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If you're dealing with the unexpected, crisis, challenge, upset. I know that you're doing two things. You deny what you're seeing and we diminish ourself. Instead of denying truth, you seek clarity and perspective. If you're dealing with the unexpected, crisis challenge, upset, sudden emotion, deal falls through, economy sucks. I know that you're doing two things, and we just have to talk about it. To help flip you a little bit on the coin, you're doing two things. The first thing that you tend to do is you deny truth. You deny what you're seeing, the unexpected. You're in a state of denial, right? You don't want to face it, so you deny it. You detach it. You don't engage it, right? You pretend that that person didn't just lie to you. You pretend that you didn't just feel that. And so you're just denying. And when the unexpected happens, we just deny it. Usually human conditions, because we're so pattern driven, we deny it too long. You denied all the signals too long that that partner, that spouse was a jerk, right? And then one day it came to a head, but you saw it, but you denied it. We do that in our personal relationships and our businesses. The second thing, though, that's even more poisonous, to use some dramatic language with you here today. The second thing that we do with the unexpected is we diminish our self. So we deny the external reality and we diminish ourself. I suck. I'm not capable. Here I go again. I'm not worthy, I'm not good, I'm an embarrassment, I'm a failure. And you take a change in the world and you diminish self. This leads to shame, guilt, self frustration, self anger. And both of these things. Denying truth and diminishing self, it stops you. You're almost dead in your tracks. You just freeze. You don't engage, you don't see, you don't recognize. And so I'll tell about the other side of the coin when it's adaptive behavior. But this is the maladaptive deny and diminish self, lack of belief, right? An external thing happened. I lowered my belief because I didn't expect that. So I've attached self to external circumstance. I've attached my emotion, right, enthusiastic or doubtful, to an external thing. And so we let the external thing take us for a ride versus as like Marcus Aurelius talks about. I love his metaphor of your job is to be the rock and the waters flow all around that. And what that meant is you have a Character, you have a disposition, you have a belief about life. And the water, you know what that circumstance, even emotion, it's flowing all around. But you're going to find your center and you're going to be strong in self, even if you know you have to be adaptive. Now, our other friend, Bruce Lee, he was like, no, no, no. Be water, be loose, be flexible. Flow around things. So you find the metaphor that you like, but both the intent and is to deal better with these things. And both the attempts was don't take it personally. And I think that's a big thing. Loose versus strictness. When something happens, can I be loose with it or do I feel like it has to be strict? The expectation, the behavior, the tightness, the perfectionism, the tension that happens in strictness. When someone has a strict belief about how has to go, when they believe everyone has to act in exist this exact way. So there's a strictness to it. Some people, when strictness is taken to the ultimate, we call that perfectionism, right? We call that an OCD disorder. Like we get into when strictness swings way too far over there. And we have to realize it's a pendulum, that you can be loose with some things and strict with others. And one of the first things I'll do with people is like when they're having a lot of emotion about something, I'm like, where are you on that right now? You're loose or strict. Let's walk through your thoughts. What are your thoughts here? And we'll just try to get it more balanced, not perfected, but there's probably, they probably swung one way or the other, right? And if we can help them understand being a little bit more flexible with their responses, a little more flexible with their expectations, they tend to really broaden their life experience. You know, if the kids have to be perfect every single day and you're really strict with them to get that compliance that feels very differently in the household. But we forget that that also translates into other communities like our office, like our team, like how that zoom call went, like, did you reply to that email? Perfectly. The more strict we tend to be. It's, it's, it's a very difficult dance because of course, that strictness. There's an excellence to that, right? There's, oh, well, I want to perfect it. I want to get it more excellent, so I can't be too loose and it's a dance. But the only people who ever deal well with that spectrum, if you will, or that pendulum, is they've developed some capabilities in self mastery, they've learned something about self regulation, they've learned something about the topics we've talked today. So they're a little more fluid and dynamic. This is what made Bruce Lee so famous. He came up in wing chun and became so incredibly strict to that perfect punch, that perfect kick, that perfect parlay. He was perfect at it. But then he realized that was actually holding him back in real life fights and scenarios. And he had this aha. He's like, I'm trying to do this move to counteract that move because I've been told that's the move and I gotta be positioned this way. And he's like, I gotta learn to dance a little bit in these fights and these struggles with life. And Jeet kune do came from that. His practice, that's his art. His practice, his martial art of Jeet kune do was a greater flexibility, a greater meeting the moment where it is and still having the skill like you've practiced the skill, but then in the fight you're a little more loose. Right? Same thing happens with all the athletes I work with in the MMA or in boxing. It's the same thing. They have trained and trained and trained and trained. And in the moment, in the ring, there has to be a certain adaptability, flexibility, meet it where it's at, and I'm going to dance with this from a fluid perspective, not expecting it's going to go exactly right. That's where that ethos of, you know, the universe is either happening for you or it's happening at you. And it's where that idea is. Gosh, are all these things I'm seeing external? Are these stacking up and they're going to wreck my life and I'm going to be ruined and things are going to become more scarce and I don't have any control in them because they're deterministic. It's just happening to me. And am I strict about what I expect? Am I going to punish myself or others because it doesn't