that love all over me, so thank you.
Rob: September is a mutual friend who I have known for almost thirty years. And when
she says that she trusts, loves, and admire someone I immediately trust and admire that
person as well just because I trust her so much. So, if September gives you praise that
is all I need. Before we really get into the meat of it, I would love for myself and for my
audience to know how you and your beautiful family have dealt with this past year? How
have you dealt with everything just like everyone else?
Adam: Well, it is a mixed bag. I think there is no other way for me to look back on this
year and see it as anything other than a mixed back. The binding moments where I felt
more connected to my Creator, more aligned in my purpose, where I felt joy in new and
even deeper ways where my own self-awareness, my own consciousness has risen
opportunities in our business that were there and others that appeared, and others that
we didn’t even anticipate would be there. Those showed themselves and at the same
time like a ledger in accounting, I was a lawyer for 18 years, not so good with
accounting but I understand that there’s this balance or let’s call it a harmony between
the pluses and the minuses. Between the credits and the debits. So yeah, there has
been a lot of good stuff. And that is only a small list of things. I feel good about when it
comes to this year. Then there is a good size list of things that would be the negatives,
the debits and the things that were challenging. Firstly, the number of people who have
passed away, the deaths that have occurred as a result of a pandemic, and every year
there are people who die that we don’t hear about. The flu takes people as well as heart
attacks, heart disease, car accidents, drunk driving accidents, I mean, you name it there
are people who die every year and are mourned and people are in grief at the loss of
somebody in their life that we don’t hear about, so this is a year. Where we are hearing
about this staggering number of people that have died as a result of this pandemic, so
that’s first. The disruption that the pandemic ultimately produced in the way that we live,
how we live, all that that means life as we knew it, is quite different. I do not want to say
it’s no more but it’s very different now to the experience of living in the world that we
have is so different. So there’s a part of me that is not only in grief and mourning the
loss of people and the loss of things that will probably have changed and may never go
back to the same way they were, but I’m also morning, just the way things that are
sacred, that connection with other people, the ability to hug a person, how it is that we
spend time in proximity to other people, I’m kind of a soul of solitary soul.
I’ve been a public speaker for 12 years. I was a lawyer and I would stand-up in
court, always felt nervous in court, and I somehow ended up pivoting out of practicing
law and ended up teaching and sharing my experience is really more than anything else
on stages around the globe in these areas of reinvention, resilience and the like. And
one of the things that even though I’m sort of an introvert and situationally I’m an
extrovert for those at that higher purpose, one of the things that I’ve always loved and I
never can get enough of it, is just hugs. Just being in the presence of another human
being and be a look them in the eye and have them see me and embrace. That is just
something that might take a little while. It might take a minute before we can get back to
feeling that that is the norm again or that we’re even open to that. So, I guess to answer
your question is, it is a mixed bag. That is how I look at it.
Rob: How should us as an individual, as a company, a group, church, or whatever, how
should we reflect on 2020 and all that has brought upon us?
Adam: Well, I am not going to suggest that we look at it through rose colored glasses or
we look at it like Pollyanna. That everything is just good. I have left out a bunch of
things. The murders of innocent people in 2020. Again, that happens every year. There
is nothing new, but to witness George Floyd’s murder the way we did as a nation. You
cannot ignore those things. You have to acknowledge and remember those things. Yet,
and here is the thing, we got to move forward. I am in my 50s and I’ve had a lot of
success. I have had a lot of failure. Overall, my life has been nothing but a blessing.
And if I say, Well, what is the one thing? What is the one... I mean, there is a million
things that it takes to be a good father, to be a good spouse, to be a good friend, to be a
good leader, CEO, founder, manager, there’s so many things, and yet, one thing we
have to do is move forward. You can’t learn from our failings, we can’t get to the place
where we’ve applied the feedback, where we take what we found out and used it to
grow and use it as a catalyst for growth. Use that adversity as a catalyst for growth,
which is how I define resilience.
