Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592

Starting point is 00:00:00 Coming up next on Passion Struck. I'm saying I just have to get through this day, right? It's okay if I just survive today. I'm not even going to set the bar at thriving. But don't we all deserve more than to get by every day and to survive and say, well, at least I made it through the day. I feel so strongly about that

Starting point is 00:00:20 because I think with the amount of change and challenge that we're all facing, many of us have unintentionally lowered the bar. Welcome to Passion Struck. Hi, I'm your host, Jon R. Miles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our

Starting point is 00:00:41 mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become passion struck. Hey, passion struck fam, welcome to episode 592. Whether you've been with us for a while or tuning in for the first time,

Starting point is 00:01:18 I am so thrilled you're here. You're now part of a global movement dedicated to unlocking your potential, forging resilience, and making what truly matters matter most. Let me ask you this, what if resilience isn't just about bouncing back but about bouncing forward? What if the key to overcoming life's toughest challenges isn't just grit but the ability to adapt, pivot, and transform adversity into a fuel for growth. That's exactly what today's guest, Dr. Tasha Yerck, explores in her brand new book, Shatterproof, How to Overcome Adversity with Strength and Resilience, which officially launches today.

Starting point is 00:01:57 Tasha is a renowned organizational psychologist, New York Times bestselling author, and one of the most sought after voices on self-awareness, leadership and psychological agility. In today's episode we go deep into the science of resilience. What it really takes to withstand life's pressure and come out on the other side not just intact, but stronger, clearer and more intentional. At the core of today's discussion is the Shatterproof roadmap, a transformative research-backed framework that includes tools like probing your pain, auditing your identity, and crafting choice. These aren't just abstract ideas, they're tangible, science-based practices that will

Starting point is 00:02:36 help you take control of your narrative, reframe struggle, and turn hardship into personal power. We explore why some people thrive through chaos, while others feel crushed by it. The danger of over-identifying with suffering and how you can train your mind to face adversity with self-awareness and mental agility. Tasha also shares actionable strategies for breaking free from victimhood,

Starting point is 00:02:58 rewriting limiting stories and developing real resilience, the kind that serves your growth, not just your survival. If you've ever faced a moment that knocked you down, a personal loss, a professional setback, or a season where nothing seemed to go right, this episode will equip you to rebuild, reimagine, and come back stronger than ever. But before we dive in, let's take a moment to reflect on the incredible week we just had here on Passion Struck. Last Tuesday I welcomed Wes Adams and Tamara Miles to discuss their new book Meaningful Work, a must-listen for anyone seeking to align purpose with performance. Last Thursday Donald Miller shared his updated Building a Story

Starting point is 00:03:36 Brand 2.0 book and gave us an exclusive look into his AI platform that's revolutionizing how we can communicate and connect. And then on Friday, Dr. Kurt Gray, now the Weary Family Foundation and Dow Chair at Ohio State, joined me to discuss political division, moral psychology, and how to find common ground in an increasingly polarized world. If you missed any of those episodes, I highly recommend going back. They're packed with transformative insights. And if you're new here, we've curated episode starter packs on topics like mental resilience, personal mastery, leadership, and intentional living. You can find them on Spotify or at passionstruck.com slash starter packs.

Starting point is 00:04:13 For even deeper tools and exclusive insights, sign up for my live intentionally newsletter at passionstruck.com. And if you prefer watching these powerful conversations, head over to the Passion Struck YouTube channel. Now, let's dive into this empowering conversation on the true nature of resilience and how to become shatterproof with Dr. Tasha Yurok. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.

Starting point is 00:04:38 Now let that journey begin. I am absolutely honored and thrilled to have Dr. Tasha Yurik on Passion Struck. Welcome, Tasha. Thanks for having me, John. Thrilled to be here today. We're going to be discussing your brand new book, Shatterproof, which debuts today, the day that this podcast is coming out. But I have to tell you, when I was opening up the book and I came to your dedication, I always love looking at them. And then a name just jumped right off the page to me, Marshall Goldsmith, someone that you call your honorary dad. And I have loved Marshall's work for decades and I've actually had him on the

Starting point is 00:05:21 show and his work has been so deep to me that I ended up anchoring a whole chapter in my book passion struck on his lessons from the earned life. I wanted to start out today by asking you what role has Marshall played in shaping your approach to leadership resilience, which we're going to be talking a lot about today. And ultimately this book. Well, I could talk to you for the entire 60-minute podcast about that. I actually, funnily enough, right before we started recording, I just got off the phone with him. We're talking about a friend's birthday party we're going to in a few weeks in New York. But Marshall came into my life when I was just finishing my first book, Bankable Leadership in 2012. And it was through a mutual connection who had been waiting to introduce me to Marshall until he deemed me ready. And I was ready upon publishing this book, trying to get it on the

