April 15, 2025 • 10 mins
The Unspoken Theme — Love
In this episode, I share my personal takeaway from the recent Resiliency and Leadership Workshop featuring Nick Lavery and Rebecca Rouse. While the workshop touched on grit, growth, and emotional strength, the underlying thread I walked away with was love—love for your fellow man, and love for yourself. It’s a theme that seemed to quietly bind every message, every challenge, and every triumph shared. Love, in all its forms, stretches across fear, happiness, and even anger. Let’s talk about how this unspoken theme changed the way I see leadership, resilience, and human connection.
In this episode, I share my personal takeaway from the recent Resiliency and Leadership Workshop featuring Nick Lavery and Rebecca Rouse. While the workshop touched on grit, growth, and emotional strength, the underlying thread I walked away with was love—love for your fellow man, and love for yourself. It’s a theme that seemed to quietly bind every message, every challenge, and every triumph shared. Love, in all its forms, stretches across fear, happiness, and even anger. Let’s talk about how this unspoken theme changed the way I see leadership, resilience, and human connection.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey guys, welcome to episode nine of the Intrapid Golden Podcast.
Today we're going to talk about the Resiliency and Leadership
course I attended at the Bergen County Police Academy in Mahwa,
New Jersey. It was put on by the REFF Responders Crew.
They're out there helping and trying to support first responders
(00:22):
and veterans. Suicide is a massive, massive problem in our community.
We're losing way too many guys and girls to suicide.
So they're trying to help with that. So anything they
could do kind of try to help them as much
as I can. So this was a little like workshop
(00:43):
course put on. Nick Lavery was a guest speaker, and
so was Rebecca Rouse. Also, two guys from the rep
for Responders Crew talked about their kind of their careers
and things they do. So Nick Lavery was the guest
speaker number one. He gave a really great speech about
his stuff and what he does and what he's gone through.
(01:06):
He's a Special Forces Green Beret, he is an amputee
and he's still active in the army. It's kind of
an amazing story if you ever have a chance to
listen to it, Whether it's the Sean Ryan podcast or
one of the other podcasts he's probably been on and
hear a story, or if you can meet him and
go go see him.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
In real life.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
It's it's extraordinary. Man, what an individual he is. It
like tough as nails, loud individual. He's from Boston. I
can't really blame for that, but you know, it is
what it is. But it was an amazing speech he gave,
talked about things he'd had, some really good like answers
(01:50):
to the question and answer section of the day. One
of the ones that he talked about was love. I
think love was like the overarching thing of the day.
I think it was like love was the strongest emotion.
And I don't think I don't necessarily think love is
an emotion. I thought more of like love being encompassing
(02:10):
of all the emotions.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Right, So like.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
Love, we have fear, we have anxiety, we have happiness, joy,
all of that is encompassed in love, right, Like when
we're falling in love, when we're you know, falling out
of love and everything like that. So like in a
room full of dudes, it's like real hard to talk
about love, and like tactical dudes and whatever else you
(02:35):
want to be and all this and we're hardcore cops
and first responder veterans community, and that's kind of what
he you know, he was saying. And it's like love
is probably what drives the majority of us to do
what we do, right. The love for your fellow man
or you know, whatever it is is what drives you,
(02:56):
like you want to help people, you want to you know,
things better in the community.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
That's all love, right.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
So, like you know, when you're in a position like
love is what drives you to protect what kind of
lay yourself on the line for your you know, the
man to the left and the right of you, when
you're in the Marine Corps when it like me, right,
that's what we're doing and it's all out of love, right,
it's love for each other.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
It's it's crazy, but that's like what it is. It's love, right.
