Sometimes people are stuck. Business leaders,

friends, people you interact with, your clients,

they can be stuck because they haven't dealt with

something in their past and really gotten to the other

side. And we can call that trauma. We call it

PTSD, post-traumatic stress, which, by the way,

that's a, that's a reaction to things that happened in the past. And we live

in a way where we're not living to our full potential because

of what happened in the past. We're not able to let go and live life.

And I'll tell you, I've had my own struggles here, which I'm going to

talk about in this episode. Because when we get hurt,

when we get burned, we don't want to get hurt again. So we don't want

to put ourselves in situations again where we can get hurt again. So our brain's

really good at like protecting us. And so it makes a

lot of sense. But today, what we're going to talk about is 3 decisions that

you can make to deal with the trauma in your life. And

there's different levels of trauma. I mean, there's trauma that we haven't actually even—

we don't even actually really remember, because we're, we're

so— we've stuffed it down so deep that it's not

even something we're aware of oftentimes. And there's this trauma that

we know that we've gone through, and that we can remember, we know

it's there. But we also do know if we're honest with ourselves, that it's still

impacting us. So what we're doing today is we're talking about some of the stuff

that we know is still impacting us, we're aware of it, and we're going to

make some decisions to move forward and not be stuck any longer.

So, welcome to the Decide Your Legacy podcast. I'm your host, Adam

Gragg. I have been a family therapist, a

clinician for 27 years, started Decide Your Legacy

in 2012.. And what we do is we

help, help leaders and their

teams. We help businesses face the stuff that's holding them

back so they can get unstuck and make long-term positive

change. I mean, this whole business came out of my frustration with

people wanting a surface-level Band-Aid fix, but

not actually getting at the core and making long-term change. So we're in the business

of making long-term change. That's my passion. That's

what we do here. And by the way, I consider everybody a leader. If you

have influence at your— wherever you go, you

know, you're a leader. So if you're 6 years old, you have the potential to

be a leader. Everybody's a leader. So we're talking about 3 decisions

that you can make when you do know that there's some kind of

thing in your past that you've identified that's holding you back. So

I recently had a client who told me that, and

we talked about this, but that a rejection from years and years ago

still holds him back from taking that step romantically. I

had somebody tell me recently that

the— that a divorce from years and years and years ago

was holding him back from connecting emotionally because

he didn't want to get hurt again. So this happens a lot. We don't want

to get hurt again. So one of the first decisions that you

make is you're going to decide you're going to decide at some

level— now this is going to sound very contradictory— but you're going to decide that

positive thinking alone is not enough. Because you've probably been

told that if you just think about it differently, then you're going to be able

to live differently. It's going to be able to overcome it. So one of the

worst things we can do to somebody that you meet, or a friend or

a family member, is to say things like— let's just say, for

example, that they're struggling with the loss of a

spouse. So they're grieving, they're feeling a lot of grief about it. And we tell

them something like, you have so much to look forward to, or

you're young, you're going to find somebody else, or you're— it's, you

know, you have all these good things in your life. And we tell

them, out of our own discomfort, we try to comfort them by telling them and

pointing out all these positive things in their life. But really what we're actually doing

is making it worse. We're shaming them because they in that moment are going to

think, man, I'm really struggling here. And why am I struggling here when everybody else

sees all these cool things that could happen in my life? They're going to shame

themselves. So it's actually better to just be with them and ask them questions and

listen to them and let them vent. But don't

just try to be Pollyanna and tell them everything is going to be better and

good and okay. It's better

for them to come to that conclusion on their own. And

for you to do something that I'm going to challenge you to do

instead, that is going to lead the kind of questions you can

ask them. So positive thinking is— and it

really comes out of a good

heart, I believe. Because if you are struggling

with depression and you start to see the cool things that you have in

your life, and you start to recognize the many blessings that you have, that can

help take you out of it. Yes. And people and your

friends can help you see it and take you out of it for a season.