go the way I am? All these things flow from are the world's friendly or it's hostile. And I really believe that once we can orient ourselves to, oh, it's a choice, I'm going to choose, it's friendly or hostile. If I choose, it's hostile. That might be real in some ways, but I'm probably going to shut myself down. If I can choose, it's it's friendly or there's an openness and I have high agency that I can, I can shift and Shape the world from within and externally. Then I flip that coin because on the other side of that coin. So remember the first side of the coin, guys, if you wrote it down, you deny truth and you diminish self. Those are the two moves that just wrecks the unexpected. The other side, though, is almost the flip. The other side is, instead of denying truth, you seek clarity and perspective. Seek clarity is really the first habit of every high performer I've ever met. The second one is, instead of diminishing self, you organize self. Organizing self. What this means is you self regulate your emotion and you set a mental intention. Okay, hey, this knocked me off. I didn't expect that. Okay, get a hold of my emotions, let them pass. Let me set an intention for what I want next. And organizing self. Okay, shoot. This Monday sucked. It's Tuesday. What am I going to do about it today? What's the plan of action? And instead of sitting and waiting and disengaging and crapping on yourself, instead you summon yourself and go, okay, it's on me. I'm the CEO here. I got to deal with it. I'm the one in charge of this deal. It sucks. What's the best way I can deal with it? You take accountability and ownership, and you step in by organizing your mind, your body, your resources, your tools, your day to deal with it. And I think this is the big shift that people make. It's a big change. It's like an aha moment when they realize, oh, I can make an impact here. I can do something about this. Even if it's small, you organize yourself. It's like you have to find a stability in self to know what the needle movers are, to move your life forward and to know the difference between the noise. Because guess what? The noise always sounds urgent. The noise always sounds important. So you're probably not going to gauge on that because everyone's going to say it's important, and everyone's going to say it's urgent. You have to discern, does it affect the core disciplines and needle movers or levers of your life, and are those things you have to adjust? And I think when you learn that, I can't tell you how many coaching sessions I have to do with people who are literally paying a million dollars a year to coach with me, where I just have to say, it sounds like you don't really need to focus on that. And they're like, what I'm like, sounds like a lot of noise. Let's get back to the core. What are the levers you're working right now. And I think when you learn to do that, even better, that's how you reach those higher levels of performance. And everyone's kind of shocked that you're progressing through all the noise that's bogging them down. And I think the ultimate test for everyone here is are you getting freaked out too much? That's really the question. It doesn't mean that we can't have emotions that come up and it doesn't mean that a lot of life isn't unsettling. Deals are lost, people cheat, people die, awful things happen in the world. Of course those things affect us. And I think that people pretend that that suffering and that difficulty isn't there. They struggle as well because they're just not real. But I think it's always that question, am I freaking out too much? Is it pulling me away from progress and peace in my life? And I just feel like if you can maintain that peace and progress through the difficulties, you earn your self respect, you earn the ability to be stronger. The next crisis, the next difficulty. It's why when you meet people who've been through a lot in their life, they seem so much more stable in a current crisis because they're like, yeah, I've been through this before, survived it, built out of it. Here I am, wealthy, happy, successful and capable now because I didn't stop in the crisis, I built myself up through the crisis and after the crisis and that self respect and that momentum that they got when everyone else was diminishing themselves and stopping because such an unfair advantage. Everyone thinks you're some kind of unicorn, but the reality is you just handled it better. And I think that that's a big piece. I'll give you one last idea on the positive side, the adaptive approach to dealing with the unexpected. And this is the idea that you can insert your role before the reaction. So stimulus happens. Most of us go right to response. When you have high agency, you know that stimulus happens. And instead of going to response, there's not just a pause there, there's a check against my role. What is my role in this situation? I'll give an example. If you're a mom and your role is I'm a loving mother and your kid does something to wreck your house, right? It's very easy to absolutely freak out on this child. But the best moms have this input where it goes, wait, I'm a loving mom now, let me behave from that versus the fact that I want to kill this person. Okay, so when we check into it same with the CEOs here with your office. You know what? You're not just like everybody else. You play a different role. You gotta be the person who holds the energy and the character of that office. And so you don't get to participate in the trait and the gossip like everybody else does. You're in a different role. Even though you want to gossip, even though you want to talk about the stupid things, even though you want to take the day off, you have a different role. And once you level up your identity in any circumstance now there's a different intention. So my role is, oh, you know what? I'm the CEO here. You know what? Here, I'm the loving husband here, oh, you know what? Here, I'm the best friend here. When we check our role for a second, our reactions tend to be more elevated with intention. You become more conscientious when you're bouncing it against a positive and important role or identity. And so if you find yourself overly reactive, you got to teach yourself about that center. Again, what's my role here? What matters here? Should I engage in this? How would I engage in this if I am a role model? To use another language, I think role model responses is a high demand of people. And I think it's one reason I've gotten so many breakthroughs with my clients. I check them back in. Your role said, hey, you said you loved this woman. You said that you wanted to be a loving husband. And what I'm hearing right now is you're acting from your lower self, not your role.