May 31, 2025 • 60 mins
In this episode of Lifejacked: The Resilience Podcast, I welcome Andy Campbell, an inspiring survivor who has navigated tremendous adversity, including childhood trauma, cancer, and personal loss. Andy reflects on the lessons learned from his mother's battle with cancer, highlighting her resilience as a foundational influence in his life.
He emphasizes the importance of witnessing both triumphs and struggles, which shaped his understanding of resilience. Through his journey, Andy has not only thrived but also aims to empower others with his insights shared in his book, "Overcoming Life's Toughest Setback."
Drawing from his book "Overcoming Life's Toughest Setback," Andy reveals his groundbreaking "15 breakthrough beliefs" that helped him navigate life's darkest moments.At the heart of Andy's philosophy lies the powerful notion that "no one outruns the universe" - a principle that encourages taking personal responsibility while letting go of blame. Through his mother's battle with cancer and his own health challenges, Andy learned that resilience isn't just about surviving; it's about transforming pain into purpose.
The conversation looks deep into the importance of building a supportive community and finding meaning in everyday acts of courage. Andy's unique perspective on finding the "chewy nougat" of opportunity within every challenge offers a fresh take on dealing with life's obstacles.
Ready to transform your own setbacks into comebacks? Tune in to this inspiring episode that proves resilience isn't just about bouncing back - it's about bouncing forward. #resilience #askandycampbell #lifejackedpodcast #TriumphOverTragedy
He emphasizes the importance of witnessing both triumphs and struggles, which shaped his understanding of resilience. Through his journey, Andy has not only thrived but also aims to empower others with his insights shared in his book, "Overcoming Life's Toughest Setback."
Drawing from his book "Overcoming Life's Toughest Setback," Andy reveals his groundbreaking "15 breakthrough beliefs" that helped him navigate life's darkest moments.At the heart of Andy's philosophy lies the powerful notion that "no one outruns the universe" - a principle that encourages taking personal responsibility while letting go of blame. Through his mother's battle with cancer and his own health challenges, Andy learned that resilience isn't just about surviving; it's about transforming pain into purpose.
The conversation looks deep into the importance of building a supportive community and finding meaning in everyday acts of courage. Andy's unique perspective on finding the "chewy nougat" of opportunity within every challenge offers a fresh take on dealing with life's obstacles.
Ready to transform your own setbacks into comebacks? Tune in to this inspiring episode that proves resilience isn't just about bouncing back - it's about bouncing forward. #resilience #askandycampbell #lifejackedpodcast #TriumphOverTragedy
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
What do you do when life throws its darkest storms
at you? When faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges, where do
you find the strength to keep moving forward? Today? On
Life Jack to the Resilience Podcast, we're diving deep into
these questions with an extraordinary individual whose life story reads
(00:21):
like a testament to the power of the human spirit.
My guest is Andy Campbell. He's not just a survivor.
He is a thriver from confronting the trauma of childhood
abuse and bullying, coping with profound personal losses, overcoming stage
four pancreatic cancer, and enduring the heartbreak of losing his
(00:44):
youngest son to suicide. Andy has faced some of life's
grimmest trials, but through it all, he has transformed his
journey into one of hope and resilience. As an inspirational author,
he shares his wisdom in his book Overcoming Life's Toughest
Toughest Setback fifteen breakthrough core beliefs to transform challenges into opportunities.
(01:08):
On this episode, join me Doctor Rowe as we explore
with Andy how his core beliefs have not only guided
him through these formidable challenges, but have empowered countless others
to dance in the rain.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Sometimes life gives us lemons, sometimes it gives us lemonade.
Other Times it gives us something entirely out of left
field that makes us say.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
W t F.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
But no matter what obstacles come, there is most often
a way out on the other side.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
And we are once again victorious.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
My name is doctor Rowe, and you are listening to
my podcast about resilience. Every guest shares a tragedy to
triumph story to give listeners like you the inspiration to
push through every single day. Listen now as my next
guest shares how they were.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
Like jacked.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Hi, Andy, welcome, Thank you so much for me a
guest on my show. How are you, Doctor?
Speaker 3 (02:20):
How are It's great to be here. Thank you for
the invitation.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Yes, yes, I love the fact that you agreed to
be on the show, and I think it's going to
be a great conversation about resilience today. I mean, you
definitely have a few life jacked moments, so you know.
But thank you so much for being vulnerable and being
willing to come on and share your story. And yes,
(02:43):
I believe that it will inspire somebody. So Andy, it's
just start off can you share a bit about that
initial moment when you realize that resilience would be your
key to survival and ultimately your tool for thriving.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
I think it started very early, Honestly. What I didn't
know was how it was going to work out, or
what tools I would use the means by which I
would become resilient. But I had been able to watch
those who came before me, and they seemed like what
(03:26):
now we would call resilient people. They had a lot
of problems and they fought their way through them, and
they struggled. So I would say early on I had
examples of people who were resilient, and probably none more
than my mother when she had her eleven year battle
with cancer. I think she taught me more about how
(03:48):
to live as she in essence died over those eleven years,
right the ups and downs of her breast cancer and
the fight and struggle that she'd been through. So I
think it was probably about where I started to get
an idea that there was there was more to it
than just not, you know, not quitting. Like she had
(04:10):
a determination, a grit, a way of persisting, and I thought,
that's that's what I want you know that's what I need.
And so I think it was probably in my early
twenties when I had to be a eighteen nineteen twenty
right in there where I realized that he was giving
me the example of what we would later call resilience.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Oh I love that. I love that. And it's great
when you have a parent, mother, whether it's mother or father,
you know that can give you that example because it
does really lay the foundation. I really do believe that
I recognize with my own sons how I leave myself
on a day to day basis, and I make sure
that they don't just see the joys and the happy moments.
(04:53):
I also try to make sure that they see me
go through disappointments and sadness and you know, setbacks, and
I kind of talk them through. You know, this is
what I've decided to do in spite of So it's
great that you also had that model as well. Now, yeah,
I want to talk, Yeah, no, go ahead.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
I was just gonna say, yeah, it's I don't know
whether she intended to leave that with me, but there
were highs and there were lows, and so I did
observe and I was able to kind of see when
she thought things were going really well, and then all
of a sudden they fell off the cliff and they
weren't well. I could observe her coming back out of
those so it was a whole rounded view of the good,
(05:37):
the bad, and the ugly, and still left an example
of how to persist.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Wow, that's amazing. So I want to talk about your book,
which is titled Overcoming Life's Toughest Setbacks fifteen Breakthrough Core
Beliefs to transform challenges into Opportunities, and it outlines fifteen
core beliefs as at the in the title. So can
you tell us exactly how you develop these beliefs and
(06:07):
which one that you may have found to be the
most pivotal in transforming your challenges into opportunities.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
So I see when you said when you speak words,
I hear the words, but in my mind I see pictures.
So I guess I'm visual and I would observe or
realize after having gone through something or part of the
(06:39):
way through something, I realized that there were certain kind
of principles that I could visualize and that I could
put into a phrase, and then that phrase would kind
of be like a meta statement. It would represent the
picture that I saw in my mind, and as I
(06:59):
collected those over time, when I would when I would
notice something that I thought would be useful in in surviving,
I would write it down, and over time I collected
you know, fifteen of those, over you know, thirty years
or so forty years, I collected fifteen of them, and
(07:20):
they you know, they just kind of became once I
kind of put them on paper in one place. They
kind of game the the core beliefs, I think, the
one that sets the stage for all the others is
and it's and it's listed as the first one for
a reason, which is no one outruns the universe. And
(07:40):
what it to me, what that ultimately symbolizes, is that
we are responsible for ourselves, our actions, how we deal
with the challenges in life, and that you can't just
pretend you can't ignore the challenges you face. You can't
(08:03):
ignore being responsible for yourself. You can't go around blaming
everyone else. That's not how the universe is designed. So
no One out runs the universe to me, is a
way to say, remember that you can't blame other people
for your problems. You can hold them responsible for their actions,
but you can't blame that you are responsible for how
(08:24):
you respond to that and what you do to work
yourself out of the problem. You know, it wasn't my
responsibility that I was a used sexually as a child,
but it over time I realized that that was affecting
my life in negative ways. That becomes my responsibility. So
I can't just outrun the universe and continue to blame
somebody else for what I'm now aware of. So that
(08:45):
is it's the number one for a reason.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Now that's not true. I truly believe that because I
know that we carry, you know, a lot of things
with us after something happens to us, right, and one
of those things is that we kind of blame and
hold on to grudges and you know, the awful things
that you know happen to us, and we just hold
them and hold them right, and we realize, you know,
(09:10):
after a while, like it can actually do something to
you health wise because you're holding on to it, because
it creates like this tense aura in your body when
you're holding on to grudges and you're holding on to
things that happen to you, and you're right, it's like
you have to free them, you have to free them
from you and not let it hold you know, hold
(09:31):
you down and hold on to you, because if you're
constantly blaming and blaming, and even though it may be
somebody else's fault, I truly you know understand that because
people do do things to us, Like you said, you
went through, you know, childhood abuse, which we'll talk about
in this interview. But we can't continue to be held victim,
right and be trapped by those experiences because they can
(09:52):
really be inhibiting. So I want to talk about now
the child abuse that you experienced. And you know, when
we have various childhood experiences, they can last with us
for a very long time because those are the things
that happened to us first, right, and so those are
(10:12):
the memories that are going to be etched in our
minds for the longest. So how do you feel that
facing those challenges as a child kind of shaped you?
And as far as your perspective on resilience, I would.
Speaker 3 (10:37):
Say that it shaped me, not in the most positive
or optimal way. I think it's one and obviously it's
personal to me, but I think it's one of probably
it is a heinous kind of act really to sexually
abuse a child. There's no consent involved, even though you
(10:59):
know you go through that, and one may constantly question
themselves about, you know, the participation in it, or what
could they have done or should they have done? So,
you know, I've heard about that, and I've experienced some
of that myself. It's but you have no consent. And
I think for me, the way it changed my perspective
(11:20):
on life, I suspect this is true for many people
who have been sexually abused as a child. It ends
your perspective of life, right. It changes your perspective of
your own self worth, of your value, of your ability
to have some control over your life. It gives you
(11:41):
a negative view of the world, a very distrusting a list.
I became very distrusting, very I ended up becoming someone
who catastrophized everything, and I, you know, I think that
was because I was concerned about how could I avoid
a catastrophe, so I would think about everything in catast
traphic terms and then try to work to prevent that
(12:02):
from happening. I think how it affected me and how
it came to be part and the reason why I
talk about it is because I think we are actually
far more children are far more resilient. They shouldn't have
to do though, they shouldn't have to go through it
that that is a bad, bad situation, a terrible experience.