Starting point is 00:06:16 New York Times bestseller list and all the fun stuff that comes along with that. And the first conversation Marshall and I had did not go the way I thought it was going to go. I thought it was going to be very calm, very nice, oh, you're going to do great. And he gave me the most candid, helpful, you know, loving, but very honest and truthful advice that actually completely reshaped the way I ended up bringing that book into the world. And also the way that I was thinking about my objectives around the process. That was how Marshall came into my life. That was a very long time ago now. And since then,

Starting point is 00:06:55 he is everything from a mentor to someone that he and I coach CEOs together, so he's a colleague, to somebody that I love going to a piano bar and having a glass of champagne and singing coach CEOs together. So he's a colleague to somebody that I love going to a piano bar and having a glass of champagne and singing show tunes with. So I think the biggest thing that Marshall has taught me is this, and this is a Peter Drucker quote that he often recites, which is that the purpose of life is not to prove how smart you are or how right you are, life is not to prove how smart you are or how right you are, but to make a positive difference. And that's instilled in everything that I hope should do. I love that.

Starting point is 00:07:32 And I have to tell you, when I had him on the podcast, if people want to go back and listen to it, he gave me teachable moments midstream as we were doing the podcast. And then once we got off, he stopped before he got off and gave me very frank feedback for about five minutes straight. And then after he did it, which he did in a kind way, but a very straightforward way, he said, you've got to get to Nashville because I walk every day and the next time you're here, I want to take a walk with you.

Starting point is 00:08:00 So I got to take him up with that. But one thing that I love about his work is he emphasizes this idea that fulfillment comes from the alignment of our values. And then he often talks about our aspirations and our ambitions rather than external achievements. How does that concept connect with your vision of becoming shatterproof? Well, one thing that Marshall says a lot that really resonates with me is that happiness and success are independent variables. And what that means to me is chasing success is not going to bring you happiness. You have to, if you want to be successful, chase that. If you want to be happy, chase that, but don't assume that there's a causal

Starting point is 00:08:45 relationship. And the way that comes into my new book Shatterproof is a high level. This book is for stressed out strivers, people who have big ambitions, who want to be the best version of themselves, who want to contribute and make a positive difference, but they are increasingly weighed down by the demands that continue to come at them. And I think we can all agree that we live in a world where the world is going to just keep asking more of us. And so where I think Shatterproof comes into that concept is we spend so much time pushing, right? Striving. I'm a terrible example of this this week. I was up until 5 a.m. yesterday writing my newsletter, which proves I am just as imperfect as all of us. But if we do that, we often do it at the expense of our own well-being, our own happiness, and more fundamentally, our own needs.

Starting point is 00:09:47 So what Becoming Shatterproof is all about is not sacrificing your success, it's finding a parallel path and a parallel skill set in order to feel better, do better, and live better that goes way beyond whatever it is we're accomplishing. I couldn't agree more. And I was one of those stressed out executives for so much of my career. And so I know exactly what it feels like. And over time, I finally got vulnerable enough

Starting point is 00:10:19 to talk about it because I think there are so many millions, I use the word millions of people who are in the same shoes that I was. So one of the biggest takeaways from your book is that resilience alone is not enough. And you write, the best response to hard things isn't merely to survive them, it's to harness them. That's a major distinction from how resilience

Starting point is 00:10:42 is traditionally framed. Can you explain how being shatterproof is different from just being resilient? I can. Before I do that, if you would indulge me, this is what my agent calls a book with a two-part premise, right? The first premise is we have to deconstruct the myths of resilience, right? The things we expect it to do for us that scientifically it cannot do

Starting point is 00:11:07 in order to introduce the idea of becoming shatterproof. But I'll be as efficient as I possibly can. The idea behind resilience, obviously, is it allows us to cope with difficult things. And it's generally defined by researchers as the capacity to either bounce back or to maintain our functioning during stressful events. Unfortunately, the hype around resilience, this really started in the early 90s.