You cannot do that if you don’t move forward. And I think that is a big issue with a lot of
people in their lives is they get stuck. No judgment about it. If you lose something, like
you lose your job, you lose your business, you lose somebody you love. You can get
stuck quickly and I just feel that as we bring this year to an end and we move into 2021,
my advice for anybody, business or otherwise is we have got to move forward.
Rob: Absolutely, I am 100% behind that, and one thing that I’ve come to realize about
myself and I have to be careful about this but to your point is I know personally I am
very good at taking a look at the situation for what it is. But immediately my mind moves
to, how do I move forward through this. How I do move forward. And that is tough. It’s
extremely tough. Take this past month for example, my sister unfortunately lost her
battle to cancer two days before her 50th birthday. That was tough. And then short time,
literally a week after, I get tested positive for Covid-19. Then my wife, Emily, tests
positive. I am afraid to say is there anything else that can happen this month. But then
immediately in my head I am asking how do we move forward? That is one of the
reasons why I got into coaching is I want to help people move forward.
Adam: Can I put one little sprinkle on that? In moving forward, I think people get what
that means. I say you must look forward to move forward. We must look at where we
are going, where we want to go, that is how you drive a car, that is how you drive your
life. Yes, we have to move forward. We have got to look forward. I think that is where a
lot of people often get stuck. It is because they are looking in the rear-view mirror and
they are looking back.
Rob: You went from being a lawyer and then life happened for you, you decided to pivot
and move in transition. Fill my audience in on that story.
Adam: Why don’t we go right to the belly of the beast. For me it was waking up one
morning. First moments of waking each morning, I don’t know if anybody can relate to
this. I’ll go back twelve or so years. I used to put my feet on the floor as we are lucky
enough to do. The first feelings that I can remember having were feelings of
anxiousness, anxiety, or anger. I would sometimes sit at the edge of the bed and just
kind of make a grunting noise or say something I probably should not say on the
podcast. That was odd man because I married my college sweetheart. We are married
30 plus years now. We have four healthy kids. We had so much going for us.
My life was so blessed in so many ways, and yet I put my feet on the floor and I had this
sense that something was not right. I might even call it dread is how I would feel. That
went on for too many weeks, months, and years to count. I didn’t know really what to do
about it or what to make of it. I just sort of thought you know its part of life. You’re going
through something. Whatever it is, it will pass and I just got to grit it out. I’m a gritty guy.
I am a tenacious person, so I’ll just grind more. So if I’m working 60 hours a week, I will
work 70 or work 80. Whatever it takes to basically figure it out. And for me at the time I
think we are figuring it out meant then I just earn so much money that I’ll be able to buy
my way out. To buy my way out of what I was feeling, which was miserable. I was in
misery and it was something I tried to ignore. I just did not do a good job of ignoring it. I
ended up in the emergency room on a gurney on a Saturday morning. I am supposed to
be at my sons baseball game and I’m there instead with electrodes taped to my chest
and feeling my heart pounding so hard I thought I was going to literally pop out of my
chest. I am sweating profusely. My mind is racing. I’m having thoughts like I’m dying. Crazy and awful
thoughts. I’m not going to see my kids again ever. I cannot believe it. I’m sitting here thinking, I can’t
believe this is ending this way. It is how I’m going to go down. My wife is standing by my
bed side. She has no color in her face. She is just like shocked and then I get the
verdict from the emergency room doctor. He comes in, speaks to me for a little while,
and he says, “Hey, you’re not having a heart attack. I know that you feel like you are but
your EKG shows that your heart is just fine. What you are having right now, what you’re
experiencing is likely an anxiety attack.” We talk for a while and he said, “so part of the
reason you’re feeling what you’re feeling is you haven’t been sleeping well, and now it’s
been that way for a while. You are stressed and you are in a stressful job. We had a
little chuckle about me being a lawyer and drinking a lot of coffee. These are lifestyle
choices that you have made that have led you to a place where you are feeling the way
you’re feeling. So you got a lucky today. It might not feel lucky but where you are sitting
you are lucky because I am giving you good news.