So I think kind of the.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Overarching like what I'm saying overarching theme is like love
through the whole day. Man, you gotta love yourself. Like
these guys are talking about depression and gain counseling and
like drinking and all these problems go back to like
they weren't loving themselves or like in my case, like
I definitely wasn't loving myself. I did not do the
right thing by myself. I was I didn't like me,
(03:53):
I didn't like this or that, So I drank to
numb those things away.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
And that's not love.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
That is pure hate or whatever distaste, whatever you want
to say. I hate a strong word as well, but
love it's kind of what got me out of that, Right.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
I got out of that because I love myself. I
love the situation.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
I mean, I love what I get to do every day, right,
I love to help people. So you know, yeah, there's
some things that happened in my life, the things that
are bad. You know, I've found love in those situations
as well, Right, I went through those to now kind
of be a guy that can talk you into like
(04:34):
or talk you out of things and help you and
use the love that I've learned from those situations to
help you know, And those are huge things. And I
think that people, you know, forget that love is like
a great teacher, a great tool, and a great thing
to use to kind of drive what we do.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
Right.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
So we had Nick's talk like talking about the love
for the man to left and right, of him, and
that's a huge emotion or again encompassing all the emotions.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
But I think Rebecca had a great talk also about.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
You know, how we fuel ourselves, how we you know,
have you know, how we work out, and how we
train and sleep and recovery and NURSEH Like NURSEH is
one of those things that's loving. Like when you nourish
your mind and nourish your body, that's love.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Right.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
I'm not putting in things that are bad. I'm not
consuming you know. It was all about consuming too, where
it's like I'm not consuming alcohol. I'm not consuming you know,
taking in cigarette smoke or anything like.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
That, or God forbid drugs. Like one of the you.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Know, referesponders guys lost his job because he was he
got addicted to drugs and was drinking hokin. Happens, man,
it gets crazy, right, So he kind of went through that.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
That's all love too.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
You got to love yourself at some point to get
off of that shit, whether you get caught or not,
and before you know whatever ever, so you have to
love yourself. So with a fitness and nutrition, it gets
into loving yourself too, right, that you need that drives
you to be better if you love yourself, you're not
gonna kill yourself by doing things that are not good
(06:15):
for you. Whether it's eating too much or too little
or whatever, it is that that stuff's going to drive
you to be better.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Right.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
If I love myself, I'm going to put in the
right food. I'm gonna eat the right amount, I'm gonna
drink the right.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Amount of water.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
I'm gonna consume nourish what i need to do to
be better. Right, So that was like the overarching thing
was like love and and love for you, love for man,
left and right, love for myself, love for everything.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Right.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
I'm helping people because you know, you may you know.
I think we get calloused in the positions we're in
about like, oh, this fucking guy, this is, this fucking girl,
this that and the other thing, this person this, They
don't know what I've been through.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Da da da da. It's like, no, it's love, man,
everything's love here. We help people.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
We don't like try to arrest them or anything like that.
We try to help people as much as we possibly can,
or you at least should. Right, it's it's it's about helping.
I think you know the position I'm in with the gym.
It's also about helping people too, right, I want to
help you become better. And that's a lot like I
(07:28):
love that. I love I get to do that. I
love to help people. I love the people to see
their progress. I love people, you know, to get healthier, right,
they they get healthier for their you know, daughters and
sons and and things like that, and like live a
longer life with the people they love in their life longer.
(07:49):
And if you could be happy doing that because you
lost weight, you're off your medications, you're not in pain anymore. Right,
that love is going to transfer on, right, It's not
gonna You're not gonna pass on this hate or this
discontent for life that you you have because you're not
you know, loving life because you're you know what, you're
(08:10):
not nourishing the right way, and this that and the
other thing. So like the big again, the big overarching
thing of this happiness and not happiness but resiliency.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
And leadership was love.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
It kind of hit me when I was sitting there,
you know, I went there by myself. I was I
didn't know what to expect out of it. I just
kind of went and you know the first thing I
do I walk in and they have a monument to
nine to eleven and walking around and I see my
one of my buddies that one of the reasons why
I joined the Marine Corps was, you know, he got
(08:44):
killed in Afghanistan. He's a e O d uh tech guy,
but he uh, he's a he has a plaque on
air man and and I just like I just broke
down and I'm like, holy shit, I loved him.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
I love him. It's a huge you know.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Like so being in that situation and talking to the
ref Frank from Rep Responders man, He's like, dude, you're
in the place to be. And I'm like, you got
that right, you know, like you know, to deal with
those emotions and like lean on somebody else, and like
it's all about love.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Those guys like they love what they do. They love helping,
you know.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
And I think when you're you're talking to first responders,
they kind of get lost in the sauce and think
of this other thing or this or that or whatever
it is, and it kind of gets overwhelming and they
just need to take a moment and step back and
realize everything's about love. Everybody loves you and we want
you to We don't want you to kill yourself. We
(09:41):
want you to, you know, be better and move on
and do what you need to do, whether it's like
this job or don't like this job, or whatever it is.
We want to help, We want to make you better,
we want to be better, things like that. So it's
all about love the whole again, over arching day was
all about out love. How we as cops and you know,
(10:05):
business owners or whatever it may be. Kind of it
was like leadership and resiliency in those realms, but I
want to say that it was like it was love.