Starting point is 00:11:36 The research on resilience actually started as early as the 1950s and 1960s. But the hype around resilience has outpaced what scientifically it's proven resilience can do for us. So the three myths of resilience that I think lead us astray. Number one, we believe that resilience is a tool that's going to help us thrive, right? No matter what difficult or bad things are happening, if we practice gratitude, if we have a positive mindset, if we get social support, that we will actually get better and happier and stronger through challenges. But as I mentioned earlier, what resilience

Starting point is 00:12:17 scientifically can do for us and what the most renowned resilience researchers say is that it exists to help us survive, right? There was one study that was done in Italy during COVID lockdowns. And they didn't define resilience as the ability to thrive through a global pandemic. They simply defined it as the absence of depression and anxiety. So the second myth is that our level of resilience is not just

Starting point is 00:12:48 learnable, but wholly under our control. And what we know from the research on this is actually two things. Number one, in terms of the learnability, this is not a slam dunk. There was one meta-analysis, which is a study of studies. They looked at 45,000 data points of interventions designed to improve resilience. And they actually found that not only were those interventions not effective, but in many cases, they reduced the wellbeing of the trainees. Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't other studies that

Starting point is 00:13:23 show that there are small effects, but by the way, there are usually only small effects. There are other studies that show no effect. So that's the first piece. The second piece is the people who need resilience most are the people who often have the fewest resources of resilience. So examples of this might be people who went through early childhood trauma. It might be people who are living as I do with a chronic illness and disability. But the idea there is if we see resilience as wholly learnable and wholly under our control,

Starting point is 00:13:55 it leads to something I call grit gaslighting, which is if you can't cope, maybe you just didn't spend enough time on that yoga mat. Maybe you just didn't think positively enough. The third myth, and this one's actually pretty simple, the research shows that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger is actually incorrect. The truth is when we're exposed to ongoing chronic stress, it actually depletes our resilience and makes stress, it actually depletes our resilience and makes coping and staying strong and not breaking even harder. So that's the landscape that we're in. That's what we're dealing with here in terms of the myth versus the reality of resilience. Now you asked the question, how is being resilient different from being shatterproof? There's a couple ways that I think this distinction makes sense.

Starting point is 00:14:44 shatterproof, there's a couple of ways that I think this distinction makes sense. So where resilience is reactive, right? We wait for things to get better. We do our coping practices and our self-care. Becoming shatterproof is a new complementary skill set to resilience that says we will get stronger through adversity if and only if we proactively harness it to grow, right? Bad things just happening to us does not magically make us more resilient. But if we harness those events, it can make us shatterproof.

Starting point is 00:15:17 The second distinction is that resilience can be pretty defensive, right? It focuses on endurance. It doesn't focus on upping our game. And it gets us back to the baseline of where we were. Becoming shatterproof is offensive. It gives us access to the best version of ourselves. And my and others research on this shows that it increases meaning, personal growth, inner peace, even physical health. And then the last distinction that I actually think

Starting point is 00:15:45 is in some way the most important is that resilience is a one size fits all approach. No matter what you're going through, if you're optimistic, right? If you exercise, if you sleep a lot, if you engage in self-care and have a gratitude journal, that will help you cope. What's different about becoming shatterproof and specifically something

Starting point is 00:16:08 I call the shatterproof roadmap, which is a four-step process to follow to become shatterproof is that it's aimed at reducing the specific needs that you are not getting met that are causing adversity to have an even worse effect on you. And so I think you can think about those terms interchangeably and they're not in contradiction with each other. But shatterproof is really a new scientifically supported skill set that can help us, especially when our resilience is running low.

Starting point is 00:16:43 Tasha, I'm so glad I read your book because I know the connection points that you're making, but people always ask, why do you read every single book? Because when an interview totally goes a different direction than I'm planning it to go, it's nice to have it as the backdrop so you can read it. Have I taken you off track? Have I ruined the plan? You took two sections and just combined it in one, which is great.

Starting point is 00:17:06 So I'm gonna just go back a step to the introduction of your book because I don't wanna leave it without talking about Emily's parking lot brawl because I think it really does a good job of illustrating how the most high achieving resilient people can take a hit and reach their breaking point, which is exactly what happened to me. Why was that the right starting point for the book?

Starting point is 00:17:32 So Emily, just to briefly summarize, is a successful professional in healthcare. She has three children who are younger and therefore require a lot more time and energy. She has a husband who is battling health challenges. Of course at her job they're asking her to do more with less as we all are continuously. I wonder like how much less can we actually do more with at any given point? And she thinks she's handling the stress well. Something pops up which is that her son starts having behavioral problems. He's having tantrums at home, tantrums at school.

Starting point is 00:18:10 His teachers are concerned about him. And to her great regret, she and her husband started talking about the situation. And she said, this doesn't seem like it's a huge pressing challenge. Let's see what the school can do for him. Let's see what we can do for him and let's reassess, right? Let's reassess in a month or six weeks. They learned shortly after that. Her son was being bullied by a girl in his grade named Greta.