(12:29):
But you know, I learned that we can come back
from those things. We can we can overcome what has
been put upon us. And so the story of resilience
I think there is looking back, is that we can
be resilient. Children are in many ways resilient, and I
(12:52):
think it's it's a matter of over time, we have
to face what that experience or those experiences have done
to us, how we shape how it shaped our lives.
And part of the resilience story. Part of being resilient
is having the discipline, the courage, should not just the
(13:14):
courage and the responsibility to take the actions to deal
with things. Threate therapy, maybe process like em DR you know,
separate yourself from the emotions that those experiences left behind
so that you can properly process them and get that
weight off of our shoulders. Right, the experience will never leave,
(13:37):
but there are ways to remove the emotion from those experiences.
So I think that it is kind of a both
a testament to resilience and a means to being resilient.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
Yes, no, absolutely, and you know, even aside from the
child abuse that you will even deeper, I mean child
sexual abuse that you ex experience and then just facing
serious illnesses and then the loss of a loved one.
Do you feel like that you've had support systems in
(14:12):
your life?
Speaker 3 (14:17):
I have? I have. Do you feel like, oh, yeah, look,
one does not want to walk this journey alone. This
is you know, you don't want to be the guy
who was robbed and beaten and you hope for a
(14:38):
good Samaritan to show up. That's that's a risky proposition.
You need to have, you know, you need to have
some people around. Now. I was unfortunate in the fact
that my mother died. She was kind of the tether
that held my father in place, and after she passed away,
we ended up becoming a strange Now my wife's family
(14:59):
had had both her parents had passed away, so we
really had to raise our children kind of grow up ourselves.
So we kind of became each other support system. Maybe
not the best way to do it, but you do
what you do when you're there. And then we had,
you know, we had a church as a as a community,
(15:19):
and we had through these things we ended up I'd
end up building a community with our family position with
you know, a couple of therapists. You know, when you
don't have a natural like support system, I think, you know,
there are ways that you should make the decision to
build a support system, to reach out and kind of
(15:42):
create your own support system because you do need you
you need people who are not in the emotional attachment
of your of your experiences. So yeah, I think community
is tremendously important, whether you have it or you have
to put the effort into kind of creating your own.
(16:03):
You know, they say, no man is an island. I
think I think you can be an island. I just
don't know that you can survive very long being an island.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
I like that. I like that, Yeah, because you know
a lot of activities. You know, you can kind of
do a loan, right, And some journeys are meant to
take a loan and they're not meant to take in
a group. Some of those journeys I've had myself, but
I've realized, Okay, well I need to drown out all
the noise and I don't necessarily the community. And then
(16:32):
there are other times when I recognize that no, I need,
you know, my human capital. I need the people who
can surround me and lift me up and help me
get through, you know, whatever I'm facing. And I believe
that you have to have the courage to know, right,
when is the time to go at it alone, and
(16:53):
when is the time to call in your troops to
kind of you know, come and support you well.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
And I think one, you know, an example of that
with my son was, Look, there's certain things that have
only you know, it's it's a club you don't want
to be in, and sadly there's too many people in it.
But there's not a lot of people other than those
people who have been associated with or go through it,
who who can have a level of comprehension of the
(17:24):
entirety of the situation, not just the loss of a child,
but how it occurred and what it means to the
rest of the siblings and to the you know, to
my wife and and so in that case, you know,
we did we joined a couple of groups that were
around the topic of parents who had lost children to
suicide and and those that community. Even that kind of
(17:49):
stepping out to get into joining that community was critical
to getting through it. I think also as critical it's
knowing when it's time to move from that community to
a different community, because you know, we don't always want
to get We don't want to always stay in that place.
Like there's a time where we need support and we
(18:10):
need support from people who truly understand what we're going through.
But if you're going to move forward, then you can't
always just stay in that place with that emotion. You
need to you need to have the courage to step
out of that and move to the next step phase
or snack space in the process.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Yeah. Now, I know one thing that you mentioned about
courage is that it's a stepping stone to determination. So
how is embracing courage, I mean, in your opinion, how
do you feel like it's directly influenced your own journey
of resilience.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
One thing that I realized is that courage is I
think a lot of times we hear stories about courage
and there and they're big, you know, like that it
was very courageous, and so at least for me, I
think I thought that courage was about big things. You know,
(19:14):
somebody's on the beach of Normandy and they're running into
a hill of both and it's you know, when you're
in a I came to realize that when you're in
you know, you've had a really bad setback, You're in
a difficult situation. So like the loss of our child,
courage can just be getting out of the bed today, right,
(19:36):
Courage can come in very That is a hugely courageous act.
When everything in your body is telling you that there
is no reason to get out of bed, life has
lost kind of its meaning, and you still do it.
You get out of bed, and you might take a
(19:56):
shower that day, but you got out of bed. That
is a huge dep That is a huge act of courage,
And to me, determination the next step in the process
is just courage. You if you show courage over and
over and over again, people will say that person is
very determined, but what they see is determination. It's really
(20:18):
just really small acts of courage, all in a row,
over and over and over again.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Mm hm.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
So I'm a big believer that we shouldn't limit ourselves,
you know, waiting for that large courageous moment. We're doing
little acts of courage all day long. Right when you
when you're coming through a very difficult experience, and when
you are you know, working your way back from a setback.
Every step forward you take, every small act you take
(20:48):
when everything in you is telling you you don't have
the energy. You don't you know, you're you're in the
state of despair. You don't think you can make it
another day. Making it another day is an act of courage,
and you should celebrate that, even if it's just in
your own head. You should, you know, don't diminish that
small act of courage, because if you do that enough times,
(21:10):
you will realize that you're actually not just courageous. You're
very determined. And if you feel determination enough, that's what
people call perseverance.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
No, that's spectacular. You know. I have to ask you, though,
because I know that the loss of a child is unbearable.
I mean, I couldn't even imagine my three sons, and
you know, the thought of one of them not being here.
You know, I'm sure I would go through every emotion
that you and your wife went through. But what's interesting is,
(21:45):
like you said, you may lay down in the bed
and you may want to pull the covers over your head,
but you've got to get up right. You've got to
And what I admire about you is that you've continue
to have a kate for resilience despite you know what
you and your wife have gone through. So I have
to ask you, you know, yes you have to get up,
(22:06):
but where do you find that strength? You know, that courage? Like,
where do you find that to keep going and to
be able to share your story with others?
Speaker 3 (22:24):
So I was raised in a very religious family, and
I'm certain that I am not the model example that
they had hoped for. But what I learned from a
very early age, and like I said, watching people who
had very difficult lives. My family came from extremely poor background,
(22:45):
very poor and watching them and being raised, you know,
at these people about. You know, I was in church
more before I turned fifteen years old then most people
will go in their lives because it was like you
went to a revival this week, and then you were
in Sunday, and then you had to be in Wednesday,
(23:06):
and when you weren't just doing that, you were back
in revival. Then it was camp me. It was like
it was always something mm hmm. But one thing I
did take away from all that, I do have a
confident and firm belief that we were all created for
a purpose, that we were created of an active love.
(23:30):
I mean by a creator. We were created in an
active love, and that each of our lives is a
thread in the fabric of the universe, and that you know,
if our thread is not there, then there is a
hole in the universe. And I know that may sound
kind of high in the sky, but to me, I
(23:52):
believe that every human being is extremely valuable, and even
though at some moment we may not feel valuable, we
may not feel loved, we may feel in a state
of despair, I believe that we were created to be
and we are important. And so in my places of despair,
(24:13):
and on those days when I thought, you know, is
this all there is? Why am I even doing this?
Why am I still alive? I went back to that
belief that we all are very important and that no
matter what I'm going through or have been through, I
(24:34):
believe there is something more for us in this life
to do. And so if we're here, we should put
our effort into being responsible for ourselves and doing all
we can to better ourselves and put ourselves in a
position to fulfill whatever it is that we're supposed to fulfill.
(24:56):
And it doesn't have to be fulfilling some you know,
you don't have to be you know, team, you don't
have to be president, you don't have to be big
in it, you don't have to be any of those
great things. Our our purpose in life may just be
to be the one that walks down the street and
says hello to somebody and we don't know it, but
they are in a terrible, terrible spot, and maybe the
point of our lives was to keep them from going
(25:19):
down the street and killing themselves. I don't know. You know,
it can be you know, purpose can it can change
over time. But what has seen me through at the
very very very foundational level has been that I have
never lost my belief that every life is important.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
M yeah, yeah, No, I mean every life is important,
and I do believe that is a good way to,
you know, think about things and go through life because
it can be incredibly difficult, incredibly difficult. But if you, yes,
if you think about every single life that you in
(26:00):
counter is important and you give people the respect that
they deserve even when you may not want to.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
But right, I mean, yeah, I think I have come
to believe. I've come to kind of I guess for me,
except that I think part of The challenge with the
resilience is like people can struggle because they think that
(26:28):
the world as a good place with problems. I think
that the world as a very difficult place with moments
of happiness. And so in those days where I could
be happy for a few minutes, or I can walk
outside and look up and the sky is blue, and
the trees are green, and there's a bird singing, and
there's children down the street, Like after losing my son,
(26:52):
I love to hear children playing down the street. I
mean I never I don't think I really paid attention
to it before, you know, But so I have come
to appreciate the moments that are not tracgical, you know.
And so I think it's part of being resilient is,
in my opinion, is facing the reality that life is hard.
(27:16):
It was never designed to be easy. It's not going
and if you've had some easy times, man, be very
very thankful for that, you know. And because we're all
going to hit the wall, we're all going to have
some difficulties. And so I think part is not taking
those those good moments, those minutes or hours of joy
(27:41):
or happiness for granted, and being super thankful for those
because I think I think that helps sustain you through.
You're not as disappointed when the difficult times come. No,
you know, the rainfall just and the unjust. You know,
like we all have these problems or some some type
of problem. And so I think being resilient, it's being
(28:03):
it's also there's an element of it. It's not just
getting through the difficulties, it's being thankful for the for
the times when you have a break.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Yeah, yeah, well I do believe that life isn't it's
it's the ebb and flow, right, It's the ebb and flowing,
ebb and flow. It's the it's the peaks, it's the valleys,
it's the high that's the lows. You just want to
use some simple words and you want to think that
your life should be rainbows and sunshines and smelling the
(28:33):
flowers and all the time. But just like the weather,
I mean, it is not nice and loose skys and
sunny all the time. Sometimes it has there's a thunderstorm,
sometimes there's a tornado in sids the hurricane and hill
storm name it right, So even the weather has its
moments of highs and lows. And so you know, in
(28:55):
our lives. I think we do have to recognize that
we are going to go through trials. But as you said,
you know, with having the courage and the determination and perseverance,
you recognize that you can still get up every single
day and you find those moments, like you said, finding
you know, listening to the children playing outside, that that
(29:15):
can give you some sort of joy inside it that
you never thought would be there before. I mean, that's spectacular,
It just really is. Now. I want to talk about
one of your core beliefs in your book, and that
core belief is every challenge has a chewy nugat center.
