Resilience Expert Anne Grady

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Tony: 

Welcome. I'm your host Tony DUrso. I interview some of the most successful people in the world and I thank you for joining us. This show is dedicated to helping you turn your vision into reality. And here's a successful entrepreneur who provides insights and guidance you can use to move along your vision path. Listen to my shows on all the podcast platforms such as Spotify or iTunes, Apple podcasts. Just search for Tony D-U-R-S-O. Okay, success squad, before we get going, here's a big thank you to some amazing sponsors of our show. Please stay tuned for an important message from Zoho CRM, who provides a CRM that caters to businesses of all sizes, and has an AI-powered sales assistant who can help you stay on top of your leads and deals. Check that out just ahead. And a special note to help you find your message or build your tribe. I want to give you Russell Brunson's book for free through the mail. More info on them just ahead. So please stay tuned. 

Today's shows with resilience expert Anne Grady. Let's see what we can learn today. At the end of this interview, I'm going to do a summary recap of what we went over, so stay tuned for that. Here's some info on Anne. Resilience expert Anne Grady is an internationally recognized speaker and author. She shares humor, humility, refreshing honesty, and practical strategies anyone can use to triumph over adversity and to master change. Anne is the author of Strong Enough: Choosing Courage, Resilience, and Triumph. Here we go. 

Welcome to the show, Anne. So great to have you on with us today.

Anne: 

Hey, Tony. Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

Tony: 

Anne, I've seen some of your stuff. You're very funny and very interesting and informative. I absolutely love it, and I want to know more about this, and perhaps if we get your backstory, we'll kind of understand who Anne Grady is. So how did it all start for you? What's the beginning of all this?

Anne: 

You know, I have been fiercely goal-oriented and determined since I was a little girl. I went on a hunger strike until I could tie my own shoes when I was two. By elementary school, my teacher was telling my parents if I didn't learn to chill out about my grades, I'd have an ulcer by middle school, and by my senior year of high school, I had a strategic plan mapped out for my life. I wanted to go to college, get a Masters, get married at 26, have my first baby at 28, my second baby at 32. I had it all figured out and I wasn't the least bit high strung and things were going according to plan. I got married at 26. I got my masters. I had my son Evan two days after my 28th birthday and I thought, I'm nailing this adulting thing. I don't know why people are talking about it being so hard. This is perfect until it wasn't. I knew something wasn't right when I was pregnant. Evan would literally kick so hard, I would drop the ground. When he was born, the nurse came into the room and said, Honey, I've been doing this 30-plus years and I've never met a baby this angry, which is, you know, always what a first time mom wants to hear. He just cried constantly and went to multiple doctors. Nobody could tell me what was wrong. He just got crankier and crankier. And when he was 18 months old, my husband left. So there I was, a single mom who had just started consulting, had no money in the bank. I was teaching at a university and also at a community college to supplement my income. And I found myself as a single mom with a baby that was just inconsolable. I kept going to doctors, and no one could tell me what was wrong, and many of them said I was making it up, but when he was three years old, he tried to kill me with a pair of scissors. And by the age of four, he was on his first anti-psychotic. 

Around that time, I was fortunate when he was about five years old, I met my husband Jay and his beautiful daughter, Riley, and that became my family, but Evan continued to escalate. When he was in the second grade, I got a call from his teacher, and she said, Anne, Evan has kicked a hole in the sheetrock, taken out an electrical cord and tried to strangle himself, threatened to kill students, dislocated a teacher's fingers, and if you can't be here in the next 10 minutes, we have to call the police.

Tony: 

Oh my goodness!

Anne: 

Yeah. So Jay and I drove from our home in Austin, and we drove to Dallas where we checked him into the pediatric psych unit of Children's Medical Center, and spent the next two months living at the Ronald McDonald House and when he was 10, he was hospitalized again. And this time I was diagnosed with a tumor in my salivary gland. So February 26, 2014, I went in for a routine surgery; supposed to be a couple of hours, but it ended up being six hours and my facial nerve had wrapped so heavily around the tumor that the right side of my face became completely paralyzed. So the day after the surgery, a speck of dust scratched my cornea, which led me to need surgery to implant a gold weight into my upper eyelid and stitch up my bottom eyelid before I started six weeks of radiation. But not before a quick trip to Vegas, where I fell down a flight of stairs and broke my foot in four places. So my background is in leadership and communication and in 2014, I became an unintentional expert on resilience, and I have just really fallen in love with all of the research and the neuroscience and really figuring out ways to help people build it proactively like a muscle so that you have it when you need it. You know, we're all going to get knocked down. It's a matter of what you do once you get back up. 