Starting point is 00:18:38 And Emily thought that she was fine through all of this. She did notice it. Well, she, so she amped up her self-care, just like I said, she even gave up all added sugar, including her beloved gummy bears. She was crying in her car on her way to work a little bit more than she would admit. She was exercising less, she was drinking more, but she was fine, right? It's that like, how are you doing? I'm fine. So she was doing everything right in the resilience playbook until one day she broke under the weight of a feather. She was taking her

Starting point is 00:19:13 son Clark, the one who was being bullied to school to kindergarten drop off. And he seemed very anxious. And she looked down at him and he said, mama, that's her, that's Greta. That's the girl who's bullying me. And she basically blacked out at that point. She marched up to this little girl and her mom, started yelling at the little girl, yelling at the mom, and it ended with a, what is now comical, but it was then illustrative of just how far,

Starting point is 00:19:43 how little her coping resources were giving her. They got into a tug of war over a set of school supplies. And the reason I think that story is something that we can all relate to is we are, life today basically looks like this, at least for stressed out strivers, who's the audience for this book. A higher than before level of stress, right? A higher baseline of stress than five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, punctuated by unexpected crises, right? That we don't see coming. And so what happens, and we saw this with Emily, is we think we're fine when, whether

Starting point is 00:20:30 we know it or not, we might be one crisis away from breaking. And that crisis doesn't have to be something dramatic. It can be, I'll give you just a very quick example. I was scanning the last round of revisions in my printer for my publisher, like a couple months ago, and the scanner stopped working. And I literally did one of those dramatic throw the papers all over the room and slowly slide down the wall crying and wondering why my life was so terrible. That's what it looks like. And they're done that we've all had that dramatic sliding down the wall crying crying, moving moment.

Starting point is 00:21:05 Right. And so I think there's just something in that for all of us. And we're experiencing that in all parts of our life. I agree. I remember at the time I was a C level at Dell and I was so freaking stressed out. I had crap going on at work. I had crap going on in my home life. crap going on at work. I had crap going on in my home life. And I just reached this point like no one cared how I was doing. And I'm one of these people who historically does a very good job of

Starting point is 00:21:36 keeping my coal under pressure. And I had this direct report who just kept doing boneheaded things time and time again, getting us deeper into crap with the business segments that we were supporting. And I remember another one of them hit us in this staff meeting at IFERC and just went off on him. And to this day, I feel so bad about it, but underneath it, I had just this level of pressure and tension that had just been built up that I think it was just waiting for a release. And unfortunately, I unloaded it on him. The thing I learned from that is I've

Starting point is 00:22:13 never done it again, but boy, did I lose my cool in that moment. And you are not alone. I heard an almost identical story from a CEO that I was coaching maybe six months ago. He kept telling me he was fine and fine through this major organizational transformation that he was leading. And he called me one day and he said, so today, for no real reason, when something really small happened that didn't go the way I wanted it to in our team meeting, I started yelling at everyone. So I guess I'm not fine. Right?

Starting point is 00:22:50 And that's the thing is like we're fine until the moment that we're not fine. Absolutely, it's how it happens. And that's one of the reasons I loved in your next chapter, the Bud Worm epidemic as a metaphor for human resilience I loved in your next chapter, the bud worm epidemic as a metaphor for human resilience, because this epidemic for people who aren't familiar with it, you can explain it to them,

Starting point is 00:23:13 but it's a striking analogy for how resilience isn't always enough, how something that worked in the past can fail when conditions change. And in the modern world, as you're describing, we're facing our own quote unquote, epidemic seven. From digital overload to gosh, we're seeing worldwide geopolitical instability.

Starting point is 00:23:34 I was just listening to NPR before our interviews started and wow. What are some of the outdated resilience strategies people rely on and why are they no longer effective? Sure, I think maybe a good way to think about this are do's and don'ts. One of the biggest mistakes that people make that's a don't is using past strategies to cope with completely new problems. And you brought up the budworm outbreak of the 1970s in Canada and Maine as an example. It's a hard story to break into sound bites, but it's fascinating. And essentially what happened was this was the biggest spruce budworm outbreak that had ever been seen.

Starting point is 00:24:18 What happened before, it was the seventh outbreak that they tracked. And it was every number of years, the bud worms would come, or there would be no human intervention because back then they didn't have chemicals like DDT and it would go on for sometimes up to 10 years. And the forest would reclaim its resilience at some point. And in epidemic seven, which again was in the seventies,

Starting point is 00:24:43 they had by this time discovered in other types of outbreaks, this chemical called DDT. And I could not, if my life depended on it, pronounce the full name, although I did for my audiobook, so people can listen to that. But it's the acronym is DDT. And because they had used this chemical for everything else, right? Because they had this hammer and everything was a nail, they decided what better way to fight the spruce-budworm outbreak than to spray millions of acres of trees with DDT. Unfortunately, that made the epidemic worse. And there's a lot of technical stuff I won't go into about why that was, Unfortunately, that made the epidemic worse.