(29:38):
That sounds like a Snickers to me, which I love.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
Is I.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Fan, Yes, But you said every challenge has a chewy
nugat center made of opportunity. That's quite unique. I mean
I never thought of it that way, because if you
get in the middle of the Snickers, I mean, it's
back or it's rich, and.
Speaker 3 (30:00):
You gotta work through it. You know, you gotta work
through it.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
And what does that mean for for life? What does
that mean?
Speaker 3 (30:09):
Yeah? Well, so I'll start with I I've never liked
the phrase every cloud has a silver lining, and I
didn't like it because if every cloud had a silver lining,
Why would I ever go like into the dark cloud.
I would just hang out on the outside in the
silver lining. I just have that. But it seems like
(30:31):
to me that it's more it's more real to think
of problems as not having a silver lining, but deep
in the core of that problem, way way down inside,
after you work through all the difficulties, there will be
some some small, you know, nugget, some sweet nougat in
(30:57):
the in the center of that problem that you can
take away from it that will in some way help
you survive the next problem. It will give you some
level of insight. And it's kind of how I came
up with the fifteen core beliefs like those those were
all things that were sitting way inside these problems. That is,
I would, you know, as I would work through them
(31:20):
or survive them, I would observe this, you know, this
little piece of what I thought was wisdom that would
show up. And so that's where that one came from.
That in I really liked milk chocolate candy bars before
I it's a long story. I had to do a
long khin day water only fast during my cancer treatment.
In between cancer treatments, and when I came out of
(31:42):
the fast, I didn't like milk chocolate anymore. Now I
can only eat dark chocolate, and I hated dark chocolate before.
But when I liked, I wrote that down. I liked,
you know, milk chocolate, cookie candy bars. Yeah, but I
think it's Yeah, I think it is. And it's also
to me like a dut check, like it's reaction that
(32:04):
you know, anything positive you can take from a difficult situation,
you're going to have to work to find that goodness
in it. It's there, but it's not just going to
easily show itself. You have to get through the hard
stuff to find any goodness you can take away from
that experience. But I do believe it's there, and if
(32:25):
we put the effort in, we can we can at
least take something away from it other than the scar.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
Yeah. Yeah, now you mentioned you know yet you went
through your cancer treatments, and as I said before, you
went through pancreatic cancer, and I mean, I'm sure it's
your experience with cancer probably brought many physical and emotional challenges.
I'm sure because you know, we never think that we
(32:52):
would end up having to literally fight for our lives.
You know, when we're in this day to day journey
of our you know what it's called our life. So
how did you say mentally strong and focused on your
goals despite such an immense personal battle for your life?
Speaker 3 (33:15):
Well, I think so, I'm okay, I mean diverted for
just a second. You maybe you probably heard the cliche
how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time?
Speaker 1 (33:32):
Right?
Speaker 3 (33:32):
And I use that today with the one okay, So,
so what nobody tells you about that cliche? Okay, nobody
says what that really means, like how do you eat
the elephant? Woman? So I watched I happen to see
this video, a YouTube video, and it was it was
a pack of hyenas had come acong. They come across
(33:56):
the carcass. It was like a day alt. So it's
pretty fresh in their minds, it's pretty fresh and this
but it was a huge bull elephant, right, so for
them this is like this is like a manna from heaven,
like you know, they just stumble up upon this massive
bull elephant who's dead, like like this is wonderful. But
(34:17):
the narrators explaining that the hide, even the mouth, everything
about the elephant is too tough to eat, like, they
can't get through it. So they know on the inside
there's muscle, there's organs, there's all this stuff that they want.
They can't get to it. So they have to start
(34:37):
at the softest place on the elephant, and that, sadly
is the amus, the worst possible place to start, and
they work their way from that really bad place all
the way through the elephant until they can get to
the good stuff. And I thought, well, that's kind of
(34:59):
like a problem, you know when you when you know,
when people say, you know, well, if you're just gonna,
you know, confront it, just eat that elephant one bite
at a time, and so you don't quite You never
told me where I was going to have to start
the process of beating the elephant, right yeah, and you
know right, so I think I like, I just held
that visual in my mind every time I hear that. Now,
(35:19):
I'm like, hey, well, why don't we tell, you know,
tell them where they have to start when you tell
them to eat the elephant one bit time? But I
think it's I think that's important to just realize that
you're you're going to have to start the process maybe
in not the best situation with the best, you know,
(35:43):
the best part of the elephant facing you. But but
we can get through these things, and you just have
to accept that you have to work through the difficult
part to continue on the process.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Yeah, no, for sure, for sure. Now you speak about
the importance of persistence in many of your core beliefs.
So do you think you could share an example where, like,
I mean, from your own life. I mean, of course,
you have the many examples that we've mentioned before of
(36:19):
your life jacked moments that have been you know, severely
like life jacking. But can you like kind of share
an example from your life where perseverance led you to
really like break through.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
The most recent example was in the Aftermathem, my son's suicide,
we my wife and I met with a grief counselor
and she was a absolutely wonderful woman, just a great heart.
(37:03):
She understood our kind of our philosophical background, her father's
a minister, and she just had an ability to help
kind of carry us in that moment. And but when
that time, after several months, six months came, it became
apparent we needed, you know, like she had gotten us
(37:24):
through the initial shock, we needed to do something a
little different. I had heard about this technique called e
m d R, and so I pursued that. Eventually my
wife I pursued that, and I think, you know, when
(37:45):
you start that process, and what happened was the trauma
of finding my son's body and dealing with the aftermath
and the pain of his loss, that kind of pain
will put pressure on everything. It will expose every weakness
in your psyche and emotionally, even physically. And going through
(38:08):
the process of the MDR, to me, was was one
place where persistence, perseverance was necessary because there were every
single session that I did was an opportunity to not
do another session, because one session led to the next,
which led you know, I started out with finding my
(38:31):
son's body, and then that led to dealing with the
years where you know, he had talked about suicide, and
then that led to the cancer treatments, and then that
led to and it led to one thing after us.
So I think I remember the therapist, you know, writing
down the topics for MDR, and it's never good when
they're filling them out on a legal page, legal pad,
(38:51):
and they flipped the page and they keep writing line
by line, and they flipped the page again, and then
they just decided to stop and they're like, you know,
maybe we'll just take care of this. And I didn't
want to. I didn't want to go back. She thanked
me what e MD I was, and how it's going
to work, and how wonderful it's going to be, how
it's going to help me, and I didn't want to
go back and experience any of those things again. I
thought they were all put in a box. I had
(39:12):
them all tucked away, they'd all been dealt with. And
she told me that they had not been dealt with,
and she gave me examples of why they had been
dealt with. And I said, but I don't want to
do this. I'm not going to do this. And she said, look, Indy,
you have one choice. You can either your choices, well
you have two choices, one decision. You can either deal
(39:34):
with this or what would amount to less than twenty
four hours. Let's say there was like twenty one hours.
I think she had like, we'll do twenty one session.
It was supposed to be eight, but she kept turning
the page, and so she said, so in the in
fewer hours than one day, you can work to free
(39:55):
yourself from the emotional response to these memories fewer hours
than one day, or you can live with them for
every moment, for every day of the rest of your life.
And I thought, well, that didn't sound good, so I'll
just take the one day now. The one day was like,
(40:17):
you know, one hour a week for a long time,
but it basically looked and I think that was an
example where perseverance really turned the time for me because
in that process, and that's kind of like that chewy
new gat center inside of a challenge, you know, or
that that opportunity that sits inside of a challenge. It
was my son's suicide that by working to deal with that,
(40:41):
I was able to deal with other things, and by
being by having perseverance to go back each week when
I didn't want to I didn't want to go through
another one. That led me to the place where, because
I could separate the emotion that been separated from the memory,
Doctor Oe, something really strange happened. I was finally able
(41:03):
to forgive people because the emotions tied to the memory
of what people had done to me had been separated
from the memory. And so with just dealing with the memory,
I was actually able to exercise forgiveness, which took that
load off of my shoulders. Now that's completely unexpected, right,
But by showing perseverance, and I don't mean that it's
(41:26):
like not tooting my own horn or something. I'm just
saying like, by showing present example, by showing perseverance, I
actually got something out of the process I never expected.
I ended up removing the emotional attachment and baggage that
I had been carrying around for all these years that
I didn't realize I was carrying around. And when I
did that, the unexpected thing was I was finally able
(41:48):
to forgive people. I forgave my son, I forgave the
people who sexually abused me. Didn't change their responsibility, but
all of a sudden, I was free from the weight
of the anger, the hate, you know, the anxiety, that
all the stuff that comes with those experiences. And so
I would say to me, that was an example where
(42:08):
perseverance actually led to finding that chewy nugad center of
goodness that was in that, that was inside that challenge.
Perseverance is critical. You don't you don't persevere, you can't finish.
And yeah, if you can't finish, what's the point to
finish this point.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
Well, I love that you were able to forgive those people,
because I heard a saying once that forgiveness is the
anecdote to the I think the bad experiences that are
poisoning our lives, right, I mean that, And if you're
able to forgive people, because it really is those experiences
(42:48):
are holding you hostage. But once you're able to separate,
like you said, the experience and then the people, it
really becomes an anecdote like you said, and it's very free.
Speaker 3 (42:57):
It's very very free.
Speaker 1 (42:59):
It is because it is poisoned. It is poisoning our bodies.
I mean down to you know, it could be giving
you you know, stress is you know insight.
Speaker 3 (43:07):
Look, I apologize for and rough, but let me just
tell you I'm absolutely all of those experiences and all
the emotion that I had no idea was still attacked.
I thought I had. I thought it was all gone,
it was all good. I didn't realize how much how
much I was carrying around until it was gone. Right,
It's like, wow, I've been I'm convinced that it contributed
(43:29):
to my pancreatic cancer. You know, do I have a
genetic mutation that makes me more susceptible to that. I
do is that the reason I don't know, for fifty
three years I didn't have pancreatic cancer, but you know,
over time, I just think the build up of those emotions,
the anger toward you know, people that had done things
to me, that my own kind of loathing of how
(43:49):
I was, and you know, like you stack all that
stuff up, and you know, is it surprising that it
shows up in your body in some way? I don't
looking back or not. I think it's probably surprising. It
took fifty three years for something bad to show up.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
And I think it's incredibly heavy, right carrying it some
at times if you're not going to release it through
forgiveness and the release of the pain that you're holding on.