But when we come and we talk about long-term

change, that's not going to be what people actually need. It's going to help them

feel less depressed in the moment. It's going to help them feel less, less anxious

in the moment, but it's not going to help them make the changes that they

need to get out of it for the long haul. So we don't

look at it as the actual solution. We look at it as a temporary

fix, but it's not a long-term solution. So the second part of this

is if somebody is going to deal with

PTSD, this stress in their lives, then what they got to do

is look for the exceptions, and the outliers and

the special situations that can show them what they

can do now to make the long-term changes that are

available to them. The outliers. So

if somebody feels like really discouraged in

their career, like they haven't done anything on their own, and By

the way, a lot of people who have outward

success, and a lot of this happens in family businesses,

is they have inherited a lot

of opportunities, but they haven't

actually exercised it on their own. They haven't done it

on their own. So lots of people that have lots of money,

you can look at, and on the exterior they may look like they've done a

lot of things, But really, they know that they

haven't actually taken the decisions to grow the business. It's been given to them in

a way where maybe they haven't blown it all up to shreds, which

in itself is a good thing, but they are struggling.

As they talk to me and my team, they're struggling because they don't feel like

they've done much on their own. And what I would do in

that situation when they're feeling depressed and anxious about the leadership that they

provided to their company is to help them recognize special

situations or outliers where they have done some extraordinary stuff,

and it may not be professionally, but they have in their

personal life. Maybe they have a really good marriage, they're a really good parent, or

they have good friendships where they can build on

those outliers in their current situation that can help them to

actually overcome the struggle that they have and the stress that they

have in their lives to build new situations where they

can reproduce and make things really good in the future. So you

recognize times where there's special situations. So somebody, for

example, if they have had a very stressful situation— let's just

say one of the most common is that they lose somebody that they

love, or they actually have somebody die abruptly that they love. I mean, this is

very stressful. They have somebody murdered that they really love. And so if they're

going to actually overcome that, they have to find

special situations where people have, maybe not in their own life,

but they've seen how people have gotten through the loss of

a loved one, and they can find a way to actually grasp

that situation to make it part of their own

situation. So for you, it's— you're struggling because you lost a

job, which I would say that I had a point in

my career personally where I was just struggling

with failure after failure. I had, I had lost, I had

resigned from a position because of what I would describe as

unethical behavior. And then I had taken on a new position and lost that job

a year later. And then I was unemployed for 7 months. And I

got really very few job offers from other people because I was

struggling. I was, I was defining that as like, I'm a failure in that period

of my life. That was in 2008,

2009. 2007, 2008, actually.

No. Anyway, it was back then. It was a long time ago. It was over

15 years ago. But what I had to do in order to have hope

in my life was find these outliers where I had excelled in my career, where

I had impacted other people, where I had actually put myself out there

and done some things on my own that had made it helpful for other

people, where I could build upon those situations in my life.

Those were special circumstances telling me that I could do it. I could make

it. So the— if you found this helpful, I've shared the first two, two things

you can do to get, to get over and make progress with PT,

with, with post-traumatic stress, with trauma. Third one I'm going to share with you in

just a second. But if you found this helpful, you got to purchase this little

mini course I got for you. It's called Shatterproof Yourself, and I named it

after the jet windshield that can withstand bird strikes and lightning strikes and

all kinds of problems, projectiles, and That can be

you. It's 7 steps to increase your boldness, your mental toughness,

your confidence. Things that I've done and challenged clients to

do over the last 25+ years that you can engage

in, in a little 45-minute mini course that could

absolutely 100% change your life. So hit the link, buy the course, and go

through the steps. It's going to change your life. So the

third step, decision you can make today is

you can actually, after recognizing these outliers in your

life, and after actually recognizing that positive

thinking alone is not actually going to work, it's just keeping you stuck,

you can start to change your

behavior and do what you did before in these special situations.

So you can be honest with yourself and tell yourself that in the past, I've

acted differently. And those are actually the good situations that I was in

in the past, and I can reproduce those situations in the past.. And that's

going to help you to live differently, which is going to help you to move

past the junk. So, and you know,

just as a little side note here is, is I'm a pretty passionate

person when it comes to helping people overcome trauma. And

what we're talking about today is the trauma that you can recognize and you know

that it's impacting you, but there is a level of not being

able to go there at all that can happen even with the trauma that

we recognize. And we can't go there and we can't process it and we can't

make sense of it. So we're stuck. And one of the most promising things I've

seen in the last decade is the use of psychedelics to

help people actually go to places where they're not willing to

go and make sense of it. And so a saying that I have is

our trauma can become the most useful way that

we can help other people, and it becomes a part of our story that we

can utilize to actually have this big, greater,

much more positive future. And so if you look at people,

and you can say that some people, as they

reflect on their past and try to make sense of their past, it's like spaghetti.