Starting point is 00:25:25 And there's a lot of technical stuff I won't go into about why that was, but I think it's such a good metaphor of when we're facing an entirely new problem, going back to our old coping strategies that worked maybe when our life was a little bit normal is it's a big don't. And I think along that same line, another don't is to make resilience your only coping strategy. We know that resilience has limits. We know that some people have more resilience than others through no fault of their own.

Starting point is 00:25:58 What I think the right way to use resilience as the do's, are first of all, sometimes there are these sudden, huge, massive crises that we have to just get through, right? And sometimes just getting through is a miraculous achievement. But again, if we use that every single time something bad happens to us, we're going to run out of resilience. And so the last do I would share is to really think about your resilience as an exhaustible resource. An example, this is one of the things that helps me. I think it's a resilience practice.

Starting point is 00:26:35 I love adult coloring books. I'm an introvert and I have a whole adult coloring book about introverts. But if that helps me in, after I've had a stressful day at work, and then the next day I have a family crisis, and I use the adult coloring book, and you know where I'm going with this, right? If you continue to use this blindly without thinking about your strategy, you're not, you're assuming that resilience is going to continue as long as you need it to continue to help you. And so I know there's a lot there. This is a pretty rich topic,

Starting point is 00:27:11 but I think the biggest take home is to not use old solutions to solve brand new and chronic problems. You're absolutely right. And as you look at the world today, we absolutely need new solutions to the problems that are impacting us because climate change didn't come out of nowhere. And the way we've solved crises in the past isn't working. So we need a new way to come at it, which is a systematic approach as Seth Godin has laid out that we need to get on

Starting point is 00:27:43 board with. So in chapter three, you introduced this concept of resilience ceiling. And this is after you go through the three myths. And I could ask you six questions about this chapter alone, but one of them that I really loved is you use this metaphor in the chapter comparing resilience to a rubber band

Starting point is 00:28:04 that stretches until it finally snaps. And I love this because in my own book, I had this chapter on becoming a perspective harnesser. And I used the story of my friend, Chris Cassidy, who at the time was training to become a seal at Buds. And he told me that the way he got through Buds was using this analogy. He said, me that the way he got through Bud's was using this analogy. He said, hard times end, challenges end, and you need to look at your resilience like it's a rubber band. And sometimes it contracts and sometimes it expands. And what you need to look for is when it expands, not to let it break. And so he used that as a way to get through the micro moments of incredible pain so that he could reach that point where it would constrict again and he would get a break and be able to recover. So, can you step into this and help? Oh, yes, I'm going to take maybe an unpopular opinion. I'm popular in the fact that I'm a people pleaser and I hate disagreeing,

Starting point is 00:29:06 but I feel professionally obligated to. That analogy is great, but we have to follow it to its logical conclusion. In Shatterproof, I use this analogy and I use the example of, imagine you're back in high school and you're sitting in a class and your teacher is droning on about something that you neither understand nor care about, and you fiddle in your bag and you find a rubber band, and you start stretching it and letting it go back, stretching it and letting it go back. Kind of a makeshift fidget spinner, right? And over the semester, that rubber band becomes your constant companion.

Starting point is 00:29:43 Every time you're stressed, you're pushing it open, you're putting it back. What happens to a rubber band over time if you keep doing that? It breaks, right? It will snap. And when it comes to this idea of hitting our resilient ceiling,

Starting point is 00:30:02 most of us don't even know we have a resilient ceiling until we're bouncing off of it. In the same way that you're stretching your reliable rubber bands, right? It's always served you well, but by the way, your stress keeps coming. So that's another sort of polite disagreement I'd have with that analogy,

Starting point is 00:30:22 which is it assumes we live in a world where you can let the rubber band go back to normal for a long enough period of time. And so from my perspective, I think, I actually think the analogy is really good to show the benefits of resilience. But what we miss is that it also shows us that resilience is an exhaustible resource. And I will tell you this from personal experience and from so many people that I've interviewed and studied is it runs out at the worst possible time and the time we least expect it. Maybe just a step back because I agree with what you're saying.

Starting point is 00:31:00 I use this as part of a chapter where I was explaining the power of perspective shifts, meaning so often we get into either or thinking. And when we do that, it causes us to get into this whiplash. But when we start allowing ourselves to get into more both and thinking, and I went into the behavior of science about it, we start finding an equilibrium to it. And then after this, I introduce the topic of how do you reach the optimal state of anxiety and I used it to play into that as well. So I completely agree with you.