I mean, I feel like when we hold on to it,
like who is it really helping? Because I don't think
it's helping anyone, and it's certainly not helping us we
continue to hold on to it. It can cause like
(44:30):
you said, stress, and it I mean not that you
know for sure whether or not it contributed to your cancer,
but like you said, it may not have helped either,
it didn't help.
Speaker 3 (44:41):
It might have been like, oh, that's the thing. But
I can assure you somewhere in that equation it was unhelpful, right, Yeah,
And I think it is like it kind of goes
back to that no one out runs the universe. The
universe has these principles where I think forgiveness is never
for the person you've forgiven, it's actually, you know, for
yourself to unload that burden of the whatever you're holding,
(45:03):
that animosity, that hatred, Like you're the one unburdening yourself.
That nobody tells you exactly how to do that, which
is what I thought was so interesting about once the
once I was able to let the emotion was able
to unhook itself from me, that I was finally able
to do, you know, experience that. But yeah, I think
it is. Wow, it is so exhausting because what you
(45:25):
really try to do is outrun the principles of the universe.
And that's a hard thing. Like you, the universe is
a big, heavy thing, and so if you're just carrying
around this stuff that the universe is designed so that
you don't carry that, it is it is physically, mentally, spiritually,
emotionally exhausting. And I had no idea until I started
(45:45):
working inadvertently working my way out of it, and then
you kind of get halfway into it and you're like,
you know, maybe I will go back to the next session,
you know, like this is this is this is better
than I thought it would be. And then after you
do that, you're like, man, I wonder if there's any
other bad things I could get rid of, you know,
like you just kind of become encouraged by it because
things become lighter.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
Yeah yeah, oh man, Wow, not have to go to
one more core belief you have in your book, because
this one is huge and it was definitely huge for me.
And that's your belief that compete only with yourself. Compete
(46:29):
only with yourself. For me, that speaks volumes because and
especially with social media, how do you not compete with others?
I mean it encourages comparison all the time. I mean,
how do you maintain a personal you know, laser focus
(46:51):
to prevent these external pressures right that are going to
and potentially impact your journey Because you know, it's like, oh,
I look at my life and I'm thinking, I mean,
of course I do have my doctorate, and that's something
that I wanted to get myself right, But then you
look around and it's like, well, this person is getting one,
and this person's getting one, and now this person is
(47:11):
getting one. I made my timeline on LinkedIn. It's just
full of graduations, which I'm happy, right, But you start
wondering like are we all doing this because everybody else
is doing it, so we feel like that's what we
need to do. Or you go on you know Instagram,
you're like, well, so and so taken a vacation with
their family and Disney and you're.
Speaker 3 (47:29):
Like, wait, and it was perfect. They were all went
to Disney, They had no arguments, the children were happy,
the weather was perfect. They didn't want to get to
do it like everything is perfect with.
Speaker 1 (47:41):
Perfect right, they make meals and everything.
Speaker 3 (47:44):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't see what happens when they
turned that phone off though, right, like they're you know,
they're wailing on each other. Yeah. So I think there's
so many applications to that one, and I want to
be I want to be completely transparent about this. The
core beliefs to me are aspirational. I don't do them
right every day. I don't. I don't follow them like
(48:07):
like a monk would do it. I'm not they represent
to me a means by which I can recenter myself.
And so I work to remember, only compete with yourself
when I find myself starting to think that way or
I have been thinking that way, and I find myself, uh,
(48:27):
you know, questioning myself or you know, thinking lesser of
myself because I'm I'm not where these people are at.
Like I think, there's there's an appropriate place for competition,
you know, and sports obviously an appropriate place for competition.
Business businesses compete and they have to, you know, how
do they measure themselves against other businesses uh in their
(48:51):
industry or similar industries. Those things, Those things make sense.
But when you're dealing with the things that are inside you,
when you're dealing with either pastor experiences, or a health
challenge that you're going through, or the loss of a
loved one, or you're recovering from you know, childhood sexual abuse,
or whatever the situation is, I believe in in those endeavors,
(49:18):
the worst thing we can do is compare ourselves to
someone else. First, we don't know what they're actually going through,
we don't know where they are, We only know what
they present. Or there's a guy I heard on the
radio one time. I think his name was Dennis Brager,
I think, but I heard him this one time, and
and he was telling a story about he had gone
(49:38):
home and he was complaining to his mother about how
all his friends had a better life like that, a
happy family that had all this stuff. And she said, Dennis,
the only people, the only happy people I know are
people I don't know well. And I thought, man, that's
pretty bread, because that's like, the only happy people I
know on social media are people I don't know well
because I look social media and I know them. I'm like,
(50:00):
that's bs. Like you, I saw you twenty minutes before that,
you were yelling at your wife, you were your kids
were running around like you were in shambles, and now
you take a selfie with a happy faith. What the
hell was that? And so I think, you know, I
just worked to remind myself. I do it like every
everyone else does. You look around you and you think, wow,
(50:22):
you know, could I you know? How are they? You know,
even when you go through grief, you might be in
a grief group and you look around and go, how
are they doing so well? And I'm stealing so much pain?
Absolutely the wrong thing to do. All you have to
do is a little bit better at yourself. Don't look
at what somebody else is going through, because you don't
(50:42):
know the setbacks they've had in between. Like they look
good right now, but yesterday they were ten steps backwards
and today they're just two steps forward. You didn't see
how far they slid backwards yesterday. You don't know what's
going to happen to them tomorrow. So I just think
when we're we're working ourselves, but when we're in the
process of coming back from a setback, I don't I
(51:06):
think we can look at people and say, like I've
look at my mother and say I want to be
like her. I want to do that, but I don't
compare myself to what she went through. What she went
through is completely different than what I've gone through. The
circumstances are not the same. So I think aspirationally we
can look at people and say wow, that, and I
would personally like, I hope that by telling my story
(51:26):
there's someone out there who's like, I don't think I
can make it. You know, I'm in despair. I'm not
sure I can make it another day. I would like
them to, you know, hear my story and go, well,
maybe I can't make it. Maybe there is kind of that,
you know, there's somebody who can kind of set an
aspirational target for me that I could make it another day.
And I think that by only comparing yourself to yourself,
(51:48):
you know, compare yourself to yesterday. Are you a little
bit better today than you were yesterday? If you're not,
give yourself some grace just tomorrow, try to get a
little bit better than you are today. And it's a
it is a long race. I think you also have
to remember I used to try to tell my children,
or I did tell my children when they would bring
up how someone else was doing, I would remind them,
(52:11):
you know, we're all different and we're on different tracks.
But sometimes when you think you're behind somebody, it's because
you're about to lap them. Okay, but you're so far
ahead of them, you're about to lap them, but your
view is that they're ahead of you, when really they're
not ahead of you. You know, we're on different tracks, yea,
And so yeah, don't compare yourself, And if you do,
(52:33):
then remember that core belief, compete on it with yourself,
and recenter yourself back to focusing on your journeys.
Speaker 1 (52:41):
Yeah, oh wow, man. So let me ask you, amidst
all the trials and tribulations, what do you feel like
has been the greatest lesson that you've learned within all
of this, And like, how do you apply it to
your daily life so that it remains filled with joy
(53:03):
and purpose?
Speaker 3 (53:11):
I remind myself, do not quit. Do not quit. Your
ancestors had it very difficult and they did not quit.
You people you know, have had it difficult and they
did not quit. You have been through things before, maybe
not as severe as what you're going through right now,
(53:33):
but you did not quit then, and you survived that.
Do not quit now. And so whenever I get into
a place of despair or or down, I work now
to tell myself it's okay, you're just down right now,
but do not quit. My grandmother told me late in
(53:58):
her life that she had six children, and in the
nineteen thirties, you know, I think it was around the
nineteen thirties, maybe early nineteen forties, her six wooman was
born and he died less than a year old. And
she told me that when he took his last breath,
(54:22):
everything in her field division became a great scale it
was just black and white. There was no color. So
if she looked outside, she didn't see green grass, she
saw a shade of gray. She looked at a tree,
the sky, everything was a shade of gray. It was
just black and white or some gray scale image. And
that she was a very religious woman, read her Bible,
(54:45):
prayed every day, and she told me she goes. I
don't know how long it took, but I didn't quit
living even though everything was gray. And then one day
I woke cup and the world had color again. I
could see color in the trees, in the sky, in
(55:06):
the grass, and I knew I had survived. And I
have held on to that as you know, a way
to remind myself, do not quit because even though everything
is grayscale today, everything is you can't see any color
in your life today. There if you, if you stay
(55:27):
long enough, if you stay in the game long enough,
you will wake up one day and there will be color.
And you know, it may not be the whole day
of color. Maybe in the beginning it's still kind of
sort of gray, but there will be flashes of color.
But eventually, you know you'll get back to where the
day is filled with color. So don't quit. That's what
(55:49):
I remind myself, don't quit. Wow.
Speaker 1 (55:52):
Well, it's hard to believe that we are at the
end of this interview. But I have one last question
that of course that I ask all of my guests,
and that is, in your opinion, what is the best
way to build resilience.
Speaker 3 (56:14):
I think it's kind of a combination of steps. One
live like you believe, even if in the moment you don't,
that your life is valuable and that it has purpose,
and that you are that that you are a part
of the universe, that you are that that you are important,
even if you don't believe it, do your best to
live that way until you can believe it. Have courage
(56:40):
and small amounts each day, and set your goal to
be to finish this life in a natural way. Give yourself,
give give the creator the universe, give it time to
(57:00):
change the summation of your life. And so that's what
I think leads to resilience is a belief that we
are unique and special, that we are important, and that
we approach life daily acting out small bits of courage,
and that we work toward finishing the life that we've
(57:22):
been giving in the most honorable way. That we can wow.
Speaker 1 (57:29):
Well, Andy, your story is more than an inspiration, It's
a beacon of hope, showing us all that no matter
how tumultuous the storm, there's always a path forward, illuminating,
illuminated sorry by resilience and belief. Thank you for sharing
your incredible journey with us today on this episode, and
for imparting the wisdom and tools we can all use
(57:51):
to force passive courage and transformation. For our listeners and
viewers who are eager to dive deeper into Andy's journey,
be sure to explore his book, Overcoming Life's Toughest Setbacks.
I have it here on the screen fifteen breakthrough core
beliefs to transform challenges into opportunities. And so lastly, Andy,
(58:12):
before we sign off, could you please let everyone know
where they can connect with you and find more of
your work and purchase a copy of your book.
Speaker 3 (58:22):
Yeah, you can find me at my website ask Andycampbell
dot com. That name comes from when people used to
ask me how it was still alive, or they would
ask friends did they know anybody would survive paying create
a cancer? And they would say, well, ask Dandy Campbell.