In my work I see people that don’t always come out of here. We got out of the hospital
that day and I realized I got a reprieve. I even thanked God. I hadn’t said thank you God
my whole life, I don’t think. I looked up at the sky and said thank you God. And I meant
it. But of course I didn’t know what to do! I don’t know what to do with this. What do I do
with this? So, as it turns out, I went back to what I knew and I think that’s what a lot of
us do when we get to that inflection point. The thing that I later wrote about and called a
pivot point. This was a pivotal moment for me, yet it was only the start of it. It exposed
the fact that something had to change but I had no clue what needed to change. Fast
forward maybe it is six months later and I’m back in my old habits. I am doing the same
things I was doing.
I come home late night and walk in the door. I am dripping wet and I see my wife
by the stairs to go up. I start to go up the stairs. I look at her, I see her eyes, and I knew
instantly what was going on behind those eyes. I knew that she was saying not with her
words but with her eyes. She was saying “you did it again. Man, you did it again. You
said you would be home for dinner. You didn't make it home for dinner. Here it is past
the kid’s bedtime and you didn’t even get home in time to read him a bedtime story.” I
kiss them goodnight while they’re still awake and I walked right up to her and I said, “If I
keep doing what I’m doing, you’re going to be a widow.” She took that in, took a breath
and then she said some words that have stayed with me and will always stay with me.
She said, “We’ll figure it out.” So in that moment and I realize this is special. Not
everybody has that in their life, people that will support them the way I was being
supported. She didn’t say remember we got two houses here, the cars is in the
driveway, the lease on our home, four kids, two big dogs, gerbil, and a gold fish. You
are responsible for a lot of stuff, dude. She did not remind me of any of that. She just
said we will figure it out. In that moment I did not have to contemplate moving to Fiji or
quitting my job, even though that would have been lovely. I knew I needed to make a
change to what I was doing for a living. I didn’t have to have a mid-life crisis. We were
able to plan a mid-life calling. That was ultimately the birth of the book, the child that
was born out of this miserable time in my life. I learned how to make small changes. I
learned how to pivot. I learned how to create a plan B that would sustain us and would
nourish us. Forget the sustain even but would nourish me, nourish my soul, and nourish
my family at the same time. That took about two and a half years. It did not happen
overnight. I am not a jump ship guy. I am not a do this one thing and everything
changes.
It does not work like that. It is like dominoes. You tip that first domino and then
sequentially what happens is you tip the next to the next to the next. That is the way
dominos work. It is often just getting something started and making a small change that
ultimately changes in outcomes. You cannot change the input without changing the
output. It is the butterfly effect. I think a lot of people where they get stuck is, they think
that either they’ve have to do something drastic to pivot or that making a small change
isn’t going to get the job done. And you are right! It will not get the job done if what you
want is for the job to be done tomorrow. However, if you are willing to look at a time
horizon that is sensible and know that you can’t change any one thing without seeing a
change. You understand you can’t change the input and not see the output change. If
you are willing to be patient enough and tenacious enough to see it through. There is
nobody who cannot change their circumstances profoundly without actually making any
single profound change in the process.
Rob: 2021 Is right around the corner. Many of us are going to make these grandiose
plans to lose weight, start a business, save money, go for a promotion, etc. However,
most of those individuals will not reach those goals. Would you say that resilience or the
lack there of is one of the key reasons why most people do not reach those goals?
Adam: Well, I think that people are burned out, stressed out and overwhelmed, and to
answer the first part of the question, or the way that you frame the question, resilience is
the thing that enables you to keep going, it enables you to go and you keep going long
enough to figure stuff out. Any entrepreneur that has been in it for more than a minute
knows that it is tough on a good day. But what makes it possible to succeed as an
entrepreneur or as a business owner, body transformation, or operator of an
organization is you have got to have longevity. You must continue to iterate and learn
through failure, learn through shock, trying things, testing things, and learn through the
process of staying in the game. What it takes to succeed and win in the game. You
cannot stay in the game. if you lack resilience. The lack of resilience is ultimately the
cause of the quitting. You could say as many have said before that a person doesn’t
succeed because at some point they quit. I look for the first domino often and to me that
first domino is they are not set up as resilient as they can be. Therefore, when they are
exhausted, burned out, and overwhelmed they naturally quit. You can make anybody
quit.