Tony: 

Totally agree. I interviewed so many people, Anne. Millionaires, billionaires and very well-known people and not one has ever had a perfect life. I think one person very close, which was really an anomaly. Everyone else has had so many issues, balls and trouble, but I have to admit, I've never run into anyone with a story as diverse and as... what's the word here ... oh, man. It's like Wow! I can't get over what's happened. And here you are. You are the resilience expert. Look at you. I really am amazed. You've kind of got me speechless a little bit, and tongue tied. I can't get over this. I mean, what's happened and I know this is a business show. We've got entrepreneurs and business owners and corporate executives in the show, but I got to ask, how did it turn out with Evan, before we get into stuff? How's he doing?

Anne: 

Well, first, thank you for asking. Evan is 16 now. About a year and a half ago, a year and four months ago, we had to make probably the hardest decision I've ever had to make in my life, and we sent him to a therapeutic boarding school in Idaho, where he can get around the clock therapy and treatment and everybody's safe. He's actually coming home Saturday; I'm very excited. He'll be home for a couple of weeks, and, you know, it's a work in progress. We take two steps forward and one step back, and you take some serious mental illness and autism and learning disabilities and a bunch of other diagnoses, and you've just got a perfect neurological storm and so it's tough because no child wants to misbehave if they can't. And so it's just challenging and tough, but it's a constant learning opportunity.

Tony: 

Totally understand that. I hope you have a great time with him, and sure hope he recovers very well.

Anne: 

Thank you.

Tony: 

And now we have to talk about a little bit of business because the audience has tuned in. They want to hear about you and this is amazing. What a great intro. I didn't expect this. Anne, I have to ask. How did you come about the vision for your current success? Where did that come in?

Anne: 

Well, it's one of those things where most people do not go to school to do what they're doing as a career. You don't find it very often. I'm one of the anomalies. I knew I wanted to do something in speaking or training or professional development, so my Masters was in organizational communication. I started out as a trainee for a mutual fund company, and then wrote and developed leadership development work and emotional intelligence work. And so now I consult with companies all over the world. It might be keynote engagements, it might be professional development or coaching, but basically, it's helping people and helping organizations and the people in them work better, get stronger, and become more resilient. And what we know is that resilient leaders create resilient teams. And it's one of those things where it is common sense, but it's not common practice. And if we don't take time to start being deliberate about how we live our life, we kind of end up on autopilot, and we just end up where we're headed. 

And so whether you're an entrepreneur or a CEO or you're a teacher, it doesn't matter. The same philosophy holds true. If we're not happy with the results we're getting in our life, we basically have two choices. We can change the way we think and behave to get a different result, or we can settle for the result we're getting, based on how we think and behave. And so I'm on a mission to be a mental health advocate. One in five adults and children struggles with a mental health issue, and it's important to me that people know that they are not a victim. They have control over not necessarily what happens, but how they interpret it and how they respond to it.

Tony: 

That's excellent. I'm kind of still a little speechless; you kind of thrown me off, which is not so easy to do. I don't know where I'm going with the show, but because it's just so hard to stay focused after hearing what's happening with your family. I'm sorry. It's because we are real people here, and it's hard to ignore a real issue. I'm going to bridge this in just one moment and talk about helping people in organizations become more resilient. Actually, I'll use that as that intro. But right before I do, and I think you may have answered this, but I want to make sure that we understand this, because we have people who are locked in here. They want to learn. They're going to have this in their business - entrepreneurs, their workers, their employees, whatever. They're going to have these issues and we want to help them hopefully, or thankfully, they tune in to me for some guidance. So I want to press on and understand if you've fully given it to us or not, what's the purpose? Why are you doing what you're doing? And I know we all think we already know, but maybe you have something else that might surprise us on this, Anne.

Anne: 

Well, so the bottom line is that the average person goes through five or six traumas in their lifetime, and we're able to look back with perspective and call it growth, but while we're going through it, it's exhausting and it's tough. Everybody who's listening to your show has survived the worst thing that's ever happened to them. By your very nature, if you're able to hear my voice right now, you are resilient. But what I have learned is that most of us become a slave to our habit patterns, and rather than creating and designing our life on purpose and being mindful about building our skills and our habits and our behaviors, we just kind of land somewhere. And for some of us, that's great. For others, it's like, oh, well, I only have 12 more years till retirement. 