He did. So have a website Askandycampbell dot com and
the book. You can find a link at the website
(58:43):
and it's on Amazon. If you search for my name.
I believe it'll be the first search result that pops up.
Speaker 1 (58:52):
Awesome. Any last words of encouragement.
Speaker 3 (58:55):
For the listeners, You are valuable and no matter how
you feel right now, you are valuable, and you know
persevere and finish. Don't quit. Whatever you're going through right now,
do not quit. Life will get better. It may take time,
(59:16):
it may take years. I don't know how long it'll take,
but eventually the world will be filled with color for
you again. So don't quit.
Speaker 1 (59:27):
You heard it, don't quit. The world will be full
of color once again. Andy, Thank you once again for
joining us. May your story continue to touch and transform
lives for everyone everywhere. I want to wish you and
your family nothing but blessings and abundance. Please take care.
Thank you, Andy Campbell. Everyone be sure to join me
(59:50):
next time for more uplifting stories and insights on resilience.
Until then, keep pushing forward, embrace the journey, and remember
that every setback can lead to a greater comeback. Doctor
Rowe signing off. ALRIGHTY, give me just a second and
(01:00:14):
I am
What do you do when life throws its darkest storms
at you? When faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges, where do
you find the strength to keep moving forward? Today? On
Life Jack to the Resilience Podcast, we're diving deep into
these questions with an extraordinary individual whose life story reads
(00:21):
like a testament to the power of the human spirit.
My guest is Andy Campbell. He's not just a survivor.
He is a thriver from confronting the trauma of childhood
abuse and bullying, coping with profound personal losses, overcoming stage
four pancreatic cancer, and enduring the heartbreak of losing his
(00:44):
youngest son to suicide. Andy has faced some of life's
grimmest trials, but through it all, he has transformed his
journey into one of hope and resilience. As an inspirational author,
he shares his wisdom in his book Overcoming Life's Toughest
Toughest Setback fifteen breakthrough core beliefs to transform challenges into opportunities.
(01:08):
On this episode, join me Doctor Rowe as we explore
with Andy how his core beliefs have not only guided
him through these formidable challenges, but have empowered countless others
to dance in the rain.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Sometimes life gives us lemons, sometimes it gives us lemonade.
Other Times it gives us something entirely out of left
field that makes us say.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
W t F.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
But no matter what obstacles come, there is most often
a way out on the other side.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
And we are once again victorious.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
My name is doctor Rowe, and you are listening to
my podcast about resilience. Every guest shares a tragedy to
triumph story to give listeners like you the inspiration to
push through every single day. Listen now as my next
guest shares how they were.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
Like jacked.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Hi, Andy, welcome, Thank you so much for me a
guest on my show. How are you, Doctor?
Speaker 3 (02:20):
How are It's great to be here. Thank you for
the invitation.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Yes, yes, I love the fact that you agreed to
be on the show, and I think it's going to
be a great conversation about resilience today. I mean, you
definitely have a few life jacked moments, so you know.
But thank you so much for being vulnerable and being
willing to come on and share your story. And yes,
(02:43):
I believe that it will inspire somebody. So Andy, it's
just start off can you share a bit about that
initial moment when you realize that resilience would be your
key to survival and ultimately your tool for thriving.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
I think it started very early, Honestly. What I didn't
know was how it was going to work out, or
what tools I would use the means by which I
would become resilient. But I had been able to watch
those who came before me, and they seemed like what
(03:26):
now we would call resilient people. They had a lot
of problems and they fought their way through them, and
they struggled. So I would say early on I had
examples of people who were resilient, and probably none more
than my mother when she had her eleven year battle
with cancer. I think she taught me more about how
(03:48):
to live as she in essence died over those eleven years,
right the ups and downs of her breast cancer and
the fight and struggle that she'd been through. So I
think it was probably about where I started to get
an idea that there was there was more to it
than just not, you know, not quitting. Like she had
(04:10):
a determination, a grit, a way of persisting, and I thought,
that's that's what I want you know that's what I need.
And so I think it was probably in my early
twenties when I had to be a eighteen nineteen twenty
right in there where I realized that he was giving
me the example of what we would later call resilience.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Oh I love that. I love that. And it's great
when you have a parent, mother, whether it's mother or father,
you know that can give you that example because it
does really lay the foundation. I really do believe that
I recognize with my own sons how I leave myself
on a day to day basis, and I make sure
that they don't just see the joys and the happy moments.
(04:53):
I also try to make sure that they see me
go through disappointments and sadness and you know, setbacks, and
I kind of talk them through. You know, this is
what I've decided to do in spite of So it's
great that you also had that model as well. Now, yeah,
I want to talk, Yeah, no, go ahead.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
I was just gonna say, yeah, it's I don't know
whether she intended to leave that with me, but there
were highs and there were lows, and so I did
observe and I was able to kind of see when
she thought things were going really well, and then all
of a sudden they fell off the cliff and they
weren't well. I could observe her coming back out of
those so it was a whole rounded view of the good,
(05:37):
the bad, and the ugly, and still left an example
of how to persist.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Wow, that's amazing. So I want to talk about your book,
which is titled Overcoming Life's Toughest Setbacks fifteen Breakthrough Core
Beliefs to transform challenges into Opportunities, and it outlines fifteen
core beliefs as at the in the title. So can
you tell us exactly how you develop these beliefs and
(06:07):
which one that you may have found to be the
most pivotal in transforming your challenges into opportunities.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
So I see when you said when you speak words,
I hear the words, but in my mind I see pictures.
So I guess I'm visual and I would observe or
realize after having gone through something or part of the
(06:39):
way through something, I realized that there were certain kind
of principles that I could visualize and that I could
put into a phrase, and then that phrase would kind
of be like a meta statement. It would represent the
picture that I saw in my mind, and as I
(06:59):
collected those over time, when I would when I would
notice something that I thought would be useful in in surviving,
I would write it down, and over time I collected
you know, fifteen of those, over you know, thirty years
or so forty years, I collected fifteen of them, and
(07:20):
they you know, they just kind of became once I
kind of put them on paper in one place. They
kind of game the the core beliefs, I think, the
one that sets the stage for all the others is
and it's and it's listed as the first one for
a reason, which is no one outruns the universe. And
(07:40):
what it to me, what that ultimately symbolizes, is that
we are responsible for ourselves, our actions, how we deal
with the challenges in life, and that you can't just
pretend you can't ignore the challenges you face. You can't
(08:03):
ignore being responsible for yourself. You can't go around blaming
everyone else. That's not how the universe is designed. So
no One out runs the universe to me, is a
way to say, remember that you can't blame other people
for your problems. You can hold them responsible for their actions,
but you can't blame that you are responsible for how
(08:24):
you respond to that and what you do to work
yourself out of the problem. You know, it wasn't my
responsibility that I was a used sexually as a child,
but it over time I realized that that was affecting
my life in negative ways. That becomes my responsibility. So
I can't just outrun the universe and continue to blame
somebody else for what I'm now aware of. So that
(08:45):
is it's the number one for a reason.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Now that's not true. I truly believe that because I
know that we carry, you know, a lot of things
with us after something happens to us, right, and one
of those things is that we kind of blame and
hold on to grudges and you know, the awful things
that you know happen to us, and we just hold
them and hold them right, and we realize, you know,
(09:10):
after a while, like it can actually do something to
you health wise because you're holding on to it, because
it creates like this tense aura in your body when
you're holding on to grudges and you're holding on to
things that happen to you, and you're right, it's like
you have to free them, you have to free them
from you and not let it hold you know, hold
(09:31):
you down and hold on to you, because if you're
constantly blaming and blaming, and even though it may be
somebody else's fault, I truly you know understand that because
people do do things to us, Like you said, you
went through, you know, childhood abuse, which we'll talk about
in this interview. But we can't continue to be held victim,
right and be trapped by those experiences because they can
(09:52):
really be inhibiting. So I want to talk about now
the child abuse that you experienced. And you know, when
we have various childhood experiences, they can last with us
for a very long time because those are the things
that happened to us first, right, and so those are
(10:12):
the memories that are going to be etched in our
minds for the longest. So how do you feel that
facing those challenges as a child kind of shaped you?
And as far as your perspective on resilience, I would.
Speaker 3 (10:37):
Say that it shaped me, not in the most positive
or optimal way. I think it's one and obviously it's
personal to me, but I think it's one of probably
it is a heinous kind of act really to sexually
abuse a child. There's no consent involved, even though you
(10:59):
know you go through that, and one may constantly question
themselves about, you know, the participation in it, or what
could they have done or should they have done? So,
you know, I've heard about that, and I've experienced some
of that myself. It's but you have no consent. And
I think for me, the way it changed my perspective
(11:20):
on life, I suspect this is true for many people
who have been sexually abused as a child. It ends
your perspective of life, right. It changes your perspective of
your own self worth, of your value, of your ability
to have some control over your life. It gives you
(11:41):
a negative view of the world, a very distrusting a list.
I became very distrusting, very I ended up becoming someone
who catastrophized everything, and I, you know, I think that
was because I was concerned about how could I avoid
a catastrophe, so I would think about everything in catast
traphic terms and then try to work to prevent that
(12:02):
from happening. I think how it affected me and how
it came to be part and the reason why I
talk about it is because I think we are actually
far more children are far more resilient. They shouldn't have
to do though, they shouldn't have to go through it
that that is a bad, bad situation, a terrible experience.
(12:29):
But you know, I learned that we can come back
from those things. We can we can overcome what has
been put upon us. And so the story of resilience
I think there is looking back, is that we can
be resilient. Children are in many ways resilient, and I
(12:52):
think it's it's a matter of over time, we have
to face what that experience or those experiences have done
to us, how we shape how it shaped our lives.
And part of the resilience story. Part of being resilient
is having the discipline, the courage, should not just the
(13:14):
courage and the responsibility to take the actions to deal
with things. Threate therapy, maybe process like em DR you know,
separate yourself from the emotions that those experiences left behind
so that you can properly process them and get that
weight off of our shoulders. Right, the experience will never leave,
(13:37):
but there are ways to remove the emotion from those experiences.
So I think that it is kind of a both
a testament to resilience and a means to being resilient.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
Yes, no, absolutely, and you know, even aside from the
child abuse that you will even deeper, I mean child
sexual abuse that you ex experience and then just facing
serious illnesses and then the loss of a loved one.
Do you feel like that you've had support systems in
(14:12):
your life?
Speaker 3 (14:17):
I have? I have. Do you feel like, oh, yeah, look,
one does not want to walk this journey alone. This
is you know, you don't want to be the guy
who was robbed and beaten and you hope for a
(14:38):
good Samaritan to show up. That's that's a risky proposition.
