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Have you ever screwed up big time, gotten rejected or watched something that you worked on for months completely fall apart? Now most people, they break in these moments. I used to too. I was fragile, I was overly sensitive, I was terrified of failure. And then I learned five principles that completely rewired my brain. These principles took me from constantly breaking under pressure to being able to build a multi million dollar company from nothing. So if you have ever wondered how to build unshakable resilience and how to achieve what you want in life, here's how. Principle number one is what we call the discomfort dividend, which I made up for you. Okay? Every time that you choose voluntary discomfort, you are making a deposit into your resilience account. I remember my first deposit when I realized I was like, I don't want to let fear rule my life. At that time I think I was a little less self aware. So I was like, well, I'm really scared of heights. When I was a kid, I jumped off a diving board, I belly smacked, I was like bruised, but my entire body for weeks is awful. And so like I just hated heights after that. And so I remember I was in Hastings, Michigan and I decided I was going to go skydiving. Some farm that had a helicopter. I get in that helicopter and I remember going up that helicopter, I was like, holy, I'm going to die. And when that was happening, I remember every cell in my body was like, you're going to die, what are you doing? And I remember the guy told me, he's like, you're going to get up there and Leila, like, I swear you're going to grab onto me, you're not going to want to jump. And I was like, I'll be fine, I'll jump. How the am I going to get down? He's like, no, I, this is what's gonna happen though. I'm gonna grab you and fucking pull you out. Don't do that, I'll jump, I swear I'm gonna jump. Your body freezes, right? My body's freezing and I'm thinking like, I don't wanna do it, I don't wanna do it. And I just remember, all I remember was him telling me, he's like, if you don't do it, I'm gonna grab you. And I was like, I remember in that moment my brain was like, don't be the person he needs to grab. And so I got out and I remember I still have chills. I stand out in this little thing, you know, six inches. I put my feet on it. And then I'm in the air, and then you gotta flip backwards. And I did it. And I blacked out right after. I don't remember what happened exactly, but I do remember when the parachute pulled after I came out from my blackout and somehow I landed. But what happened after that was amazing because I said to myself, I can jump out of a plane. When every instinct inside of me is saying no, what else can I do? I can go rock climbing. I can go ziplining. I can speak in front of thousands of people. I could. There's a dozen things that used to paralyze me with terror. I can do it. So that single act of voluntary feeling, Terrified. It unlocked a whole new level of what I knew I could do. The same thing happened to me with the first time that I traveled overseas. The same thing happened to me when I spoke in front of 5,000 people for the same time. The same thing happened when I ran a company of over a hundred people. Instead of avoiding the things that scared me, I said yes to the opportunity. And I deliberately put myself in that discomfort again and again and again so my nervous system could learn this is not a threat. This is training. Now, things like traveling abroad, speaking in front of people, I look forward to those things. Do I still get somewhat nervous? Yeah. Yes. But I would say it's a healthy amount of concern to make. I want to do a good job, but most of the time, I'm excited. And the reason I'm excited is because I've rewired my brain to see that these things are not threats. They're opportunities to expand my life and expand my capacity as a human. I know that you probably feel and see your comfort zone as this, like, amazing, cozy, and delicious place, but no dreams are achieved there. You do not meet your future self there. People who deliberately expose themselves to control discomfort, they recover exponentially faster when a real crisis hits. Every time that you voluntarily choose discomfort, you expand your capacity. When you choose discomfort, your life gets bigger. When you walk away from it, your life gets smaller. So this brings us to principle number two. I call it the ownership effect. And I made that up for this video. The real difference between people who get everything they want in life and people who just keep dreaming is not talent, it's not luck, and it's not timing, and that is ownership. Really early in building acquisition.com, which was only four years ago, so I hired somebody who turned out not just to be, you know, like, the wrong person, but they were actually fairly dangerous to my team. And My business. And I remember at that time, my inner dialogue wanted to be victim. I was like, they weren't ready. They weren't committed. They lied to me in the interview process. They did all this behind my back. I started looking at them, like, all these bad things, right? But then when I asked myself the question, how am I responsible for this? I immediately saw where I had gone wrong. I was still a little timid in how strongly I felt about the type of leadership I wanted in the company. I also hadn't verified their skills before throwing them into the deep end. Like, I hadn't checked alignment on what success looked like, and I had essentially hired somebody hoping that they were gonna be able to be who I wanted, rather than making sure of it. And so all those things, it sucks to admit, and I hated it, and I felt like I hated myself for a second there, but it