I started talking about Evan really initially as a way to get help, because nobody could tell me what was wrong, and so I would just talk about him on stage, hoping that there was a doctor or somebody in the audience who could help me figure it out. And what ended up happening is that I would have people come up to me and thanked me because they felt so alone. Their child or their neighbor or their nephew or their niece, or whomever it was, was experiencing something and a couple things rang true. One, everybody started with "my story is nothing compared to yours, but", and so that is comparative suffering and it's an exercise in futility. We all struggle at 100%, that whatever you're going through is real to you.

Tony: 

This is Anne Grady, resilience expert and you can find her at annegradygroup.com. I'm going to spell that. Anne is with an E. A-N-N-E-G-R-A-D-Y-G-R-O-U-P.com. This is the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead the chat continues with resilience expert, Anne Grady, but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

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All right, we're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Let's see what we can learn today. Today's show is with resilience expert Anne Grady. At the end of this interview. I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. Anne Grady, she's a truth bomb dropper! Anne shares practical strategies that can be applied both personally and professionally to improve relationships, navigate change, and triumph over adversity, and she'll make you laugh while she does it. All right, now back to the chat with Anne.

Anne: 

If you've got a sick kid, a sick dog, whatever it is that's in your life that's happening is 100%. You're struggling at 100%, and so I really want people to understand that you don't have to have gone through something catastrophic. It could be dissolving a friendship or a business. It doesn't have to be something huge. But the other thing is that there are habits and skills and behaviors that you can proactively develop, and the problem is most of us don't like to be uncomfortable. But if you think about your muscles, you go to the gym, and you actually have to break down your muscle in order to grow it. Well, resilience isn't built when everything is daisies and sunshine. It's when the stuff hits the fan and you're exhausted and don't know how to go on that. That's where it's built. And so if you have the tools to do it, then you end up staying down for less time, and you get back up stronger as a result. 

Tony: 

Anne, let's dive a little bit more into and get into actually your vision path. Let's talk about leadership and communications and helping people in organizations become more resilient. What's a great way to focus? As we've been talking about resiliency, people think they know quite a bit, but let's just say, should I say how do you help people be more resilient, and also why? I mean, organizations, people come to work, don't people just set aside everything. They just do their work for whatever and then bring it all back when they go home? I mean, that's how we were taught in corporate America, way back when. I could not even ask somebody, hey, how's it going? Because if I stood there for more than 10 seconds, I would get written up. This is how it used to be. But today is so different. It's like, people drink alcohol and they goof off. They shoot pool at work, they do all these things. So it's really different culture. I don't know that culture anymore, so with all that going on, why does anybody need this kind of help? 

Anne: 

Well, I mean, whether I'm working with Google or Dell or Johnson and Johnson, it doesn't matter who I'm working with. Everybody's organizations are made up of people. And people are human and we're infallible and we have lives. And this idea that you can separate the two and keep them these distinct units is a fallacy. You know, this idea of balancing life and work and everything in between and being constantly connected and overwhelmed with digital stimulation and information, it takes a toll on our health. People kept telling me to slow down. My mom is a flight attendant, she was a court reporter for 30 years and at the age of 51, she became a flight attendant. She's 70 and she's still doing it and I'm not supposed to tell you which airlines so we'll just call it Southwest, but she does the oxygen mask announcement and the way she does it is my favorite. She'll say, in case of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, please place your mask on and then assist your child. And if you're traveling with more than one child, please pick your favorite or the one with the most potential. 

But people kept telling me to take time for me to relax, to get sleep and I thought, you know what? I don't have time for a spa day. I run a business. I've got two kids. I'm a wife, a mom, I'm a volunteer. I'm a career oriented professional. I didn't have time and unfortunately, when we don't take time to stop, life has a way of doing it for us. The rate of suicide, depression and self-medication are higher in the Western world than any place on earth. Anti-depressants have gone up 400% since 1987, and probably higher now, and no judgment - I'm on everything but roller skates, but we are more connected, busier than we have ever been. And we're no more productive or happier for it. And so when I talk with teams or I'm working with entrepreneurs or CEOs, or it doesn't matter who it is, there's really three buckets that resilience falls into. 