You need to have, you know, you need to have
some people around. Now. I was unfortunate in the fact
that my mother died. She was kind of the tether
that held my father in place, and after she passed away,
we ended up becoming a strange Now my wife's family
(14:59):
had had both her parents had passed away, so we
really had to raise our children kind of grow up ourselves.
So we kind of became each other support system. Maybe
not the best way to do it, but you do
what you do when you're there. And then we had,
you know, we had a church as a as a community,
(15:19):
and we had through these things we ended up I'd
end up building a community with our family position with
you know, a couple of therapists. You know, when you
don't have a natural like support system, I think, you know,
there are ways that you should make the decision to
build a support system, to reach out and kind of
(15:42):
create your own support system because you do need you
you need people who are not in the emotional attachment
of your of your experiences. So yeah, I think community
is tremendously important, whether you have it or you have
to put the effort into kind of creating your own.
(16:03):
You know, they say, no man is an island. I
think I think you can be an island. I just
don't know that you can survive very long being an island.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
I like that. I like that, Yeah, because you know
a lot of activities. You know, you can kind of
do a loan, right, And some journeys are meant to
take a loan and they're not meant to take in
a group. Some of those journeys I've had myself, but
I've realized, Okay, well I need to drown out all
the noise and I don't necessarily the community. And then
(16:32):
there are other times when I recognize that no, I need,
you know, my human capital. I need the people who
can surround me and lift me up and help me
get through, you know, whatever I'm facing. And I believe
that you have to have the courage to know, right,
when is the time to go at it alone, and
(16:53):
when is the time to call in your troops to
kind of you know, come and support you well.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
And I think one, you know, an example of that
with my son was, Look, there's certain things that have
only you know, it's it's a club you don't want
to be in, and sadly there's too many people in it.
But there's not a lot of people other than those
people who have been associated with or go through it,
who who can have a level of comprehension of the
(17:24):
entirety of the situation, not just the loss of a child,
but how it occurred and what it means to the
rest of the siblings and to the you know, to
my wife and and so in that case, you know,
we did we joined a couple of groups that were
around the topic of parents who had lost children to
suicide and and those that community. Even that kind of
(17:49):
stepping out to get into joining that community was critical
to getting through it. I think also as critical it's
knowing when it's time to move from that community to
a different community, because you know, we don't always want
to get We don't want to always stay in that place.
Like there's a time where we need support and we
(18:10):
need support from people who truly understand what we're going through.
But if you're going to move forward, then you can't
always just stay in that place with that emotion. You
need to you need to have the courage to step
out of that and move to the next step phase
or snack space in the process.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Yeah. Now, I know one thing that you mentioned about
courage is that it's a stepping stone to determination. So
how is embracing courage, I mean, in your opinion, how
do you feel like it's directly influenced your own journey
of resilience.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
One thing that I realized is that courage is I
think a lot of times we hear stories about courage
and there and they're big, you know, like that it
was very courageous, and so at least for me, I
think I thought that courage was about big things. You know,
(19:14):
somebody's on the beach of Normandy and they're running into
a hill of both and it's you know, when you're
in a I came to realize that when you're in
you know, you've had a really bad setback, You're in
a difficult situation. So like the loss of our child,
courage can just be getting out of the bed today, right,
(19:36):
Courage can come in very That is a hugely courageous act.
When everything in your body is telling you that there
is no reason to get out of bed, life has
lost kind of its meaning, and you still do it.
You get out of bed, and you might take a
(19:56):
shower that day, but you got out of bed. That
is a huge dep That is a huge act of courage,
And to me, determination the next step in the process
is just courage. You if you show courage over and
over and over again, people will say that person is
very determined, but what they see is determination. It's really
(20:18):
just really small acts of courage, all in a row,
over and over and over again.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Mm hm.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
So I'm a big believer that we shouldn't limit ourselves,
you know, waiting for that large courageous moment. We're doing
little acts of courage all day long. Right when you
when you're coming through a very difficult experience, and when
you are you know, working your way back from a setback.
Every step forward you take, every small act you take
(20:48):
when everything in you is telling you you don't have
the energy. You don't you know, you're you're in the
state of despair. You don't think you can make it
another day. Making it another day is an act of courage,
and you should celebrate that, even if it's just in
your own head. You should, you know, don't diminish that
small act of courage, because if you do that enough times,
(21:10):
you will realize that you're actually not just courageous. You're
very determined. And if you feel determination enough, that's what
people call perseverance.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
No, that's spectacular. You know. I have to ask you, though,
because I know that the loss of a child is unbearable.
I mean, I couldn't even imagine my three sons, and
you know, the thought of one of them not being here.
You know, I'm sure I would go through every emotion
that you and your wife went through. But what's interesting is,
(21:45):
like you said, you may lay down in the bed
and you may want to pull the covers over your head,
but you've got to get up right. You've got to
And what I admire about you is that you've continue
to have a kate for resilience despite you know what
you and your wife have gone through. So I have
to ask you, you know, yes you have to get up,
(22:06):
but where do you find that strength? You know, that courage? Like,
where do you find that to keep going and to
be able to share your story with others?
Speaker 3 (22:24):
So I was raised in a very religious family, and
I'm certain that I am not the model example that
they had hoped for. But what I learned from a
very early age, and like I said, watching people who
had very difficult lives. My family came from extremely poor background,
(22:45):
very poor and watching them and being raised, you know,
at these people about. You know, I was in church
more before I turned fifteen years old then most people
will go in their lives because it was like you
went to a revival this week, and then you were
in Sunday, and then you had to be in Wednesday,
(23:06):
and when you weren't just doing that, you were back
in revival. Then it was camp me. It was like
it was always something mm hmm. But one thing I
did take away from all that, I do have a
confident and firm belief that we were all created for
a purpose, that we were created of an active love.
(23:30):
I mean by a creator. We were created in an
active love, and that each of our lives is a
thread in the fabric of the universe, and that you know,
if our thread is not there, then there is a
hole in the universe. And I know that may sound
kind of high in the sky, but to me, I
(23:52):
believe that every human being is extremely valuable, and even
though at some moment we may not feel valuable, we
may not feel loved, we may feel in a state
of despair, I believe that we were created to be
and we are important. And so in my places of despair,
(24:13):
and on those days when I thought, you know, is
this all there is? Why am I even doing this?
Why am I still alive? I went back to that
belief that we all are very important and that no
matter what I'm going through or have been through, I
(24:34):
believe there is something more for us in this life
to do. And so if we're here, we should put
our effort into being responsible for ourselves and doing all
we can to better ourselves and put ourselves in a
position to fulfill whatever it is that we're supposed to fulfill.
(24:56):
And it doesn't have to be fulfilling some you know,
you don't have to be you know, team, you don't
have to be president, you don't have to be big
in it, you don't have to be any of those
great things. Our our purpose in life may just be
to be the one that walks down the street and
says hello to somebody and we don't know it, but
they are in a terrible, terrible spot, and maybe the
point of our lives was to keep them from going
(25:19):
down the street and killing themselves. I don't know. You know,
it can be you know, purpose can it can change
over time. But what has seen me through at the
very very very foundational level has been that I have
never lost my belief that every life is important.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
M yeah, yeah, No, I mean every life is important,
and I do believe that is a good way to,
you know, think about things and go through life because
it can be incredibly difficult, incredibly difficult. But if you, yes,
if you think about every single life that you in
(26:00):
counter is important and you give people the respect that
they deserve even when you may not want to.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
But right, I mean, yeah, I think I have come
to believe. I've come to kind of I guess for me,
except that I think part of The challenge with the
resilience is like people can struggle because they think that
(26:28):
the world as a good place with problems. I think
that the world as a very difficult place with moments
of happiness. And so in those days where I could
be happy for a few minutes, or I can walk
outside and look up and the sky is blue, and
the trees are green, and there's a bird singing, and
there's children down the street, Like after losing my son,
(26:52):
I love to hear children playing down the street. I
mean I never I don't think I really paid attention
to it before, you know, But so I have come
to appreciate the moments that are not tracgical, you know.
And so I think it's part of being resilient is,
in my opinion, is facing the reality that life is hard.
(27:16):
It was never designed to be easy. It's not going
and if you've had some easy times, man, be very
very thankful for that, you know. And because we're all
going to hit the wall, we're all going to have
some difficulties. And so I think part is not taking
those those good moments, those minutes or hours of joy
(27:41):
or happiness for granted, and being super thankful for those
because I think I think that helps sustain you through.
You're not as disappointed when the difficult times come. No,
you know, the rainfall just and the unjust. You know,
like we all have these problems or some some type
of problem. And so I think being resilient, it's being
(28:03):
it's also there's an element of it. It's not just
getting through the difficulties, it's being thankful for the for
the times when you have a break.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Yeah, yeah, well I do believe that life isn't it's
it's the ebb and flow, right, It's the ebb and flowing,
ebb and flow. It's the it's the peaks, it's the valleys,
it's the high that's the lows. You just want to
use some simple words and you want to think that
your life should be rainbows and sunshines and smelling the
(28:33):
flowers and all the time. But just like the weather,
I mean, it is not nice and loose skys and
sunny all the time. Sometimes it has there's a thunderstorm,
sometimes there's a tornado in sids the hurricane and hill
storm name it right, So even the weather has its
moments of highs and lows. And so you know, in
(28:55):
our lives. I think we do have to recognize that
we are going to go through trials. But as you said,
you know, with having the courage and the determination and perseverance,
you recognize that you can still get up every single
day and you find those moments, like you said, finding
you know, listening to the children playing outside, that that
(29:15):
can give you some sort of joy inside it that
you never thought would be there before. I mean, that's spectacular,
It just really is. Now. I want to talk about
one of your core beliefs in your book, and that
core belief is every challenge has a chewy nugat center.
(29:38):
That sounds like a Snickers to me, which I love.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
Is I.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Fan, Yes, But you said every challenge has a chewy
nugat center made of opportunity. That's quite unique. I mean
I never thought of it that way, because if you
get in the middle of the Snickers, I mean, it's
back or it's rich, and.
Speaker 3 (30:00):
You gotta work through it. You know, you gotta work
through it.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
And what does that mean for for life? What does
that mean?
Speaker 3 (30:09):
Yeah? Well, so I'll start with I I've never liked
the phrase every cloud has a silver lining, and I
didn't like it because if every cloud had a silver lining,
Why would I ever go like into the dark cloud.