Love is what kind of drives you to do all
the things that you want to do in life, in
(10:27):
whatever avenue you choose.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
I think love really drives a lot of things, and
I think we take it for granted. And that's kind
of That's all I got, guys. That's it. That's it, man.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Love strongest emotion, but not really an emotion, encompasses all
of them. All Right, have a good night. I'll see
you next time, or I won't see you next time.
You'll hear me next time.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
This is episode nine. Have a great night. Bye,
Hey guys, welcome to episode nine of the Intrapid Golden Podcast.
Today we're going to talk about the Resiliency and Leadership
course I attended at the Bergen County Police Academy in Mahwa,
New Jersey. It was put on by the REFF Responders Crew.
They're out there helping and trying to support first responders
(00:22):
and veterans. Suicide is a massive, massive problem in our community.
We're losing way too many guys and girls to suicide.
So they're trying to help with that. So anything they
could do kind of try to help them as much
as I can. So this was a little like workshop
(00:43):
course put on. Nick Lavery was a guest speaker, and
so was Rebecca Rouse. Also, two guys from the rep
for Responders Crew talked about their kind of their careers
and things they do. So Nick Lavery was the guest
speaker number one. He gave a really great speech about
his stuff and what he does and what he's gone through.
(01:06):
He's a Special Forces Green Beret, he is an amputee
and he's still active in the army. It's kind of
an amazing story if you ever have a chance to
listen to it, Whether it's the Sean Ryan podcast or
one of the other podcasts he's probably been on and
hear a story, or if you can meet him and
go go see him.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
In real life.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
It's it's extraordinary. Man, what an individual he is. It
like tough as nails, loud individual. He's from Boston. I
can't really blame for that, but you know, it is
what it is. But it was an amazing speech he gave,
talked about things he'd had, some really good like answers
(01:50):
to the question and answer section of the day. One
of the ones that he talked about was love. I
think love was like the overarching thing of the day.
I think it was like love was the strongest emotion.
And I don't think I don't necessarily think love is
an emotion. I thought more of like love being encompassing
(02:10):
of all the emotions.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Right, So like.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
Love, we have fear, we have anxiety, we have happiness, joy,
all of that is encompassed in love, right, Like when
we're falling in love, when we're you know, falling out
of love and everything like that. So like in a
room full of dudes, it's like real hard to talk
about love, and like tactical dudes and whatever else you
(02:35):
want to be and all this and we're hardcore cops
and first responder veterans community, and that's kind of what
he you know, he was saying. And it's like love
is probably what drives the majority of us to do
what we do, right. The love for your fellow man
or you know, whatever it is is what drives you,
(02:56):
like you want to help people, you want to you know,
things better in the community.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
That's all love, right.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
So, like you know, when you're in a position like
love is what drives you to protect what kind of
lay yourself on the line for your you know, the
man to the left and the right of you, when
you're in the Marine Corps when it like me, right,
that's what we're doing and it's all out of love, right,
it's love for each other.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
It's it's crazy, but that's like what it is. It's love, right.
So I think kind of the.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Overarching like what I'm saying overarching theme is like love
through the whole day. Man, you gotta love yourself. Like
these guys are talking about depression and gain counseling and
like drinking and all these problems go back to like
they weren't loving themselves or like in my case, like
I definitely wasn't loving myself. I did not do the
right thing by myself. I was I didn't like me,
(03:53):
I didn't like this or that, So I drank to
numb those things away.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
And that's not love.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
That is pure hate or whatever distaste, whatever you want
to say. I hate a strong word as well, but
love it's kind of what got me out of that, Right.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
I got out of that because I love myself. I
love the situation.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
I mean, I love what I get to do every day, right,
I love to help people. So you know, yeah, there's
some things that happened in my life, the things that
are bad. You know, I've found love in those situations
as well, Right, I went through those to now kind
of be a guy that can talk you into like
(04:34):
or talk you out of things and help you and
use the love that I've learned from those situations to
help you know, And those are huge things. And I
think that people, you know, forget that love is like
a great teacher, a great tool, and a great thing
to use to kind of drive what we do.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
Right.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
So we had Nick's talk like talking about the love
for the man to left and right, of him, and
that's a huge emotion or again encompassing all the emotions.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
But I think Rebecca had a great talk also about.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
You know, how we fuel ourselves, how we you know,
have you know, how we work out, and how we
train and sleep and recovery and NURSEH Like NURSEH is
one of those things that's loving. Like when you nourish
your mind and nourish your body, that's love.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Right.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