One, it's your mindset, and this is practicing a growth mindset. It's understanding learned helplessness, it's being deliberate about habit formation, and being deliberate about the habits that ... you can't break a habit, but you can replace it with a more productive one. So which habits are you building because your brain doesn't know the difference between the habits that are supporting you are the ones that are sabotaging you. So understanding your mindset and your belief system about your abilities is the starting point, but then it's skills, and these are skills like self-care that we think yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that, but the number of people who are not doing what they know they're supposed to be is that an all-time high, and so it doesn't have to be a spa day. It doesn't have to be diet or exercise, although the spa days are great and diet and exercise are important, but it could be getting out of reactivity and strategically stopping throughout the course of your day, and really deciding is my day running me or am I running it? Am I just fighting fires in my inbox? Or am I being productive and helpful? It's leadership. You know, leadership is not a title that you hold or a place that you sit. It's a choice that you make, and we follow people that we know, like and trust. So are you the kind of person you would want to follow? That includes your emotional intelligence and how you connect with people, how you communicate, build relationships, but it's also how you navigate stress and how you view it, and it's gratitude and mindfulness and humor and social connection and self-compassion and so much more. 

And then the last component of it is your ability to reset. We all have a parasympathetic nervous system, and we have the ability to get out of the 'fight or flight' sympathetic nervous system into the parasympathetic, which is more of the 'rest and digest'. Part of that is knowing how to do it, and the other part of it is, are we creating the life we want by design? Because the one thing I know for sure is that your resume and your eulogy should not be the same document. 

Tony: 

That's for sure. 

Anne: 

But I see it all the time. You know, people are like, yeah, I'm working 80 hours a week, I'm nailing it, but really, are you? Is that getting you closer to where you want to be? Or are you just busy being busy?

Tony: 

Well, you know, I raised my hand, I've done the 80 hours. I think sometimes when you run your own business, 80 hours is necessary because hours don’t matter. It doesn't matter what it takes. When you're running your own business, you just got to get it up running and be successful. But that 80 hours doesn't run forever. It's a finite period. And if it keeps running for too long, then there's something wrong but I think to start up, it can be good and I'm not trying to say everybody's got to work 80 hours. I would scare you if I told you what I work. How much gas does it take for a car to go up to 5, 10, 15 miles an hour, as opposed to when you're doing 60? It's so much easier to go 70

Anne: 

Right. And look, I own a business. I get it. I have had to put in very long hours as well, but I think we confuse activity with accomplishment. Your brain cannot run at 100% for 8 to 10 hours or 12 hours a day. It just can't do it. Your car idles when you're sitting at a red light. If you were to drive 120 miles an hour on the Autobahn, you'd have run out of gas, and so one of the things is not necessarily how long we work, but it's the way we work. If you're sitting at your desk for 6, 7 hours without taking a break or eating lunch at your desk, your chances of heart disease and diabetes double. And so it's like yeah, you can have the greatest startup or have a great business, but how long can you sustain that if you're not creating systems and processes that are going to help take you out of that. I'm not trying to be a hypocrite; we're struggling with the same thing in my business. It's growing by leaps and bounds, and we're having to operationalize things so that I'm not the one doing everything, because it's really easy to just get bogged down and overwhelmed. But if my facial tumor and paralysis and my child have taught me anything, it's that whole definition of insanity, and it also has taught me that if you're not happy where you are, you're not going to be happy where you're going. You know, it's not about money. Happiness isn't a trait; it's a skill. And so my goal is to help people create the life they want, and live it on purpose. 

Tony: 

I love it. Anne, we've been speaking so much about resiliency. Let's go into this a little bit more. What does it really mean to be resilient, and what are some methods that we can use to be resilient when we need to?

Anne: 

So resilience is your ability to get back up after you've been knocked down. Your resilience is that we become bent, not broken, and some tools that you can use, like for example, your belief system. Carol Dweck, great author, researcher at Stanford has discovered something called our mindset. A fixed mindset is a belief that our intelligence, abilities and talents are fixed, that we are who we are, that we're either smart or we're not, and that this is the smartest we're going to get. The growth mindset is it has nothing to do with talent or abilities. I am where I am because I work hard, that there's no such thing as a math or a science person or an athletic person. There's no math gene. It's where did I put my time and my effort and energy. Am I more worried about looking smart than I am about becoming smart? Am I more focused on improving, or do I want to look good? And so developing your belief system is really the place to start. We send ourselves messages and say things to ourselves that we would never say to our friends, ever. I mean, if you talk to your children the way you talk to yourself, or you talk to your employees the way you talk to yourself, nobody would want to work for you. And that's where it has to start. Are the messages that I am sending myself about myself accurate? And if they're not - which 99.9% of us do not have accuracy there - it's really reevaluating how you're thinking, but then it's also things. For example, Gallup interviewed 4 million employees and found that receiving regular recognition and praise creates higher employee engagement, better customer satisfaction, better safety records, higher income, improved relationships, greater overall organizational success, and it's one of those things where in passing, say thank you, but are we really truly taking time to develop people and appreciate them for their strengths and put them in positions to win. It's mindfulness. 