It's like they have all these different explanations for why things happen. It's

my fault. It's their fault. It was a bad situation. I'm

bad. This situation is bad. It's— and what that does is if

they haven't really come to terms with what happened in their lives,

is it creates their future that seems incredibly uncertain, where

they have no influence over what happens in their

future. And, and the future that they paint in their mind is

just bad. Something I got to protect myself from. It's not like there

are trustworthy people in the future. There are good opportunities in the future.

There are things that I can engage in that are going to be actually really

wonderful in the future. No, it's just I got to live this self-protective

life. Because it's happened, happened to be that things were bad in the

past. So the future is not really good. So I'm going to actually hurt a

lot of people. Along the way in order for me

to feel safe, which— that's a really big problem. So that's

where I'm absolutely 100% optimistic about what we can do with psychedelics

as we keep studying. And I'm talking about ketamine,

talking about MDMA, I'm talking about psilocybin. And there's therapists like

me getting training, much of which isn't actually—

this usage of psychedelics is not legal in the

United States, except in very unique circumstances. And

it's often driven by the military. Ketamine is one of the only ones

that's actually legal. And all of this requires you being under the care

of a therapist and a medical— and a physician

as well. So, so as we go back on this thing,

like, do what you did before. So find

ways that you can, you can reengage

these special, special situations. So I was talking to a client recently,

and I, I'm going to change— I changed genders of clients. So there's nothing you

can actually— you won't know whether I'm talking about you by

how I'm describing it. But basically, she had

trouble realizing— she had trouble making friends, had been burned, had

had bad situations, some of which she was struggling to take

responsibility for her role, which was minor in the situation. But

anyway, What she was able to identify was that 20 years ago, she built friendships

in a much healthier way than she does now. And she could reproduce that

in a small way if she wanted to. Whether she's going to do that or

not, I don't know. But she could reproduce it. And she could even see that

as we talked, that there were things she could do that would be very different.

And that's putting herself out there, trusting people, engaging in relationships at a

different level. And hey, it could be really awesome for her. And it

could help her to deal with the post-traumatic stress in her

life. So what are you going to do with this? I mean, you have 3

decisions you can make to deal with the PTSD, the trauma in your

life. Positive— number 1 is positive thinking alone is not going to actually help you.

It's just going to band-aid it. It's just going to be a short-term fix. It

may be what you need for now, but you're going to have to do some

things differently. And what are those things? You're going to have to recognize the special

situations from your past when it was actually different. And then the 3rd decision is

you're going to have to do what you actually did before before and plan it

into your life. You know, for me, I

had an outlier when I was in the hospital because of trauma. I

was not dealing with stuff in my life and I wasn't sleeping and didn't sleep

for 4 days straight. I ended up in the hospital, but the outlier in my

life was somebody that was a student

chaplain at a college in Wichita that when I was

at my lowest point, spent some time talking to me. I don't know her name.

I don't know I don't know anything about her. But all I know is it

was an outlier, because it was someone that really seemed to care, even though I

didn't know them. And even though I'm—

they were being paid to talk to me, but I just got the sense that

they were there. And it was like a God thing, like they were there

to be God's presence in my life. And it gave me hope. It gave me

hope that like, God is looking out for me, he's putting people in my life

to watch out for me. And I'm going to keep engaging those people

if I'm willing to live by faith and do the next right thing. That

was an outlier. So what are the outliers in your life that you're going

to actually engage? There's no positive

change unless you decide to change. Now,

80% of making a big transformation in your life is taking new

actions. Only 20% is insight. You've gained insight by listening

to this podcast today. The action is on you. And

go ahead and teach it to somebody else. Talk about it to somebody else. You're

going to be more apt to actually apply it to your life if you

do that. I'm excited for you. I'm excited for some action that you can take

today. So whatever that one thing you learned today, commit to by the end

of the day today, you're going to do something new with what you

learned today. And I'm going to close the way that I always do. Make it

your mission to live the life now that you want to be remembered for 10

years after you're gone. You decide your legacy,

nobody else. I appreciate you greatly. And if you found this helpful,

share it with your friends and your family and people and subscribe and

like on Apple or Spotify, wherever you get your podcast content, because we want

to grow and we're getting close to reaching 50,000 downloads and we need your help

to do so. There's no positive change unless you decide to change. I appreciate

you greatly. And I'll talk to you next time.