Escaping the Drift with John Gafford - Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unleashing Your Potential Through Resilience
Episode Date: October 10, 2024Growing up amidst the swirling chaos of Florida's hurricane season, I've witnessed resilience in its rawest form. As a Floridian, the spirit of perseverance and rebuilding is deeply ingrained in me, e...specially after facing the wrath of recent storms. This episode of the Weekly Drop is a heartfelt reflection on how these experiences have shaped my understanding of resilience, not just as a regional trait, but as a universal necessity to overcome life's obstacles. Drawing from my time on "The Apprentice" and the wisdom of experts like Dr. Liza Siegel, I explore how resilience was a key factor in the show's selection process, and how we can cultivate this vital trait ourselves. In this inaugural episode, I share practical strategies inspired by figures such as Alex Hermosi and Tony Robbins—techniques that can transform every setback into a stepping stone. From the simplicity of achieving small daily wins to the profound impact of sensory triggers and social support, I provide listeners with a toolkit for building resilience. By re-framing adversity as an opportunity and embracing the heroic journey within our own lives, we can learn to face our dragons and triumph over them. Whether it's through expressing emotions in a journal or leaning on a friend, I'm here to guide you in turning life's challenges into stories of growth and victory. Join me on this journey to embrace the power of resilience and unlock your potential for personal growth. 💬 Did you enjoy this weekly drop? Tell us all about it in the comment section below! ☑️ If you liked this video, consider subscribing to Escaping The Drift with John Gafford ************* 💯 About John Gafford: After appearing on NBC's "The Apprentice", John relocated to the Las Vegas Valley and founded several successful companies in the real estate space. ➡️ The Gafford Group at Simply Vegas, top 1% of all REALTORS nationwide in terms of production. Simply Vegas, a 500 agent brokerage with billions in annual sales Clear Title, a 7-figure full-service title and escrow company. ➡️ Streamline Home Loans - An independent mortgage bank with more than 100 loan officers. The Simply Group, A national expansion vehicle partnering with large brokers across the country to vertically integrate their real estate brokerages. ************* ✅ Follow John Gafford on social media: Instagram ▶️ / thejohngafford Facebook ▶️ / gafford2 🎧 Stream the new Weekly Drop here: Listen On Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7cWN80gtZ4m4wl3DqQoJmK?si=2d60fd72329d44a9 Listen On Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/escaping-the-drift-with-john-gafford/id1582927283 ************* #weeklydrop #johngafford #resilience #adversity #florida #hurricane #perseverance #rebuilding #universalnecessity #theapprentice #drlizasiegel #alexhermosi #tonyrobbins #strategies #personalgrowth #challenges #triumph #heroicjourney #emotions #journaling #socialsupport #miniseries
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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 john 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 John 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 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 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, in 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. 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 they're originally predicting it to be damage wise.
But even with that, even with knowing what was coming, right, 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, 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 Sweet Rules or The Sweet 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 contestant seasons.
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, 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 Maz, called Mastering Life's Greatest Challenges by Stephen Southwick and Dennis Charney that shows
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 it's, 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. 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 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 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 adversity of life. If you do one thing to chip 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 a move and he gives you a
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 immediately changes your physiology and it changes your psychology.
I'm going to give 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 the 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,
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'll see you in the next episode.