Here's a typical scenario. Let's say, Tony, that you work with somebody that you really, really like. And they send you an email that says, hey, Tony, I found some mistakes in your paperwork. I'm going to stop by around three to go over them. Now you like this person, you get along with them, how do you feel when you see that email?

Tony: 

Elated. If I made a mistake, I want to know about it. Why wait till three o'clock?

Anne: 

Exactly, but now let's say conversely, you work with someone you don't like, and I know that doesn't happen with anybody. Everybody likes everybody they work with, of course but just hypothetically, let's say you work with someone you really just can't stand. And for whatever reason, it's oil and water since day one, and they send you an identical email. Hey, Tony, I caught some mistakes in your paperwork. I'll stop by around three to go over it. How do you feel then?

Tony: 

I am going to make sure I run out to Starbucks.

Anne: 

Yeah, exactly. So when we talk about mindfulness, it can seem very new-agey, but mindfulness is really nothing more than realizing that you're going to interpret those two messages very differently based on the lens that you are wearing, and that you will approach those conversations very differently. And so that's using mindfulness and emotional intelligence to regulate emotion, and to navigate and build relationships and influence it. It's so all tied together that it can feel overwhelming. It’s kind of like New Year's resolutions. Think about at the end of the year, you're going to set new goals - be healthier, be a better friend, stop drinking, eat better, and by January 10 you have a beer in one hand, a cheeseburger in the other. You went to the gym; that hurt. Why would I do that again?

Tony: 

This is the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead the chat continues with resilience expert Anne Grady, but first, it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

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Tony: 

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Alright, we're back on the Tony DUrso Show, where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Let's see what we can learn today. Today's show is with resilience expert Anne Grady. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. All right, and now back to the chat with Anne.

Anne: 

And we try to change a lot of behavior at once and it leads to no change at all, and resilience is about proactively cultivating subtle habits one at a time, whether that looks like making sure you spend the first 30 minutes of your day without a screen, and Shawn Achor calls it 'building a mental moat around your day'. So the first 30 minutes you're awake and the last 30 minutes you're awake, you're the weakest, cognitively speaking. Cannot adequately prioritize information, assimilate it, understand it. and so what ends up happening is we become hijacked emotionally. Our brain is emotionally hijacked before we ever start our day, when we check email first thing in the morning, when we look at social media first thing in the morning, when we watch the news first thing in the morning or last thing at night. And so there are things that most of us aren't even aware that we're doing, that subtle shifts in habit can make a huge difference over time. 

Tony: 

Very interesting stuff. Now, to be resilient means something happened and that sometimes it's just so much, it just changes our whole life and we have to propel ourselves nonetheless to get up and do something because we have to live. We have to see that our families are taken care of. So how do we use any adversity and I'm sure you have some great examples. How can we use that? I hate to say that you want something bad to happen, but if they do happen, so how can we use that to actually propel ourselves and move forward? 

Anne: 

It's a great question, and we cannot control most of what happens to us in our life, but we can control our interpretation. And so I'll give you an example. We took Evan to Idaho, placed him at the therapeutic boarding school. It was a huge catastrophic ordeal. He called the police. I mean, it was just a nightmare. And we get home and my husband's putting something on the garage shelf and he falls off a ladder and breaks his arm, ribs and hip, two days after we brought Evan and I'm standing there in my garage going, how in the hell do I interpret this, right? Why? Why is this happening? And one of the strategies to being resilient is a sense of humor, because stuff's going to happen. Can you laugh at it? Well, the first people who showed up when I called 911 was a fire truck full of hot firemen. I was like, all right Anne, interpret it this way. These guys were meant to come resuscitate you. But the way I interpret that now, at first it was like, why is this happening? But then what I realized is my husband Jay couldn't move for three weeks and we have not had time since we met where either one of us had time to really stop. I did when I had my surgery and my tumor, but he had never had time to stop and it was his body's way of saying I'm going to take time to let you be still. whether you're going to do it for yourself or not. And it doesn't have to be really bad stuff happening. It could be losing a deal. You know, if I'm putting together a training program and a client calls and says, we decided not to hire you. We've gone with someone else. That's resilience, right? I'm not going to put down my shingle and go, oh well, they didn't want me so I'm never going to have another client again. It's how do I interpret that? Well, for me, it's what did I learn from it? And how do I use that information and the feedback going forward? But rather than getting defensive and arguing it, it's asking questions and being curious to learn from.

