Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unleashing Your Potential Through Resilience
16:15 Share

When you need an SUV that's roomy for your friends and family, durable and ready to carry all your stuff and equipped for adventure, Honda's here with the 2025 Honda CR-V. CR-V outperforms the pack with more style, more space and more power. Complete with state-of-the-art safety features and a five-star safety rating. Honda's here for you with the 2025 Honda CR-V. Check it out at your local Honda dealer today.

From the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be, escaping the drift, this is The Weekly Drop with Jon Gafford. No matter what platform you're watching or listening to us on, make sure you like, subscribe, and comment. And now, The Drop. Welcome, everybody, to The Weekly Drop. My name is Jon Gafford, and like it says in the opening, man, I am here to get you from where you are to where you want to be.

And the weekly drop is going to be my own little personal podcast for you guys once a week. It will drop every Thursday. It is just going to be me, not the long-form podcast you're used to, the interviews with the thought leaders and great people that we bring through the studio. But this is just going to be me in here for about 15 minutes once a week talking about something that's important to me that I think is going to help you. And this is going to be the first installment of that. So

This week, there's a lot going on in the world, but I think nothing captured the attention of America more this week than obviously the massive hurricane that was barreling through the Gulf towards the state of Florida. And as I watched that...

You've got to understand something. Number one, I was born and raised in the state of Florida. I am Floridian by birth, even though I've lived in Nevada now for 20 years. I will always, at my heart, be a Floridian. And I've always been that guy. I mean, growing up there, we dealt with hurricanes. That's what we dealt with on a regular basis.

It was just part of life. And I'm the first guy to say like, hey, let's get a bottle of booze, fill the bathtub up with water, and let's ride this thing out. And if you're wondering why you fill the bathtub up with water, it's so if the water goes out, you can flush your toilets with the water that's in the bathtub. That's why you do that. But-

I was always that first guy, but as I was watching this storm come through the Gulf and I was like, man, this is going to be bad. And a place that I laid my head for a really long time and considered home was Tampa, Florida. And they have not had a hurricane like this come into the bay where it was going to spin the type of storm surge that they were projecting in like 100 years. It just hasn't happened.

And so I was a little freaked out and I was, you know, I've been addicted to the weather channel for the last 24 hours watching this thing happen. And thank God, even though it was bad and there's a lot of damage, I don't think it's what it could have been when that thing was spinning as a cat five out in the Gulf. What were they originally predicting it to be damage wise. But even with that, even with knowing what was coming, right. And, and knowing the damage and devastation that was going to happen to that communities and did happen.

I just know that the people that live in Florida are resilient in a way that they deal with these storms and deal with this stuff. I know, like, my wife's like, I don't understand why people live there. I don't understand why they stay there. I don't understand why they do this. And it's like, because they have such a level of resilience when it comes to this, that they just grind through it and start over and go again. And it got me thinking about resilience.

And I like to think that I'm something of an expert in that area, and I'll tell you why. When I was on The Apprentice many moons ago, after the show, several seasons later, the lead psychologist that worked on The Apprentice, Dr. Liza Siegel, she was writing a book called The Suite Rules, or The Suite Life, I think it was. S-U-I-T-E, because we lived in the suite. And...

She wanted to interview me. And I thought to myself, man, there's been like seven seasons of this show. There's 18 contestants. That's a lot of contestants. Why do you want to interview me? And when she was telling me why, she said, when you were applying to be on that show and everybody applied, they put you through the rigors of every test, personality test, everything.

IQ test, everything in the world, trying to figure out if you're going to be a good candidate. And by candidate, I don't mean the best employee. I mean, are you going to be good television is what they're looking for. Let's be honest. I probably wasn't the best job applicant they had to work for Donald Trump at the time, but I was damn good TV. And

They put us through all these tests, and she said that out of all of those contestants that tested, and she was the one administering this stuff and reading the results and going through them, I tested higher in resilience than any other contestant, period. Meaning I just had this internal self-drive that no matter what was put in my way, I was just going to push through it.

Something else this week happened that wanted me to talk about resilience. My friend Maha, if you can go back and watch her full episode on the show, her book, Seven Rules of Self-Reliance, I'm going to plug it again for number one right now on Amazon. So proud of Maha. This is a great read and it talks about exactly what we're going to talk about today.