Starting point is 00:31:35 If you keep stretching it back and forth overall, you're going to wear the thing out and you're going to wear yourself out. Exactly. So Tasha, I want wanna move forward in the next section of the book, you outline three major shatterproof mindset shifts that people must take to move beyond just coping. And you say the first is moving from discounting hard things to actively embracing them.

Starting point is 00:32:00 The second is shifting from coping to the courage to change. And the third is breaking free of the limiting beliefs that keep us stuck. Can you maybe go through which one you think people have most trouble with? It's interesting. I don't know if I can pick one. I want to just slightly revise the third mind shift. It's actually going from bouncing back to growing forward. I might choose that one because I think it summarizes this process of becoming shatterproof almost better than anything else can. And you think about how do we deal with our daily stresses and challenges in the course of the lives that we lead?

Starting point is 00:32:40 We wake up every day. We never get through our to-do list. There are more people demanding things of us than we can possibly satisfy. And we get by. And that doesn't mean that we don't have wonderful moments and great connections and can have a life that we find generally fulfilling. But I think that sort of, again, that elevated baseline of stress punctuated by unexpected crises leads so many of us to have this mentality. And I'll be honest, I'm in a time in my life

Starting point is 00:33:13 right now with this book launch where I'm slipping back into bouncing back. I'm saying, I just have to get through this day, right? It's okay if I just survive today. I'm not even going to set the bar at thriving. But don't we all deserve more than to get by every day and to survive and say, well, at least I made it through the day. I feel so strongly about that because I think with the amount of change and challenge that we're all facing, many of us have unintentionally lowered the bar and just said, like last night I finished my newsletter at God knows what time in the morning, probably when people were waking up for work. And I said, good job self, you made it through another day and becoming

Starting point is 00:33:57 shatterproof is a daily choice, right? It's not time consuming. It's not complicated, but I actually had a moment this morning where I actually had to sit down and say, okay, self, you have to model this behavior. And it doesn't mean that you can't fall back because we're humans and it happens. But the bar that I think we should all have is no matter what's going on in our lives, no matter what challenges, no matter what we're facing, is that there is always a way to grow through them, to become better, stronger, wiser, happier, to find more joy

Starting point is 00:34:34 and peace and purpose. And the tool that I give your listeners and your watchers comes from one of my mentors and another person that I dedicated the book to, Alan Mulally. And what Alan says is his hypothesis after carefully studying manuscript and book, is that the first step to become shatterproof is what he calls a better way mindset. And all that is, the simplest thing in the world, we just have to choose is to believe that a better way exists, even if we don't know what it is yet. And so I think this idea of I will no longer settle for barely surviving.

Starting point is 00:35:16 I know there's a better way. And I know, regardless of whether or not you pick up shatterproof, right? Maybe there are other tools that are helpful. But I think we just need to stop staddling in a world that keeps demanding more of us. I can agree more, and thank you for sharing that. And I have always wanted to meet Alan, one of my peers at Dell used to work for him

Starting point is 00:35:38 when she was at Ford. I think he was at Ford, correct? Yes. Yep, he was. So the core part of your book is you go through these three of these four steps to becoming shatterproof. Step one is to probe your pain. Step two is to trace your triggers. Step three is to spot your shadows and step four is to pick your pivots. And I wanted to ask you about the first one. You quote in the book,

Starting point is 00:36:05 you can't gain control of the situation and find solutions until you face your pain head on. You have to accept the reality of your life and understand that it's okay and that it's not going to be what you planned. On the other hand, you have to say, I'm gonna kick the situation in that you know what. My question for you is Jan's story illustrates the moment she shifted from enduring pain

Starting point is 00:36:26 to harnessing it as a tool for change. Why is it so crucial for listeners and watchers of this episode to acknowledge their suffering instead of suppressing it? Okay, that's a great question. I'm reminded of a Lord Byron quote that is in the book. He says, adversity is the first path towards truth. And what I argue pretty strongly as a self-awareness nerd and according to Marshall

Starting point is 00:36:54 Goldsmith, the number one self-awareness coach in the world, I believe that there is no truth without awareness and that awareness has to start with us. And so in adversity, the path to truth is not to push through our pain, to pretend we're fine, to tell ourselves when we're awake at two o'clock in the morning, staring at the alarm clock, and we know we're not fine, but we're saying like, you've got this, other people have it worse than you.