Tony: 

Got me speechless again. I can't get over what's happening in your life.

Anne: 

My husband would die if I at some point was speechless, he would probably be so happy.

Tony: 

Well, being Italian, I think I speak a lot and I've learned that if I ever am speechless, actually just stopped moving my hands in this thing. I'm doing that now; you don't see it, but okay. Amazing what's happening? Absolutely amazing. You are the resilience expert here, the resiliency expert and you wrote a book called Strong Enough. You wrote a couple books, but in this particular book, you talk about stress, and how we all know stress it. It impacts us completely on how to think logically. People who are trying to abstain from alcohol or a particular type of food, the first thing that happens when stress hits is they'll go to that comfort item that alcohol, that food. For me, it's pasta, and you just need that comfort, you need something that you just know you always feel good. So can you take it a little bit further, kind of take it and break it down? What happens when we go under stress? We've already talked about how to deal with it a little bit, but let's get into the mechanics of it.

Anne: 

Sure. So there's a couple of different philosophies. Obviously, there is enough research and data to show that chronic stress is not good for your brain or your body. But there's interesting research that shows it's not the stress itself; it's your interpretation of it. So Kelly McGonagall is a neuropsychologist and wrote a great book called The Upside of Stress and she has a great TED Talk and she aggregated research. For example, one study was done where they took 8,000 ... I'm sorry, they took 30,000 Americans and tracked them over eight years, and they started by asking two questions. One, what level of stress have you had in the previous 12 months - low, moderate or high? And two, do you think stress is bad for you? And the results were mind boggling. 

What they found is that for people who had high levels of stress in the previous 12 months, there was a 43% increased risk of dying prematurely, but it was only for the people who thought stress was bad for them. The people who thought stress was just their body's natural response to help them prepare for what was ahead, their heart rate, their heart beats faster to get more oxygen so they can think more clearly, you know, the norepinephrine and the cortisol are there to help you with adrenaline and energy. Those people had a zero percent increased risk of dying prematurely, less than the people who had no stress or low levels of stress. And so what that tells us is that our beliefs drive our neurochemistry. And part of it is when you believe stress to be bad for you, you try to run from it and numb it, whether it's pasta or alcohol or drugs or sex or gambling, whatever dopamine creating activity gets you going. We try to run from it and numb it. And that's where we get into trouble. 

If we can view stress as our body's mechanism to help us deal with what is ahead of us, then we don't want to feed it pasta because we know our brain won't work right. We want to feed it the right kind of foods and we don't want to starve our brain and stay awake because we know we need sleep to function, and if you're not getting sleep, you're not giving your brain fuel. If we know that stress is just our body preparing us, then rather than run from those uncomfortable emotions, we almost embrace them. 

And part of the challenge with stress is that because we don't like uncomfortable emotions, we try to run away from them, and building resilience requires that you sit in it for a little bit, that you don't try to microwave those uncomfortable emotions. Stress is our limbic system in our brain firing on all cylinders. The problem is it doesn't know the difference between a saber toothed tiger charging us or a snarky email from a colleague. It just takes every threat the same way and basically we lose the ability to be rational. We have something called the negativity bias, which is again a protection mechanism so that if you were a million years ago walking through a field and you saw a tiger running at you, but you saw a beautiful field of flowers, your brain pays way more attention to the tiger because the flowers aren't going to eat you. So our brain has become like Velcro to negative and Teflon to positive. Which is why when you get a performance review and you're told to do nine things exceptionally well, and you have one opportunity for growth, our brains chew on that opportunity for growth. So simply knowing this can cause you to behave differently. 

Simply knowing that stress is just a physiological bodily response, that it's not good, bad, right or wrong, that it just is, helps you to interpret it differently, changing the way you act and behave about it. Now does that mean I never go for a cheeseburger when I'm overwhelmed? Of course not! We're human, but we can start to be deliberate about proactively preparing ourselves for those things when they happen. You know, your brain only has so much of a limited cognitive ability throughout the course of your day, so I know a lot of people who start out if they're trying to get healthy first thing in the morning, it's like great I've exercised, I've eaten healthy. By midnight, you're like a cow grazing your pantry looking for sweet and salty, and it's just because your brain can't sustain that level of intense energy and willpower for that long of a period of time. So the idea with creating resilience proactively is that you start to develop habits that allow you to operate smarter and more efficiently without you having to work so hard at doing it yourself.