was the truth. And the thing about the truth, and when we tell ourselves the truth, is that if we create the problem, we can also solve the problem. So if I chose poorly, I can choose better in the future. If I'm responsible for failure, I'm also responsible for success the next time I do it again. So if you want to recover from setbacks faster, what can you do? You can take responsibility. People who recover from setbacks faster and stronger are the ones who believe that they are the ones who created the setback. So, you see, sometimes people try to protect their ego by deflecting the setback, deflecting the way that they failed or made a mistake. Those are actually not the strongest people. They're so insecure that they can't admit that they made a mistake or that they did something wrong. And so, in other words, if you think the world happens to you, you're defenseless. But if you think the world happens because of you, you will feel unstoppable. And in that situation that I had making that bad hire, what it showed me is that every failure, it's just data. What do I need to do next? What do I need to fix? What can I do better? I genuinely do not fear failure anymore. I don't even use the word failure, which is kind of funny making this video. Like, you may hear that word and be like, I relate to that. Like, I don't use that word. I did something wrong, I made a mistake. But, like, at the end of the day, I'm learning. Like, you're just learning. And responsibility, it might sting for a second, but playing the victim in the situation of life, it is a prison, and it does not have an escape route. You do not want to be there. You cannot be envied and pitied at the same time. We have principle three. This is called the data override. Most people do not fail because they can't win. They fail because their emotions convince them that they've already lost. This actually happened recently with one of my portfolio companies. So there was a campaign that we had essentially said for this company, we want to do this thing. Here's all the ways that we would change this marketing, the sales and the CS and the campaign. And we launched the thing and it ticked. So it was like their conversion rate had been at like 8% and then it went down to like 2%. And I remember at the time, my brain was like screaming. Because I'm the type of person that when I'm doing something for someone else, I like to make sure I'm not going to fail. If I'm doing it for myself, I'm like, fuck it, you can fail. If I'm doing it for somebody else, I'm like, I'd like to not fail, especially when I'm doing this for you. And so my emotional brain was like completely melting. I was like, this is fucking failing. Where they're going to be fucking bleeding money. We're fucking screwed. I fucking suck. You shouldn't have fucking made that call. You should have fucking stop them. Why the fuck you do this? And I was just like, now? I was like, do not talk to anybody right now, Layla. Cuz you sound like crazy person. Step away from the situation. I looked at the cold hard facts. I was like, take all the emotion out of this. And the facts told a completely different story. There was a specific step in the funnel that had a 1.2% conversion rate instead of the 8% that we expected. All I need to do is fix that. That's it. The other pieces that we put into place, I did not need to fix those things. I need to do anything about that. I just need to fix that one step. It's not a business ending catastrophe. It is one single broken piece of the machine. 1. And so me bringing that to my attention and then telling them and bringing it to their attention saved us from throwing away months of work. So instead of burning it all down and starting all over, we fixed the one single piece that was actually broken in the campaign and then went to generate over 2 million in the next six months. Think about how many people burn down their business, end their relationship, ruin their diet because of one wrong piece. You are so much closer than you think and you have so many more things right than you think. But you just don't take a step back from your emotions long enough to see it. Panicking is not a personality flaw. That is chemistry. And that is what happens when you're a human. When the stress hits, cortisol floods your system and it turns your perception into like, it's almost like a fun house mirror. So everything looks bigger, scarier, it's like more catastrophic than it actually is. And this is how our brains have been built to help us survive. We just don't need it to be this loud anymore. So the rule here is simple. Facts first. Feelings after resilient people do not pretend that feelings don't exist. It's just that they don't let their feelings dictate their behavior. Because feelings lie, but numbers and data tell the truth. I always say this, I'm like, follow the evidence, follow the evidence. Evidence over emotions. When you're in a threatening situation or something really bad happens, you know what your brain does? It remembers what everything looked like, who was there, how it smelled, how it sound, how you felt. And the next time you enter a situation like that, you know what it's going to tell you? Fucking run. Danger bad. That does not mean that this situation is dangerous. It means that your brain is doing its job. It's just that you, if you don't know how to drive the car, AKA your brain, then you're going to go off the road because you're like, oh, it told me no. It's what's supposed to do, but it's a false alarm. Now principle number four, commitment costs you. This is the truth that most people will not tell you. Everybody dreams of the dream body, the dream relationship, the dream company, right? Like for me, I always had dreamed of a