I just had a guy on our podcast was a 26-year veteran of the Navy Seals. He told me all
about people who quit and these are the highest performing folks you could ever meet
physically but not necessarily mentally. You can make anybody quit something if you
give them enough and pile enough on them there’s almost no human that you could
possibly imagine that you couldn’t get to quit.
Rob: Your book Pivot is broken up in two parts, Beliefs and Behaviors. I believe that
one of the reasons many people do not reach their desired level of success is a lack of
a clear vision. In your book you provide some amazing points on clarity and I would love
for you to expound on that.
Adam: Well, there is a great lyric and I think it was George Harrison that said that “if
you don’t know where you’re going any road will take you there.” Having a clear vision is
incredibly important, and that’s both short-term and long-term vision. Typically, when we
work with people all over the world at an organizational level whether it’s founders, early
startups, or even much more mature Fortune 50 companies, we go in to help them to
develop their resilience. Part of what we are looking for is what is their vision. Because
again, if you don’t have a vision for the future research, the kind of case studies that go
back to the 60s and talk about learned helplessness where people when they don’t have
vision they feel hopeless. They feel helpless in many ways. When you have a vision,
and when you can track to that vision, then there is always the sense that you can make
or create a solution. So even the biggest challenges and often it is the little challenges
that wears a person down. I like to think of those kinds of things as dirt on a windshield.
When you have got that dirt on your windshield you realize if you keep the dirt on your
windshield and you don’t use the wiper, you’re going to be dangerous soon.
What ends up happening when people have all that dirt on their windshield, and
often the dirt is several things, including their current belief systems. The belief systems
that they develop when they were quite young and often times they’re unaware that
those belief systems are like the operating system for them. The way that they make
meaning of things. How one person looks at their failing in a situation and goes “I just
figured out ten ways this doesn’t work. Like Thomas Edison, I figured out 999 ways not
to make a light bulb. So that is one belief system. You get another person who looks at
that failing or that series of failings and goes “I’m a loser. I do not know what I’m doing. I
do not know what I’m playing at.” Two identical failures but two very different belief
systems about what it means. Turn on the windshield and when a person has got
enough dirt on their windshield which a lot of people do, they tend to drive slowly. Some
of them are stuck. Some of them were just sitting on the side of the road stuck. Often
they’re driving slowly. Whereas somebody that has a clean windshield can see feet,
yards, and miles ahead. They can drive quickly.
Rob: I was working out with a trainer once he asked me a question. He said, “Robert
you do great in the gym. You love the crazy workouts. I try my best to hurt you. But do
your behaviors outside the gym match the lifestyle you want?” I responded “Oh, you got
me on that one.” Can you talk about how your behaviors must match your vision?
Adam: I think what we said earlier is really meaningful for this point which is that often
we see a disconnect between the things we say we want and the things we do. I know
for me that was reflected when I would say to my wife in the morning “I’ll see you for
dinner. I will be home for dinner. I can’t wait to see you guys and have dinner together.”
4 o’clock in the afternoon would come and I would start to get productive. So, things I
had put off that I could have done in the morning, difficult things that I needed to my
wrap my arms around, whether it was to write a brief or it was to write a contract or
something. I would start to do at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and I would get really
good at getting productive at 4 o’clock in the afternoon. By six o’clock in the afternoon I
was humming and producing. I was doing things that were going be good for money,
good for business, good for my client relationships, and all that kind of stuff. Getting
home at 6:30 for dinner was never going to happen when that was my habit.