I'm not putting in things that are bad. I'm not
consuming you know. It was all about consuming too, where
it's like I'm not consuming alcohol. I'm not consuming you know,
taking in cigarette smoke or anything like.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
That, or God forbid drugs. Like one of the you.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Know, referesponders guys lost his job because he was he
got addicted to drugs and was drinking hokin. Happens, man,
it gets crazy, right, So he kind of went through that.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
That's all love too.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
You got to love yourself at some point to get
off of that shit, whether you get caught or not,
and before you know whatever ever, so you have to
love yourself. So with a fitness and nutrition, it gets
into loving yourself too, right, that you need that drives
you to be better if you love yourself, you're not
gonna kill yourself by doing things that are not good
(06:15):
for you. Whether it's eating too much or too little
or whatever, it is that that stuff's going to drive
you to be better.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Right.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
If I love myself, I'm going to put in the
right food. I'm gonna eat the right amount, I'm gonna
drink the right.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Amount of water.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
I'm gonna consume nourish what i need to do to
be better. Right, So that was like the overarching thing
was like love and and love for you, love for man,
left and right, love for myself, love for everything.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Right.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
I'm helping people because you know, you may you know.
I think we get calloused in the positions we're in
about like, oh, this fucking guy, this is, this fucking girl,
this that and the other thing, this person this, They
don't know what I've been through.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Da da da da. It's like, no, it's love, man,
everything's love here. We help people.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
We don't like try to arrest them or anything like that.
We try to help people as much as we possibly can,
or you at least should. Right, it's it's it's about helping.
I think you know the position I'm in with the gym.
It's also about helping people too, right, I want to
help you become better. And that's a lot like I
(07:28):
love that. I love I get to do that. I
love to help people. I love the people to see
their progress. I love people, you know, to get healthier, right,
they they get healthier for their you know, daughters and
sons and and things like that, and like live a
longer life with the people they love in their life longer.
(07:49):
And if you could be happy doing that because you
lost weight, you're off your medications, you're not in pain anymore. Right,
that love is going to transfer on, right, It's not
gonna You're not gonna pass on this hate or this
discontent for life that you you have because you're not
you know, loving life because you're you know what, you're
(08:10):
not nourishing the right way, and this that and the
other thing. So like the big again, the big overarching
thing of this happiness and not happiness but resiliency.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
And leadership was love.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
It kind of hit me when I was sitting there,
you know, I went there by myself. I was I
didn't know what to expect out of it. I just
kind of went and you know the first thing I
do I walk in and they have a monument to
nine to eleven and walking around and I see my
one of my buddies that one of the reasons why
I joined the Marine Corps was, you know, he got
(08:44):
killed in Afghanistan. He's a e O d uh tech guy,
but he uh, he's a he has a plaque on
air man and and I just like I just broke
down and I'm like, holy shit, I loved him.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
I love him. It's a huge you know.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Like so being in that situation and talking to the
ref Frank from Rep Responders man, He's like, dude, you're
in the place to be. And I'm like, you got
that right, you know, like you know, to deal with
those emotions and like lean on somebody else, and like
it's all about love.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Those guys like they love what they do. They love helping,
you know.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
And I think when you're you're talking to first responders,
they kind of get lost in the sauce and think
of this other thing or this or that or whatever
it is, and it kind of gets overwhelming and they
just need to take a moment and step back and
realize everything's about love. Everybody loves you and we want
you to We don't want you to kill yourself. We
(09:41):
want you to, you know, be better and move on
and do what you need to do, whether it's like
this job or don't like this job, or whatever it is.
We want to help, We want to make you better,
we want to be better, things like that. So it's
all about love the whole again, over arching day was
all about out love. How we as cops and you know,
(10:05):
business owners or whatever it may be. Kind of it
was like leadership and resiliency in those realms, but I
want to say that it was like it was love.
Love is what kind of drives you to do all
the things that you want to do in life, in
(10:27):
whatever avenue you choose.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
I think love really drives a lot of things, and
I think we take it for granted. And that's kind
of That's all I got, guys. That's it. That's it, man.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Love strongest emotion, but not really an emotion, encompasses all
of them. All Right, have a good night. I'll see
you next time, or I won't see you next time.
You'll hear me next time.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
This is episode nine. Have a great night. Bye,
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