I would just hang out on the outside in the
silver lining. I just have that. But it seems like
(30:31):
to me that it's more it's more real to think
of problems as not having a silver lining, but deep
in the core of that problem, way way down inside,
after you work through all the difficulties, there will be
some some small, you know, nugget, some sweet nougat in
(30:57):
the in the center of that problem that you can
take away from it that will in some way help
you survive the next problem. It will give you some
level of insight. And it's kind of how I came
up with the fifteen core beliefs like those those were
all things that were sitting way inside these problems. That is,
I would, you know, as I would work through them
(31:20):
or survive them, I would observe this, you know, this
little piece of what I thought was wisdom that would
show up. And so that's where that one came from.
That in I really liked milk chocolate candy bars before
I it's a long story. I had to do a
long khin day water only fast during my cancer treatment.
In between cancer treatments, and when I came out of
(31:42):
the fast, I didn't like milk chocolate anymore. Now I
can only eat dark chocolate, and I hated dark chocolate before.
But when I liked, I wrote that down. I liked,
you know, milk chocolate, cookie candy bars. Yeah, but I
think it's Yeah, I think it is. And it's also
to me like a dut check, like it's reaction that
(32:04):
you know, anything positive you can take from a difficult situation,
you're going to have to work to find that goodness
in it. It's there, but it's not just going to
easily show itself. You have to get through the hard
stuff to find any goodness you can take away from
that experience. But I do believe it's there, and if
(32:25):
we put the effort in, we can we can at
least take something away from it other than the scar.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
Yeah. Yeah, now you mentioned you know yet you went
through your cancer treatments, and as I said before, you
went through pancreatic cancer, and I mean, I'm sure it's
your experience with cancer probably brought many physical and emotional challenges.
I'm sure because you know, we never think that we
(32:52):
would end up having to literally fight for our lives.
You know, when we're in this day to day journey
of our you know what it's called our life. So
how did you say mentally strong and focused on your
goals despite such an immense personal battle for your life?
Speaker 3 (33:15):
Well, I think so, I'm okay, I mean diverted for
just a second. You maybe you probably heard the cliche
how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time?
Speaker 1 (33:32):
Right?
Speaker 3 (33:32):
And I use that today with the one okay, So,
so what nobody tells you about that cliche? Okay, nobody
says what that really means, like how do you eat
the elephant? Woman? So I watched I happen to see
this video, a YouTube video, and it was it was
a pack of hyenas had come acong. They come across
(33:56):
the carcass. It was like a day alt. So it's
pretty fresh in their minds, it's pretty fresh and this
but it was a huge bull elephant, right, so for
them this is like this is like a manna from heaven,
like you know, they just stumble up upon this massive
bull elephant who's dead, like like this is wonderful. But
(34:17):
the narrators explaining that the hide, even the mouth, everything
about the elephant is too tough to eat, like, they
can't get through it. So they know on the inside
there's muscle, there's organs, there's all this stuff that they want.
They can't get to it. So they have to start
(34:37):
at the softest place on the elephant, and that, sadly
is the amus, the worst possible place to start, and
they work their way from that really bad place all
the way through the elephant until they can get to
the good stuff. And I thought, well, that's kind of
(34:59):
like a problem, you know when you when you know,
when people say, you know, well, if you're just gonna,
you know, confront it, just eat that elephant one bite
at a time, and so you don't quite You never
told me where I was going to have to start
the process of beating the elephant, right yeah, and you
know right, so I think I like, I just held
that visual in my mind every time I hear that. Now,
(35:19):
I'm like, hey, well, why don't we tell, you know,
tell them where they have to start when you tell
them to eat the elephant one bit time? But I
think it's I think that's important to just realize that
you're you're going to have to start the process maybe
in not the best situation with the best, you know,
(35:43):
the best part of the elephant facing you. But but
we can get through these things, and you just have
to accept that you have to work through the difficult
part to continue on the process.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Yeah, no, for sure, for sure. Now you speak about
the importance of persistence in many of your core beliefs.
So do you think you could share an example where, like,
I mean, from your own life. I mean, of course,
you have the many examples that we've mentioned before of
(36:19):
your life jacked moments that have been you know, severely
like life jacking. But can you like kind of share
an example from your life where perseverance led you to
really like break through.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
The most recent example was in the Aftermathem, my son's suicide,
we my wife and I met with a grief counselor
and she was a absolutely wonderful woman, just a great heart.
(37:03):
She understood our kind of our philosophical background, her father's
a minister, and she just had an ability to help
kind of carry us in that moment. And but when
that time, after several months, six months came, it became
apparent we needed, you know, like she had gotten us
(37:24):
through the initial shock, we needed to do something a
little different. I had heard about this technique called e
m d R, and so I pursued that. Eventually my
wife I pursued that, and I think, you know, when
(37:45):
you start that process, and what happened was the trauma
of finding my son's body and dealing with the aftermath
and the pain of his loss, that kind of pain
will put pressure on everything. It will expose every weakness
in your psyche and emotionally, even physically. And going through
(38:08):
the process of the MDR, to me, was was one
place where persistence, perseverance was necessary because there were every
single session that I did was an opportunity to not
do another session, because one session led to the next,
which led you know, I started out with finding my
(38:31):
son's body, and then that led to dealing with the
years where you know, he had talked about suicide, and
then that led to the cancer treatments, and then that
led to and it led to one thing after us.
So I think I remember the therapist, you know, writing
down the topics for MDR, and it's never good when
they're filling them out on a legal page, legal pad,
(38:51):
and they flipped the page and they keep writing line
by line, and they flipped the page again, and then
they just decided to stop and they're like, you know,
maybe we'll just take care of this. And I didn't
want to. I didn't want to go back. She thanked
me what e MD I was, and how it's going
to work, and how wonderful it's going to be, how
it's going to help me, and I didn't want to
go back and experience any of those things again. I
thought they were all put in a box. I had
(39:12):
them all tucked away, they'd all been dealt with. And
she told me that they had not been dealt with,
and she gave me examples of why they had been
dealt with. And I said, but I don't want to
do this. I'm not going to do this. And she said, look, Indy,
you have one choice. You can either your choices, well
you have two choices, one decision. You can either deal
(39:34):
with this or what would amount to less than twenty
four hours. Let's say there was like twenty one hours.
I think she had like, we'll do twenty one session.
It was supposed to be eight, but she kept turning
the page, and so she said, so in the in
fewer hours than one day, you can work to free
(39:55):
yourself from the emotional response to these memories fewer hours
than one day, or you can live with them for
every moment, for every day of the rest of your life.
And I thought, well, that didn't sound good, so I'll
just take the one day now. The one day was like,
(40:17):
you know, one hour a week for a long time,
but it basically looked and I think that was an
example where perseverance really turned the time for me because
in that process, and that's kind of like that chewy
new gat center inside of a challenge, you know, or
that that opportunity that sits inside of a challenge. It
was my son's suicide that by working to deal with that,
(40:41):
I was able to deal with other things, and by
being by having perseverance to go back each week when
I didn't want to I didn't want to go through
another one. That led me to the place where, because
I could separate the emotion that been separated from the memory,
Doctor Oe, something really strange happened. I was finally able
(41:03):
to forgive people because the emotions tied to the memory
of what people had done to me had been separated
from the memory. And so with just dealing with the memory,
I was actually able to exercise forgiveness, which took that
load off of my shoulders. Now that's completely unexpected, right,
But by showing perseverance, and I don't mean that it's
(41:26):
like not tooting my own horn or something. I'm just
saying like, by showing present example, by showing perseverance, I
actually got something out of the process I never expected.
I ended up removing the emotional attachment and baggage that
I had been carrying around for all these years that
I didn't realize I was carrying around. And when I
did that, the unexpected thing was I was finally able
(41:48):
to forgive people. I forgave my son, I forgave the
people who sexually abused me. Didn't change their responsibility, but
all of a sudden, I was free from the weight
of the anger, the hate, you know, the anxiety, that
all the stuff that comes with those experiences. And so
I would say to me, that was an example where
(42:08):
perseverance actually led to finding that chewy nugad center of
goodness that was in that, that was inside that challenge.
Perseverance is critical. You don't you don't persevere, you can't finish.
And yeah, if you can't finish, what's the point to
finish this point.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
Well, I love that you were able to forgive those people,
because I heard a saying once that forgiveness is the
anecdote to the I think the bad experiences that are
poisoning our lives, right, I mean that, And if you're
able to forgive people, because it really is those experiences
(42:48):
are holding you hostage. But once you're able to separate,
like you said, the experience and then the people, it
really becomes an anecdote like you said, and it's very free.
Speaker 3 (42:57):
It's very very free.
Speaker 1 (42:59):
It is because it is poisoned. It is poisoning our bodies.
I mean down to you know, it could be giving
you you know, stress is you know insight.
Speaker 3 (43:07):
Look, I apologize for and rough, but let me just
tell you I'm absolutely all of those experiences and all
the emotion that I had no idea was still attacked.
I thought I had. I thought it was all gone,
it was all good. I didn't realize how much how
much I was carrying around until it was gone. Right,
It's like, wow, I've been I'm convinced that it contributed
(43:29):
to my pancreatic cancer. You know, do I have a
genetic mutation that makes me more susceptible to that. I
do is that the reason I don't know, for fifty
three years I didn't have pancreatic cancer, but you know,
over time, I just think the build up of those emotions,
the anger toward you know, people that had done things
to me, that my own kind of loathing of how
(43:49):
I was, and you know, like you stack all that
stuff up, and you know, is it surprising that it
shows up in your body in some way? I don't
looking back or not. I think it's probably surprising. It
took fifty three years for something bad to show up.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
And I think it's incredibly heavy, right carrying it some
at times if you're not going to release it through
forgiveness and the release of the pain that you're holding on.
I mean, I feel like when we hold on to it,
like who is it really helping? Because I don't think
it's helping anyone, and it's certainly not helping us we
continue to hold on to it. It can cause like
(44:30):
you said, stress, and it I mean not that you
know for sure whether or not it contributed to your cancer,
but like you said, it may not have helped either,
it didn't help.
Speaker 3 (44:41):
It might have been like, oh, that's the thing. But
I can assure you somewhere in that equation it was unhelpful, right, Yeah,
And I think it is like it kind of goes
back to that no one out runs the universe. The
universe has these principles where I think forgiveness is never
for the person you've forgiven, it's actually, you know, for
yourself to unload that burden of the whatever you're holding,
(45:03):
that animosity, that hatred, Like you're the one unburdening yourself.
That nobody tells you exactly how to do that, which
is what I thought was so interesting about once the
once I was able to let the emotion was able
to unhook itself from me, that I was finally able
to do, you know, experience that. But yeah, I think
it is. Wow, it is so exhausting because what you
(45:25):
really try to do is outrun the principles of the universe.