That was my ritual and we ritualize to habitualize. The things that we make. The
sacred cows in our life. The things that become those habits. There was a complete
disconnect between the words that were coming out of my mouth. The actions that I
was taking later in the same day or even an hour later. An hour after I said that I was
still cleaning my desk, or I was answering back some calls that were important and
urgent. I was putting off doing the more difficult work when I was warmed up. Yet that
was only going to perpetuate me being a liar again. I was going to get home at 8 o’clock
that night, walk in the door, miss dinner, still be able to kiss the kids go night, and I will
have broken my word yet again. Here I am a lawyer and I’m just breaking my word day
after day. After a while it wears at your soul.
When you think about your behaviors and your trainer pointed this out to you, is
so important that when your behaviors are not a match for the words that come out of
your mouth or the thoughts that you think. The things that are important to you, but your
behaviors don’t match those thoughts you’ve got something to put your attention to.
Now as part of our work in resilience we prepare a resilience assessment. We have a
tool that we share with individuals and with organizations to help them to figure out
where it is that they might be lacking in resilience mentally, emotionally, physically, and
spiritually. There is a question that is part of that assessment that’s all about what you
and I are discussing now. This misalignment between the things that we say are
important to us and the things we are actually doing in our life. I’ll give you the link for
this assessment. Anybody can use this link to get their results. It is 16 questions and
takes 3 to 4 minutes to complete. It is your.resilienceculture.com
You are going to find out not just what your score is, but what does it mean, and
what can you do about it. Again, if your beliefs are out of alignment with your actions or
if your words are out of alignment with your actions, that doesn’t just make us a
hypocrite. It actually makes us unproductive; it depletes us. Like I say, it wears at your
soul and that depletion, that exhaustion, that overwhelmed, and those things that we
feel don’t allow us to be resilient. They don’t allow us to be at our best. Life and
business are challenging enough by themselves. You put into the mix the unexpected,
the death of someone, the loss of a client, a pandemic that comes out of nowhere, or
political unrest. What was a difficult sport to begin with just got that much more difficult.
How are you showing up in those moments? Are you able to show up and seize the
opportunities when others are running because they are paralyzed by fear?
That Is why I say it was a mixed bag this year because there were opportunities
to grow and develop, serve more people, earn more money, and create a new vision or
a modified vision for the future of your business going into 2021 and beyond. A lot of
people were able to do that. There were even more number of people that were unable
to do that and got stuck in that and caught in that world pool of depleting mindset and
the degradation that comes from living in anxiety or living in fear. So your behaviors are
very much an important thing as a talisman of what you truly believe. Not what you say
you believe but what you truly believe. Because your actions will be the thing that tells
the story. So, if you want to change those behaviors and I’m not saying you have to be
stuck with “well it is just the way I am or I just don’t keep my word. Or even I will get
productive at 4 O’clock and so I can’t be home at dinner.” That is not the way this works.
It can work that way of course, but the other way it can work is you make small changes
which is what we talked about earlier.
I don’t even want to call it a solution or a sort of an antidote. But it just works. And
you only know that when you do it yourself consistently, that when you commit to
making incremental progress, commits to small changes, what you see over time is that
hockey stick. You see the compound effect of making small changes and that is how
you develop new rituals. That is how you replace those behaviors with behaviors that
more align with what you truly want to believe or what you really do believe. However,
that requires consciousness. It requires a commitment to making a small change. So
when I was miserable as a lawyer I couldn’t just quit. Who knows what my world would
have looked like if I just quit it. I was not prepared to walk away from my clients and
walk away from responsibilities. I knew I needed to get out but I needed to get out in a
way that was going to make sense long-term. So people reading this you have to think
long-term. You have to be able to think short-term and long-term when making
decisions and to the extent that you can’t see out of the windshield. You must be
engaged in a process and with people, mentors and others that can help you to clear
the windshield. Somebody like yourself, Robert. To be coached by someone that can
reflect true information to a person and give them real feedback is vital.
Rob: That was absolutely life changing information that you just delivered. You
mentioned one of my favorite things I love to talk about, coach, and train on and that is
fear. There is a quote in your book that states, “at the heart of our intangible pivot fear is
one fear, is that we would not be good enough.” How do we get past and overcome fear
that holds us back from discovering our purpose?