But if you're somebody in your life that has struggled with resilience, wants to build a higher level of resilience, wants to flex that muscle, wants to get a little better in that department, this is for you. The next 10 minutes are for you. And I want to kind of talk about a couple of different things, ways to look at problems, at adversity, at things that happen to you so you can build up your resilience and be more resilient. The first one is the brick wall method.

Now, everybody has problems in their life. Everybody has issues that come up. Everybody has things that happened. And how you frame, the first part of this is all in how you frame or perceive those problems. And a great way to look at it is look at something as this is the brick wall. This is what I've been slammed against. This is rock bottom, if you will. This is the end of it. This is the thing that pivots me.

I don't care what it is, job loss, losing a girlfriend, whatever it is. This is the thing that is going to pivot me into a new life. How many times in your life have you broken up with somebody and thought, I will never find a better person, only to find somebody elitely better coming down the pipe? How many times have you lost a job that you thought, and then that was my dream job, only to have your true passion show up right around the corner?

So next time adversity strikes you, and I know this one is really hard and it's hard to do, you've got to look at that as this is the moment. This is the crossroads. This is the pivot. This is the moment that something better is coming. And there's research to back this up. If you look at life this way, there's absolutely research. There's another book, in addition to Maaz, called Mastering Life's Greatest Challenges by Stephen Southwick and Dennis Charney that shows that

that if you hit adversity face on, overcoming this rewires your brain and almost it's like working out. It's like building a muscle. The more that you look at adversity in the face, the more your brain will get adept to dealing with it. The second thing I'm going to talk about, and this was

Like, we are all on social media. We scroll like crazy. We see a million things. We see a million things come down the pike. This was something that I saw Alex Hermosi say now four weeks ago that stuck with me. And it was a 20-second clip. And for me to have something stick to me like that, it's pretty profound. And what he said was, when I have a problem or I have a challenge,

I look at this as a story that I'm going to tell later. And in my story, I am the hero. I am always the hero in the story. And the challenges, the problems, the adversity, whatever it might be, that is the dragon. And the bigger the dragon, the bigger the story, the bigger the hero.

So embrace your challenges, embrace your problems, embrace that adversity. You are the star of your own movie. Everybody else is a bit player. Everybody else is a supporting actor or actress in your particular movie. So take charge of that and understand when these problems arise, this is going to make one hell of a story that I can tell later. And you have two choices of what that story is going to be. It's either going to be the, whoa, poor as me story.

And we all know people like that, and they don't have too many people to tell those stories too because people run from them. Or you're going to have the, listen to how deep a shit I got into and how amazing I was for getting out of it. And that is a story that inspires people. They love to hear that. So be on the hero's journey. Understand that. This is your story. Embrace your challenges because it's going to make a wonderful, amazing story again. The next thing I'm going to talk about is the power of small wins.

Just the power of one small win a day. Now, I've talked about this openly before on the podcast. I've talked about it openly in here, which is I suffer from seasonal, you'll call it, depression. And when I say seasonal, I don't mean in wintertime I get depressed or springtime I get depressed. I mean, I will just, my wife and I call it the funk. And it just kind of comes on randomly at different times throughout the year. It'll just hit me.

And for no reason at all, I just kind of go into a funk. And I have programmed myself to understand that A, that that's temporary. B, it's just something that's happening. But I've got to summons all of my willpower and all of my energy on each day when I'm really in the middle of that. And I focus on getting one thing done.

If you are at a place where the world seems overwhelming, where your task list seems never ending, where you are just flat overwhelmed, I promise you, if everything doesn't get done today, nothing bad is going to happen.

Like I was trying to remember it before I started doing this podcast earlier today. There was a movie and I don't remember what it was. If you do, if you, if this story sounds familiar to you, please share in the comments on YouTube what the movie was because I could not recall it. There was a movie where a guy was an actor or a screenwriter and he was trying to get something done. He was trying to get a screenplay sold or a part in a movie. I don't remember exactly which one it was.