And that's a hard thing. Like you, the universe is
a big, heavy thing, and so if you're just carrying
around this stuff that the universe is designed so that
you don't carry that, it is it is physically, mentally, spiritually,
emotionally exhausting. And I had no idea until I started
(45:45):
working inadvertently working my way out of it, and then
you kind of get halfway into it and you're like,
you know, maybe I will go back to the next session,
you know, like this is this is this is better
than I thought it would be. And then after you
do that, you're like, man, I wonder if there's any
other bad things I could get rid of, you know,
like you just kind of become encouraged by it because
things become lighter.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
Yeah yeah, oh man, Wow, not have to go to
one more core belief you have in your book, because
this one is huge and it was definitely huge for me.
And that's your belief that compete only with yourself. Compete
(46:29):
only with yourself. For me, that speaks volumes because and
especially with social media, how do you not compete with others?
I mean it encourages comparison all the time. I mean,
how do you maintain a personal you know, laser focus
(46:51):
to prevent these external pressures right that are going to
and potentially impact your journey Because you know, it's like, oh,
I look at my life and I'm thinking, I mean,
of course I do have my doctorate, and that's something
that I wanted to get myself right, But then you
look around and it's like, well, this person is getting one,
and this person's getting one, and now this person is
(47:11):
getting one. I made my timeline on LinkedIn. It's just
full of graduations, which I'm happy, right, But you start
wondering like are we all doing this because everybody else
is doing it, so we feel like that's what we
need to do. Or you go on you know Instagram,
you're like, well, so and so taken a vacation with
their family and Disney and you're.
Speaker 3 (47:29):
Like, wait, and it was perfect. They were all went
to Disney, They had no arguments, the children were happy,
the weather was perfect. They didn't want to get to
do it like everything is perfect with.
Speaker 1 (47:41):
Perfect right, they make meals and everything.
Speaker 3 (47:44):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't see what happens when they
turned that phone off though, right, like they're you know,
they're wailing on each other. Yeah. So I think there's
so many applications to that one, and I want to
be I want to be completely transparent about this. The
core beliefs to me are aspirational. I don't do them
right every day. I don't. I don't follow them like
(48:07):
like a monk would do it. I'm not they represent
to me a means by which I can recenter myself.
And so I work to remember, only compete with yourself
when I find myself starting to think that way or
I have been thinking that way, and I find myself, uh,
(48:27):
you know, questioning myself or you know, thinking lesser of
myself because I'm I'm not where these people are at.
Like I think, there's there's an appropriate place for competition,
you know, and sports obviously an appropriate place for competition.
Business businesses compete and they have to, you know, how
do they measure themselves against other businesses uh in their
(48:51):
industry or similar industries. Those things, Those things make sense.
But when you're dealing with the things that are inside you,
when you're dealing with either pastor experiences, or a health
challenge that you're going through, or the loss of a
loved one, or you're recovering from you know, childhood sexual abuse,
or whatever the situation is, I believe in in those endeavors,
(49:18):
the worst thing we can do is compare ourselves to
someone else. First, we don't know what they're actually going through,
we don't know where they are, We only know what
they present. Or there's a guy I heard on the
radio one time. I think his name was Dennis Brager,
I think, but I heard him this one time, and
and he was telling a story about he had gone
(49:38):
home and he was complaining to his mother about how
all his friends had a better life like that, a
happy family that had all this stuff. And she said, Dennis,
the only people, the only happy people I know are
people I don't know well. And I thought, man, that's
pretty bread, because that's like, the only happy people I
know on social media are people I don't know well
because I look social media and I know them. I'm like,
(50:00):
that's bs. Like you, I saw you twenty minutes before that,
you were yelling at your wife, you were your kids
were running around like you were in shambles, and now
you take a selfie with a happy faith. What the
hell was that? And so I think, you know, I
just worked to remind myself. I do it like every
everyone else does. You look around you and you think, wow,
(50:22):
you know, could I you know? How are they? You know,
even when you go through grief, you might be in
a grief group and you look around and go, how
are they doing so well? And I'm stealing so much pain?
Absolutely the wrong thing to do. All you have to
do is a little bit better at yourself. Don't look
at what somebody else is going through, because you don't
(50:42):
know the setbacks they've had in between. Like they look
good right now, but yesterday they were ten steps backwards
and today they're just two steps forward. You didn't see
how far they slid backwards yesterday. You don't know what's
going to happen to them tomorrow. So I just think
when we're we're working ourselves, but when we're in the
process of coming back from a setback, I don't I
(51:06):
think we can look at people and say, like I've
look at my mother and say I want to be
like her. I want to do that, but I don't
compare myself to what she went through. What she went
through is completely different than what I've gone through. The
circumstances are not the same. So I think aspirationally we
can look at people and say wow, that, and I
would personally like, I hope that by telling my story
(51:26):
there's someone out there who's like, I don't think I
can make it. You know, I'm in despair. I'm not
sure I can make it another day. I would like
them to, you know, hear my story and go, well,
maybe I can't make it. Maybe there is kind of that,
you know, there's somebody who can kind of set an
aspirational target for me that I could make it another day.
And I think that by only comparing yourself to yourself,
(51:48):
you know, compare yourself to yesterday. Are you a little
bit better today than you were yesterday? If you're not,
give yourself some grace just tomorrow, try to get a
little bit better than you are today. And it's a
it is a long race. I think you also have
to remember I used to try to tell my children,
or I did tell my children when they would bring
up how someone else was doing, I would remind them,
(52:11):
you know, we're all different and we're on different tracks.
But sometimes when you think you're behind somebody, it's because
you're about to lap them. Okay, but you're so far
ahead of them, you're about to lap them, but your
view is that they're ahead of you, when really they're
not ahead of you. You know, we're on different tracks, yea,
And so yeah, don't compare yourself, And if you do,
(52:33):
then remember that core belief, compete on it with yourself,
and recenter yourself back to focusing on your journeys.
Speaker 1 (52:41):
Yeah, oh wow, man. So let me ask you, amidst
all the trials and tribulations, what do you feel like
has been the greatest lesson that you've learned within all
of this, And like, how do you apply it to
your daily life so that it remains filled with joy
(53:03):
and purpose?
Speaker 3 (53:11):
I remind myself, do not quit. Do not quit. Your
ancestors had it very difficult and they did not quit.
You people you know, have had it difficult and they
did not quit. You have been through things before, maybe
not as severe as what you're going through right now,
(53:33):
but you did not quit then, and you survived that.
Do not quit now. And so whenever I get into
a place of despair or or down, I work now
to tell myself it's okay, you're just down right now,
but do not quit. My grandmother told me late in
(53:58):
her life that she had six children, and in the
nineteen thirties, you know, I think it was around the
nineteen thirties, maybe early nineteen forties, her six wooman was
born and he died less than a year old. And
she told me that when he took his last breath,
(54:22):
everything in her field division became a great scale it
was just black and white. There was no color. So
if she looked outside, she didn't see green grass, she
saw a shade of gray. She looked at a tree,
the sky, everything was a shade of gray. It was
just black and white or some gray scale image. And
that she was a very religious woman, read her Bible,
(54:45):
prayed every day, and she told me she goes. I
don't know how long it took, but I didn't quit
living even though everything was gray. And then one day
I woke cup and the world had color again. I
could see color in the trees, in the sky, in
(55:06):
the grass, and I knew I had survived. And I
have held on to that as you know, a way
to remind myself, do not quit because even though everything
is grayscale today, everything is you can't see any color
in your life today. There if you, if you stay
(55:27):
long enough, if you stay in the game long enough,
you will wake up one day and there will be color.
And you know, it may not be the whole day
of color. Maybe in the beginning it's still kind of
sort of gray, but there will be flashes of color.
But eventually, you know you'll get back to where the
day is filled with color. So don't quit. That's what
(55:49):
I remind myself, don't quit. Wow.
Speaker 1 (55:52):
Well, it's hard to believe that we are at the
end of this interview. But I have one last question
that of course that I ask all of my guests,
and that is, in your opinion, what is the best
way to build resilience.
Speaker 3 (56:14):
I think it's kind of a combination of steps. One
live like you believe, even if in the moment you don't,
that your life is valuable and that it has purpose,
and that you are that that you are a part
of the universe, that you are that that you are important,
even if you don't believe it, do your best to
live that way until you can believe it. Have courage
(56:40):
and small amounts each day, and set your goal to
be to finish this life in a natural way. Give yourself,
give give the creator the universe, give it time to
(57:00):
change the summation of your life. And so that's what
I think leads to resilience is a belief that we
are unique and special, that we are important, and that
we approach life daily acting out small bits of courage,
and that we work toward finishing the life that we've
(57:22):
been giving in the most honorable way. That we can wow.
Speaker 1 (57:29):
Well, Andy, your story is more than an inspiration, It's
a beacon of hope, showing us all that no matter
how tumultuous the storm, there's always a path forward, illuminating,
illuminated sorry by resilience and belief. Thank you for sharing
your incredible journey with us today on this episode, and
for imparting the wisdom and tools we can all use
(57:51):
to force passive courage and transformation. For our listeners and
viewers who are eager to dive deeper into Andy's journey,
be sure to explore his book, Overcoming Life's Toughest Setbacks.
I have it here on the screen fifteen breakthrough core
beliefs to transform challenges into opportunities. And so lastly, Andy,
(58:12):
before we sign off, could you please let everyone know
where they can connect with you and find more of
your work and purchase a copy of your book.
Speaker 3 (58:22):
Yeah, you can find me at my website ask Andycampbell
dot com. That name comes from when people used to
ask me how it was still alive, or they would
ask friends did they know anybody would survive paying create
a cancer? And they would say, well, ask Dandy Campbell.
He did. So have a website Askandycampbell dot com and
the book. You can find a link at the website
(58:43):
and it's on Amazon. If you search for my name.
I believe it'll be the first search result that pops up.
Speaker 1 (58:52):
Awesome. Any last words of encouragement.
Speaker 3 (58:55):
For the listeners, You are valuable and no matter how
you feel right now, you are valuable, and you know
persevere and finish. Don't quit. Whatever you're going through right now,
do not quit. Life will get better. It may take time,
(59:16):
it may take years. I don't know how long it'll take,
but eventually the world will be filled with color for
you again. So don't quit.
Speaker 1 (59:27):
You heard it, don't quit. The world will be full
of color once again. Andy, Thank you once again for
joining us. May your story continue to touch and transform
lives for everyone everywhere. I want to wish you and
your family nothing but blessings and abundance. Please take care.
Thank you, Andy Campbell. Everyone be sure to join me
(59:50):
next time for more uplifting stories and insights on resilience.
Until then, keep pushing forward, embrace the journey, and remember
that every setback can lead to a greater comeback. Doctor
Rowe signing off. ALRIGHTY, give me just a second and
(01:00:14):
I am
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