Adam: It is a thing that is individualized. In the book, I identify these five fear stories
than we often can relate to. Everybody’s fear is different, yet it feels the same. That is
the funny or not so funny part about it. Pain is a good one too. You cannot compare
pain because pain is pain. Mental or physical pain. If you are in pain, you are in pain.
There is no comparing it and fear feels the way it does regardless of the reason for the
fear. So, you can’t compare it. You cannot say you know something you are afraid of is
not something I’;m afraid of. Something I am afraid of you cannot look at and go, oh, that
is easy and not an issue. So, it is an individualized thing and to me fear is a buffer, fear
is a bully, and fear is something that exists in the absence of love. For me there is no
hack. It is just something that in the moment that you feel fear and it is real, you do not
ignore it, you do not say it is not here. You just must recognize that that fear is there
because love is not.
Rob: That is powerful. I hope people here that. Fear is the absence of love. That is
strong. That is good stuff. That is great stuff right there. I have always been a morning
person. It is just my nature. My mom is as well. She worked for the State of Tennessee
at the women’s prison for over 30 years. She is used to getting up four or five in the
morning and still does even after many years of retirement. I mentioned that because I
am a huge believer in mourning rituals. I am a huge believer in earning the first part of
your day. I bring that up just because in a recent podcast of yours, you were having a
great discussion with Mark Victor Hanson and his wife Crystal. Mark being the author of
the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. It was an immensely powerful interview that
everyone should check out. Could you talk about morning rituals and how some years
ago started asking yourself different questions in the morning. Talk to us about morning
rituals and asking those questions when you first wake.
Adam: This was so fascinating and became interesting enough to do more than a
podcast on it. I gave a TED Talk in 2018 on this topic of one particular ritual that
became a life saver for me and still is. This is still the life preserver or the buoy that I am
able to hold on to when I feel fear, doubt, or worry as we do. The conversation and the
Conscious Pivot Podcast with Mark and Crystal was about the fact that rituals are so
important that we’ve got to be thinking in terms of what are we doing on a ritual basis.
Ultimately the quality of our life really is equal to the quality of the things that we
ritualized, the things that we make so important that we consciously do them and
repeatedly. So I do one thing in particular that’s a part of a longer morning routine or a
morning ritual and I do it when I wake. It was interesting enough to want to write a book
about it and not just one book actually. As it turns out, it is a book and a workbook. I just
got this in the mail a couple of days ago because it’s now in pre-order and will be
officially on the shelves and bookstores around the world on the first of January. It is the
I love my life challenge workbook and individuals that want to find out more about it can
go to the website which is www.Ilovemylifechallenge.com to find out more. It is a 28-
day interactive workbook on how to create the kinds of rituals that ultimately become
habits. When I said earlier that I used to begin the day with that feeling of anxiety and
even the sense of dread, it was setting the compass for my day. I would be anxious that
day. I would be agitated that day. I would be angry that day. That is the way it went. I
was a lawyer and a litigation attorney. I could be as angry as I wanted to be and I got
paid for it too. Now what I do is very different in the morning. It is three parts. First part
is I wake up. Now that sounds like okay, what’s with that? We all do that. Robert you
woke up this morning, right? When you went to bed last night did you get a contract?
Was it written in stone or on paper that guaranteed you see another day?
No, me either. I did not get that contract. I have not met anybody yet that has a
contract for that. So, when I wake up, I realize I have been given another day. I feel that
for a moment. What does that mean? It means somebody went to bed when I went to
bed last night and they did not wake up. It means I am taking a breath in this moment
and know that there are people who are taking their very last breath in this moment.
This then transforms me right there. Instantly I am getting transformed in this moment
now because it makes that moment holy. It makes that moment sacred. It is not just any
old moment in your life. That is the first moment of waking. I get to be holy to start. I get
to create something sacred for the day. My grandma used to say leave the house on the
right foot. I leave the bed on the right foot. I do not want to leave the bed on the wrong
foot the way I used to for so many years.