Starting point is 00:37:27 By doing that, what we are missing are crucial signals to unlocking a better life. And again, like you said, it might not be the life we planned. Sometimes things happen that we can't go back, right? It's a death or a divorce or we lose a job. But in probing our pain, what we start to learn, and the science supports this, is that pain is a signal that something is not quite right in your life or in your world. And when we deny it, we are literally shutting the door on the opportunity to understand what

Starting point is 00:38:05 that is and to find that first path to truth and adversity. Thank you for that, Tasha. And I'm writing my own second book right now. And what you were just describing is a section that I've just been slaving over for the past couple of weeks because I'm trying to tell what you just said through my own personal life story and it's painful. And I'm trying to figure out how vulnerable to be. And so I finally just decided to put it all on the table. I appreciate bringing that up.

Starting point is 00:38:35 So the third portion of your book, you go into these shatterproof transformations and tools. And the first one is crafting confidence. But I want to go into the last two because they really resonate with what we discuss here on the podcast, not that confidence isn't one of them, but in the time we have, I wanna go into this next one, which is crafting choice because something I believe in

Starting point is 00:38:59 is it's our agency, it's our intentionality about the choices that we make that shape the life and the outcome that we end up producing. So you quote that the only thing that can beat fear is laughter. And you bring up the story of op tour or at poor. And you discovered that humor can dismantle fear and inspire action against oppression. And part of the reason I'm bringing this up is I was probably 20 feet away from one of Milosevic's, well, not one of his top general when I was in Croatia. And so I've lived this. You have this concept of bully jiu-jitsu, which when you're going through this,

Starting point is 00:39:46 turned a dictator's strength into a weakness. And I want you to go through that and how we can apply this same choice type of framework in our everyday lives when we're facing intimidating authority figures or seemingly insurmountable challenges. So thank you for bringing up the story. It's about my dear friend, Sergei Popovich.

Starting point is 00:40:06 If I oversimplify this, but also factually accurately explain and summarize what he did as a college student, he started a movement that overthrew the murderous dictator Slobodan Milosevic. And for those of you that aren't familiar with that story and that history, this was mostly in the 1980s and 1990s. Milosevic was starting wars with every neighboring country in the Balkans. It ended with hundreds of thousands of people dead, millions of people displaced, and it resulted in the disintegration of the Yugoslav Federation.

Starting point is 00:40:43 And so this was a bad, dangerous, tyrannical man. And Sergei and his friends, which started out literally as six people in a smoky apartment in Belgrade, six college students saying, all right, well, we know we can't beat this guy on force. It seems like a pretty bad idea to challenge a dictator with his own police force, an army, to competition of strength. So what can we start doing to assert our choice, to show the people of Serbia that a different future is possible, and to use their words to delegitimize our oppressor. Surja, that's a much fancier name that Surja has than I do. I just call it bully jujitsu. And what we know about jujitsu,

Starting point is 00:41:31 if you've ever read about it or studied it, is that instead of using your strength against your opponent, you're actually using their strength against themselves. So if they punch you, you might step to the side, right? And maybe they fall down. And so that basic concept is as follows. And here's what they did, I'll give you an example. They knew that the people of Serbia would be too scared

Starting point is 00:41:57 to just to ask them, could you please rise up against this murderous dictator? So what they started doing, were creating these very fun, funny, and low stakes opportunities for them to start asserting their choice. And my favorite one that I talk about, they called the smiling barrel. And what they did is they had one of their members, Duda, design, they went to a nearby construction site, they found this big metal barrel, and they had draw or paint, I think, an absurd looking caricature of Milosevic's face. And next to it,

Starting point is 00:42:33 they wrote a sign that said, smash his face for just a dinar, which is the equivalent of 0.05 cents. And so what they did is they took the barrel, they took a baseball bat and the sign to one of the busiest squares in Belgrade. And they parked themselves not too close because they didn't want to get caught, but close enough that in a nearby coffee shop that they could see what was happening. And it was a very interesting experiment, right? Anyone who's a psychologist or psychology minded is fascinating. So at first people were walking by, they were confused, they didn't know what to

Starting point is 00:43:08 do, and then one young person, probably a college student, kind of walks past it and comes back, he takes a coin out of his pocket and he puts it in a bucket where it would have to be, and he picks up the bat and go away. And the clang you can hear for blocks and blocks. And so people start to notice this. And the people who are walking by here, they're families. They're young couples in love. They're college students.