And this guy worked his ass off. He went to every meeting. It was just grinding and grinding and grinding. And he finally got to a place where he said, you know what? Fuck it. I'm going to take a road trip. I'm going to go out on my own. I'm going to do my own thing. And I'm just going to forget about this for a while. And he left his phone at home and took off. And then what happened in the story was like one agent called and then he didn't call him back because he wasn't there. And then all of a sudden they're like, well, what do you mean he didn't answer? He didn't call me back.

So then another agent heard that and they're like, well, he didn't call him back. Who's he working with? So they started, so his phone starts blowing up because that's, I guess how Hollywood works where the less available you are, everybody wants you. And it blew up. So my point is to that story, sometimes letting go of the world of all of these problems and just focusing on one thing. And even if that's just you, if it's just today, I'm going to make my bed today. I'm going to, you know, I'm not going to get thin today, but I'm going to walk a mile today.

Just do one thing. Everything that you have that is a virtue of life, if you do one thing to chip away at that, it will eventually chop that mountain down. It's like they say, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. The next thing I'm going to say is the reset button. I love the reset button. And what I mean by the reset button is

Tony Robbins at UPW does a thing where he gives you your move and he gives you your power move where he says like, he does this whole exercise where you go through and just you feel like your best feeling and you can feel it like a pebble in the palm of your hand and then you make a power move and it immediately changes your physiology and it changes your psychology. I'm going to give you an easier way than that. There's triggers in your life, anchors that have happened to you through your life and I'll prove it right now to you.

Every single person listening to this podcast, when you smell fresh cut grass early in the morning, it triggers a memory for you. I don't know what that memory might be. It might be you rode horses as a kid. It might be whatever. For me, it's going to the golf course with my father as a kid. That always triggers that memory, always puts me in a good, happy mood. I love the smell of fresh cut grass. You have something like that in a song,

in a picture, in a place, something you can use in moments of adversity to trigger you into a better state that will put you in a better place to deal with that adversity. So stop for a second. Don't let yourself get completely wound up. Hit the reset button and then move and deal with that stuff.

They talk at length of this. Again, here's another great book. It's called Resilient, How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength, and Happiness by Rick Hansen. He talks about using mindfulness and triggers a lot in that book. If that sounds like something that is going to work for you, I highly recommend that book to you. The next one is using the power of your voice. A lot of people carry their adversity. They carry trauma. They carry problems. They carry issues. One of my dear friends, I will leave him nameless.

He just went to retreat and literally was there for seven days. And for seven days, he did nothing but purge out every childhood trauma, everything in his entire life that had ever affected him negatively through journaling, through role-playing, through talking, through complete immersion in this. And I can tell you that letting this stuff go, getting it out, talking with others about it,

changed him completely. He came back a completely different person than before he went to this. So if you're somebody that you feel like you're on a hamster wheel with some of your problems, things keep repeating themselves, trauma keeps happening to you, and it keeps happening again and again and again and again and again, I would venture to say that in some of those cases, you probably play a role in attracting some of that negativity back to yourself.

So maybe look into purging some of those things so they stop that cycle. And again, for me, always the best way to overcome adversity and build a high level of resilience is you don't have to do it by yourself. Social support and having a good support network around you, even if it's just a good friend,

You know, your spouse. I always tell people who you're married to is more important of a business decision in the long run than your business decisions is. Having somebody that supports you in those decisions and helps you through that stuff is so important. So if you're trying to go through your problems by yourself, that's also a mistake. Build resilience by using the strength of others that care about you and love you and will help you through those tough times.

Man, that's what I got for this week. I hope you guys love that stuff. I hope it makes you more resilient. I hope it helps you. If you dig this again, please like and subscribe. I'll be dropping little mini podcasts like this every single week on Thursdays. But don't forget to listen to the main podcast. Comes out every Tuesday with some of the most amazing guests on the planet coming to the studio. We'll see you next week.

What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.

When you need an SUV that's roomy for your friends and family, durable and ready to carry all your stuff and equipped for adventure, Honda's here with the 2025 Honda CR-V. CR-V outperforms the pack with more style, more space, and more power. Complete with state-of-the-art safety features and a five-star safety rating, Honda's here for you with the 2025 Honda CR-V. Check it out at your local Honda dealer today.