Tony: 

Anne, this is really amazing stuff, and I think one of the things that we want to be able to latch on before this interview ends is what are some good strategies that we can use to manage stress and deal with what comes up? 

Anne: 

Well, what we know is that when we are stressed the gray matter in our brain shrinks, and the gray matter in your brain is the part of the brain that's responsible for attention management and emotional regulation. And so if you want to proactively start repairing the neurons damaged by stress and strengthening your brain, there are scientifically proven things that you can do, one of which is exercise, and I'm not one of those wake up and want to run five miles and get a runner's high. That's not me. I don't particularly enjoy exercise, but I know that my brain works better when I do and my mood is stable. So if you can exercise 120 minutes a week, it can be all at one time or you can break it up over the course of seven days, doesn't matter. The research is pretty clear. Our body needs 120 minutes of cardio and exercise, and so it doesn't matter whether you're running through an airport or whether you're taking a walk down the street or going to a gym. For me, I swim.

Tony: 

This is the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead the chat continues with resiliency expert Anne Grady, but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

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Tony: 

All right, we're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Let's see what we can learn today. Today's show is with resiliency expert Anne Grady. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. Anne is a two-time TEDx speaker, and her work is featured in numerous media outlets, including Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur, Forbes, Fast Company and INC magazines, CNN, ESPN and Fox Business. And now back to the chat with Anne. 

Anne: 

Another way is meditation. And for me, I often joke that meditation is like playing whack a mole with my thoughts. I'm a very type A driven person, and so the thought of sitting quietly and finding Zen in a full lotus does not appeal to me until I learned that that is not what meditation is supposed to be at all. Meditation is one of the best ways to repair gray matter in your brain. The magic number is nine minutes a day and it's not about finding Zen or peace. It's about brain training, because every time you meditate, for example, let's say you have an anchor, like your breath, and every time your mind wanders, which it will the entire time you are meditating, but every time you catch yourself and go back to your breath, you're training your brain to direct its attention where you want it to go, not where it normally goes on its own. And so I meditate to sleep every single night because that's when we lay in bed and ruminate on everything we could have said, should have said, didn't say, ate, wore, whatever and I meditate to bed every single night. And if I wake up in the middle of the night, I meditate to go back to sleep, and it's really just training your brain, making it less likely to hit the panic button, because you can direct your attention where you want it to go. 

For example, yoga. I wasn't a big yoga person, but I started doing yoga. I follow a YouTube channel with yoga because yoga does both. It's both meditation and exercise so it's a double whammy. Sleep - 50 to 70 million Americans have a sleep or wakefulness disorder. The CDC has named it our number one public health crisis. It's responsible for so many illnesses and accidents and tragedies, and most of us think it's a negotiable. Well, your brain can't work if we don't give it the right things. And so, do I sleep eight hours every single night? No, but more often than not, do I get seven to eight hours? Yes, and it's because I trained myself to turn off Better Call Saul and Dexter. 70% of Americans sleep with their phone next to their bed and we use it because it's our alarm clock, but they make those and research has shown that simply having your phone next to your bed makes you less likely to fall into a deep sleep because your subconscious is waiting for a notification. So really subtle things that you can't do perfectly, that's why it's a practice, but you can start to be deliberate about the way you use stress and the way you process it and the way you prevent it.

Tony: 

Anne, what are you looking to accomplish in the next few years? Where are you going with all this?

Anne: 

My goal is to ... a portion of all my book proceeds - right now I've got two books; I'm working on a third - and a portion of all of my book proceeds goes to the National Alliance on Mental illness in Central Texas, and my goal is to really just become more and more of a mental health advocate. We are in crisis as a nation, and if we don't learn to address it, then we will only continue to see more illness and more challenge and so what we know is that everybody is affected by mental health - everybody! Whether it's ADD, ADHD, autism, anxiety, bipolar, depression, schizophrenia, or just feeling sad one day, everybody is affected by it, and my goal is to really stamp out the stigma and help people address it for the illness that it is. If you have a cold, you talk about it and you go to a doctor, but there are so many people suffering needlessly because they think they're weak, and it has nothing to do with weakness.

Tony: 

Very interesting and I look forward to seeing some great growth. Anne, in this interview you've mentioned a couple of good resources, and I'd like to know if there's anything else that you'd like to mention to our audience visionaries as far as resources that they can use to help them grow their business.