fast growth company with an amazing culture that I built with my spouse that set a new standard for what it meant to love the work that you do. Dreaming of that was something that I had dreamed of. But dreaming of it wasn't the hard part. Because the real question is what are you willing to give up for it? So for me, what did I have to give up to have that dream? I had to give up sleeping in. So I had to wake up at 4:30 every day, if not 4:00, when my body was like holy crap. This is a shock to our system. For the first three years of my business, I had to give up comfort to have hard conversations with people while they were joining my team. I had to give up 8 hour work days because I was no longer coming in and coming out of work. I was the owner. I had to be there and be on the clock for the first three years, 14 to 16 hours, just to make sure that stuff didn't fall through the cracks because we didn't have a full team yet. I had to give up family dinners, birthday parties, beach. Days came, my hair done, my nails done. Peace of mind sometimes. But to get what I wanted. So here's the thing. Positive thoughts and making affirmations, those don't make you successful. Sacrificing something for that thing is what makes you successful. So the question when you're trying to figure out how to commit to something is not do I want this thing? Lots of people want that thing. But the question is, am I willing to give up these things for that thing? Once I accepted that, I had to pay a price, like really accepted that I could not have everything I wanted in life. At the same time, every setback that came my way became predictable. And I welcomed each one of them. Just knowing it was a test of my commitment at each point. When you get, you get to that setback, essentially it's life saying, do you still want this or do you want that? Research shows that most people dramatically overestimate what they're willing to endure for a long term goal. But they underestimate the power of consistent small sacrifices day in and day out. They want a million dollar business, but they will not sacrifice their weekends or their nights. I want you to understand this. There's nothing wrong with you. If you're not willing to give up things for that dream. That is fine. Just don't say that you also want the dream. Resilience starts when you stop pretending that you can just wish your way to success. You have to decide, what are you willing to suffer for? It is a question I ask myself every fucking day. What am I willing to suffer for? Do I want to suffer for this thing? And if the answer is no, what do I want to suffer for? Because guess what? Here's the thing about light. You're going to suffer no matter what. So make sure that you know what you're suffering core and that it's something worthwhile for you. Principle number five is the hardest pill to swallow. And I learned this lesson when we were scaling gym launch from zero to a hundred million. When I was doing that, it was the first company I ever built. Every day felt like firefighting in a tornado. I could predict nothing cause I'd never done it before. Competitors were attacking us. Laws were Changing Covid hits. It was crazy. But what carried me through that, it was not inspiration, and it certainly was not motivation. Both of those things are very fickle, and they will abandon you when you need the most. What saved me was my consistency. Showing up when I didn't want to, having hard conversations when my throat was tight, holding people to standards, making the calls, writing the emails, solving problems day after day after day after day, and not beating myself up when I was not perfect. That consistency got me through that chaos, and it transformed me into somebody who thrives in it. So things that once felt impossible, it just became every day. It was like, that's Tuesday or Wednesday or Saturday. That's just another day. And that's the secret. You don't wake up one morning and become magically resilient and skilled. You build resilience rep by rep, choice by choice, day by day. If you show up consciously and you ask yourself, like, are these things gonna make me better? And then you do those things, even though they're uncomfortable, you will become resilient. You take responsibility. You act on the facts and not the feelings. And little by little, what you'll see is that things that would have crushed you soon are things that are easy for you to do. It is not built in one heroic moment. It is built in a thousand small moments when nobody is watching, where it would have been easier to avoid the thing. If you train these choices like your life depends on it, because it does, how your life ends up does depend on it, then all the setbacks that you come across, they will not be threats anymore. I think about it all the time now. It's like the moment a challenge hits, I'm like, how do I use this to make me better? That's the question I ask. How do I use this to make me better? Failure, as you say, becomes fuel. And when those storms hit of life, that is your fucking training ground. That is how you become the person you want to be. Everyone says, gosh, you know, I wanted that thing. But then this happened. This is preparing you for that. You can't get that unless you overcome this. It's through it, and nobody ever sees it. And it. It kills me because it's like everything that's happened in my life that has felt like a major setback has actually set me up for success. I never knew it in the moment, and then always looking back, I was like, fuck, that was so hard. But if it hadn't happened, I wouldn't have been able to become that person that I'm really proud that I am. Now, if you're hungry for success and you are willing to put in the work, subscribe to my channel.