Starting point is 00:43:38 This is like the most wholesome group of people that could be participating in this as possible. And as soon as he did that, other people started to gain confidence and they started smashing his face for denier. So what happened? Someone called the police. The police arrived, three policemen in a squad car taking this so seriously, and they quickly assessed the situation. They said, wait a minute. Okay, so the first thing they wanted to do was find the rebels who had designed this

Starting point is 00:44:06 terrible threat against their dictator, and they were nowhere to be found. So there were only two choices left. The first other choice was they could arrest these families with children, these young, wonderful college students, which they knew they couldn't do because there would be a public outcry. Or, wait for it, they could arrest the barrel. So, Serge and his friends knew this was going to happen in a Monty Python-esque moment. They made sure that there were enough people milling about that had cameras. And so they snapped

Starting point is 00:44:47 all of these shots of these three serious, intense, tough policemen arresting a barrel with a caricature of Milosevic's face and putting it in the squad car. What I love about this story is it's a lesson for all of us. And I'll just give you a really quick tool. Obviously most of us hopefully are not facing that situation, but maybe we're facing a boss who's a jerk. There's a tool that I talk about it and insight actually, my second book and not shatterproof, but I call it the laugh track.

Starting point is 00:45:23 So the next time your horrible boss does something to you that's so cruel that you wanna cry, imagine a laugh track behind it, right? It's a sitcom and this is a ridiculous character that your character has to deal with. And it doesn't solve all problems, but it's a way of using their strength against them and delegitimizing your oppressor. Tasha, thank you so much for sharing that story.

Starting point is 00:45:50 And I wish we had another 20 minutes to keep going, but I know you've got a hard stop. So for the listeners who want to learn more about you, where's the best place for them to go? I am fortunately or unfortunately ubiquitous on the intranet. You can find me, my handles are Tasha Urick, E-U-R-I-C-H. And if you want to learn more about the Shatterproof book and a bunch of resources that we have to help with that, you can go to shatterproof-book.com.

Starting point is 00:46:19 Tasha, it was so incredible to have you today and congratulations on what I expect will be another New York Times bestseller. Thank you so much. As my mom would say, from your lips to God's ears. Let's hope. That's a wrap on an incredibly insightful conversation with Dr. Tasha Yorick. Her groundbreaking work in Shatterproof reveals that resilience isn't just about enduring hardship, it's about harnessing it to create lasting transformation. One of the biggest takeaways from today's episode is the importance of probing your pain, understanding that adversity we face

Starting point is 00:46:51 isn't just something to survive, but a tool for growth. As Tasha emphasized, true resilience isn't about avoiding discomfort. It's about leaning into it, processing it, and using it to propel ourselves forward. So as you reflect on today's conversation, ask yourself, where in your life have you been settling for survival instead of stepping into growth?

Starting point is 00:47:11 What small intentional shifts can you make today to start building a more resilient mindset? And which of Tasha's insights resonated most and how can you begin applying them in your own journey? Remember, transformation isn't about passively consuming information. It's about taking action. If you're ready to go deeper, check out Shatterproof.

Starting point is 00:47:28 It's available now, and links to our book, Tasha's work, and other resources are all in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Wanna bring the power of intentionality to your organization? Beyond hosting PassionStruck, I speak to companies, teams, and events about unlocking potential, building resilience, and creating lasting impact.

Starting point is 00:47:47 If you're looking for a keynote speaker who can inspire action and drive transformation, visit JohnRMiles.com slash speaking to learn more about how I can help your team thrive. And if today's episode spoke to you, I'd be incredibly grateful if you'd leave a five-star rating in review. It's one of the best ways to help PassionStruck reach even more people who need these conversations. If you know someone who could benefit from today's discussion, share this episode with them. Now, coming up next on PassionStruck, I'm joined by Stanford psychologist, Dr. Greg Walton,

Starting point is 00:48:17 author of the extraordinary new book, Ordinary Magic, the science of how we can achieve big change with small acts. In our conversation, Greg reveals how small shifts in perception, which he calls wise interventions, can create upward spirals of transformation. Whether it's a mindset shift, a reframing of purpose, or the belief that you belong, this episode will show you how seemingly small actions can lead to extraordinary change. Trust me, you won't want to miss it. I think there's so much of our lives today that involves blame that's pejorative.

Starting point is 00:48:48 And it would be easy to look at a teacher, say, who's reacting in a punitive, hostile manner to a student and judge them and say that there is something wrong with them. But I think what's really important is to understand how and why these questions come up for all of us in circumstances, whether it's a question like does my partner really love me when you're having a conflict conversation or whether it's a

Starting point is 00:49:10 question like is this kid just an f-up as they come back to school from juvenile detention. That these are reasonable questions, like it doesn't help us to suppress them and push them away. Finally, thank you for being part of Passion Struck. This show is built on curiosity, transformation, and action, and I'm honored to have you with me on this journey. Remember, the fee for the show is simple. If you found value, share it. Let's keep growing this movement

Starting point is 00:49:33 and living with intention, impact, and purpose. Until next time, live life Passion Struck. You

Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592

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