Anne: 

Sure, I've got a resilience self-assessment and a self-care sheet, as well as a monthly article that gives you tips, tools and strategies. If your listeners want, they can get this by texting the number 555888 and typing in the word STRENGTH, 555888 and texting the word STRENGTH and at AnneGradygroup.com, there are hundreds of articles and resources and videos and things that you can do to start proactively building resilience for you and your team

Tony: 

And this resilience item here Anne, if we go to AnneGradygroup.com, can we find it there instead of texting?

Anne: 

The text is probably the best way to get that, but you can always reach out to us on the contact page and we are happy to share resources with you that way as well.

Tony: 

Well, very good. Thank you for sharing that with the audience. Once again, this is Anne Grady, resilience expert and you can find her at again Anne - that's Anne with an E. You can find her at AnneGradygroup.com. Anne, thank you very much. You've shared so much; so much more to talk about. I just love everything that we've gone over. And again, I wish you the best with your husband, and with your child and I know that you are the resilience expert so you'll deal with it, but I still wish them very well and I hope everything goes great there. 

Anne: 

Thank you, Tony. I wish the same for you and for all of your listeners. 

Tony: 

Hey, success squad. Thanks for hanging out with me while I featured an elite entrepreneur who took her vision to reality. I hope this was as inspiring for you as it was for me to do this interview. I learned a lot. Great insights so valuable. How did you like this interview with resilience expert Anne Grady? I can't get over the beginning of the show with all of the unfortunate incidents that happened to Anne. I've never met anyone with such misfortune in such a short amount of time. I think I'm speechless. She really is a resilience expert. Don't you agree? Most people don't have the career of what they went to school for. She says the average person goes to five to six traumas in their lifetime. I believe that's true, too, especially with all the people I've interviewed so far. How about you? How many traumas have you gone through, and here you are listening to the show? You've pulled through, right? 

It's a great definition of resilience and how she compares that to working out. You have to break down your muscles in order to grow them. Resilience is built when trouble happens, not when everything is perfect. That's correct. Only we don't want anything more bad to happen. Do you work with other people? Are you only allowed to talk about business and nothing else, like I was originally trained myself? Are you able to balance your life and business? What kind of culture do you have in your workplace? 

Three key points of resilience, she said. One, your mindset and your belief system; two, your skills. She says leadership is a choice you make. Interesting! How you navigate success, how you navigate stress, and so much more. Three, your ability to reset. Are you creating the life you want by design? It's funny, your resume and your eulogy should not be the same document and she sees it all the time. Another good point, it's not how long we work. It's the way we work. I worked at a place for years where it was long hours, short breaks, and you couldn't stop for anything but business. After a while that can take a toll on you that you don't even realize until you stop and take a breather, if you can. You guys out there are so lucky with the way the world is today, on the breaks and how things are set up, except for you entrepreneurs doing 80 hours a week. I do sympathize with that. You know, it's all about sustaining and that's where resiliency comes into play. 

And another great takeaway by Anne, if you're not happy where you are, then you're not going to be happy where you're going. Happiness is a skill. How about that? Has anyone thought of that? Yep. It's a skill. Resiliency is your ability to get back up after you've been knocked down. She makes a great point about when we try to change a lot of our behavior all at once. That leads to no change at all. An interesting point on the first 30 minutes of our day and the last 30 minutes of our day, without a screen in front of us. Isn't that impossible? Do you do that? Now? I'm good on that first thing of the day, but not at the end of the night always. Sometimes, yes but not always. How about you? There's so much more I got out of this interview. What did you get? I'd love to know how you use this information to help you in your career or business. Reach out to me. 

Okay guys, now, grab hold of your vision, decide you're either going to start something great or take it to the next level. You have to decide first; it always starts with a decision and you can get my vision map to help you along the process. The free eBook is at Tony D-U-R-S-O.com. I created my empire in just a few years. That's all it took. I had the vision map as my guide. you can do it too. Once again, check out my shows on Spotify. It's all designed to help you get to the next level in your business or career. Let's help you move on your journey to success. And if you have iTunes or access to any Apple device, look up my name Tony D-U-R-S-O. Please subscribe to my show. A kind review there will get you tremendous appreciation back in return. Thanks and remember, just take action. Success awaits those who persevere and remain steadfast despite the odds. Sow good seeds, do good deeds and join me on the next episode of the Tony DUrso Show.

We hope you've enjoyed this week's edition of the Tony DUrso Show with his key influencers. Be sure to tune in again next Friday at 5 p.m. Eastern Time, 2 p.m. Pacific Time on The Voice America Influencers Channel