Yeah, so I feel gratitude in that moment and that is the second part, the horse is now
being led. It is just so easy. I just go right down that beautiful trail of gratitude, and I
think about what I am grateful for in the moment. For as long as I feel like thinking about
it, I put my feet on the floor and I say “I love my life.” Those four simple words and it is
not easy. Not easy to love your life in the middle of a pandemic, in the middle of a
divorce, in the middle of cancer, or anything that might be going on. Yet that is the
through line of the book. It is the through line of that TED Talk. It is the question, the
simple question of what it would be like if you would love your life no matter what. When
you learn to love your life no matter what, you are resilient.
Rob: In listening to you talk about that it reminds me of my sister and her end of life
journey. You and I were talking before we started the podcast. She passed away
recently from a brave fight with cancer. One of the things that I talked about at her
memorial was that I’m really proud because even in the midst such pain she maintained
a smile that I can promise you, would light up the room. I do not care what mood you
were in, even in her last days, she fought with, as you mentioned, just being grateful for
the life that she did have. It made me ask myself a question at her memorial service. It
is the same question that came up last year when my dad died. That question is
“Robert, are you living up to your full potential? Are you grateful for what you have?” I
recently did a podcast and I ask individuals to ask themselves that question…Are you
waking up every day grateful? Are you living your full potential?
As we are coming to a close here; we’e going into a new year. I have always thought
of this time of the year as a great opportunity to take accounting of our life. Based on
this past year and your experience, how would you coach and advise people going into
this new year?
Adam: You must develop your resilience before you need it. You develop your
resilience now, not because we are in the middle of a challenge, but because this is not
the last challenge that any of us will face.
Rob: I am glad you say that because Adam that concerns me honestly. My concern is
that people think January 1st, 2021 is going to come around and suddenly life is just
going to get 100% better. And I want people to understand that it does not work that
way. It just does not. You talk about resilience and you are absolutely correct. I really do
appreciate that. I would like to wrap up this way, you previously mentioned you have a
new book and manual coming out and I am so looking forward to that. Are there any
other new projects or anything you are working on that you can share with my
audience?
Adam: Folks can go to adammarkel.com. As you said we have a robust podcast show
that includes people from really diverse backgrounds. We are working on that a lot and
there is really fresh and new content all the time there. We do a lot of virtual training.
We are doing virtual workshops for organizations both large and small. As I said,
anything from a start-up to Fortune 50. We do speaker training work. On the website
you can explore what that looks like. If you are the kind of person that’s ever had it on
your bucket list to be a TEDX speaker or a keynote speaker and you want to pivot into
that work slowly over time or you want to roll up your sleeves and start right away, then
we support folks in that area. All those things can be accessed from the
Adammarkel.com website side. If you are the kind of person that resonates with that
message about how you develop resilience, take the resilience assessment we gave
earlier, Your.resilienceculture.com and get your free assessment resources. There are
no strings attached to that, it is our gift. And the book “I love My life Challenge” is in pre-
order right now. We will have a launch party at the beginning of January. Go to
www.Ilovemylifechallenge.com and find out more about that. We are going to start that
28-day challenge in January. I agree with you, Robert. Just because we change the
calendar year and we figuratively are turning a page, putting one year behind a starting
a new one... I think there is something that is a ritual to that. There is an energy about it.
I think it is a positive thing. People recognize it is a clean end of one thing and the
beginning of another. But it is also what you said, which is that those things that we
want to change don’t change magically overnight. We have take those small steps. Get
people around us that are willing to tell us the truth and be truthful with ourselves to
think and again, look forward and go forward.
Rob: Absolutely. Adam thank you so very much. Today has selfishly just been a
blessing for me. I cannot wait to go back and review our conversation. But like I said,
thank you so much, we really appreciate all your heart, your knowledge, wisdom, and
just your love. You are just genuine. I told you my friend I was in love with you from day
one, so I really do appreciate it.
Adam: What an honor. Thank you, Robert. thanks for having me.
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