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Transcriber: Jiyoung Hong
Reviewer: Fadwa Zahed
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I began my career as a former
special agent with
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the United States Secret Service
and the U.S. Secret Service.
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There's a dual mission at agency.
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You do protection,
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which means you protect,
the president, former presidents,
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foreign heads of state, and you also
work criminal investigations,
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serious crimes across the board.
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And I did interviews and interrogations
after I left the US Secret Service,
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I had a more public persona.
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I wrote my book, Becoming Bulletproof,
and then I began working on air.
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Today I work for NBC news and I cover
crime and national security.
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What was interesting is people
began writing into me,
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and they started writing into me with
questions, wanting guidance every.
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I want to ask my boss for a raise,
but I don't know how to do it.
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I'm afraid every. I'd like
to change career paths,
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but I don't know how to do it, I'm afraid.
And the questions vary.
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They were all over the place and
I began doing mentor sessions.
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I thought, you know, I really can't answer
a person's question in a text
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or in a note or even in an email.
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So I started doing a few mentor sessions,
guiding people.
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Then a few became a few dozen, then
a few dozen became a few hundred.
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And over the years, I did hundreds
of mentor sessions with people,
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and I found a pattern. I found a pattern
that they were all at the core,
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struggling with common issues, that
there were these inhibitors,
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these patterns in their way of thinking
and behavior that caused them to be stuck,
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that caused them not to know
how to move forward.
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And I want to share these with you today.
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First inhibitor, you're not that special.
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Here's the thing. We may like to
think of ourselves as special.
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Okay, so if I'm special, then that
means you're not special.
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Well, or if you're all special,
then nobody is special.
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The other thing is, when you think
of yourself as being special,
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it kind of means that you're separate
from everyone else. You are unique.
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You know, it's interesting.
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I'm a criminal justice professor,
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and obviously my background
is criminology.
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We found that people who commit crime,
chronic crime,
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those people that commit crime
over and over and over again,
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they think they're special
because the laws and
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the rules don't apply to them. The laws
and the rules are for everybody else.
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I'm special. What else is really
interesting is that those who think of
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themselves as special become
extremely self-focused.
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I am so focused on myself and me that
I make my problems special.
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My pain is special and my
suffering is special.
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Nobody knows how I feel because I am so
special that I hurt so differently.
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And when you feel like that,
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there are higher rates of depression and
you have higher rates of anxiety
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because I am so unique. But what
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I found is when you think that
you are that special,
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you feel alone in the world. You can't get
through it. Nobody understands you.
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You're not that special. And do
you know what that means?
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You're not alone in the world.
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When I was a special agent, uh, I was
exposed to the events of September 11th,
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2001. I worked out of the United States
field office in New York City,
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and I went to work that day
at the World Trade Center.
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So I was there from when the first plane
hit to the second to the collapse of
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the first tower and the second tower.
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Now, what was interesting, there was a
moment when that was all happening,
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that exposure to see all those people
suffer and all those people that
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I couldn’t help or save.
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And what got me through
that really tragic event is
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I understood I wasn't that
special in my pain,
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that other people had been exposed
to what I had been exposed to,
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and that if they could get through it,
I could get through it.
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I knew that I wasn't alone in the world.
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Now, this is the number one thing I get
asked about when people come to me.
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Evie, I need confidence.
I’m not confident.
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How do you manifest confidence?
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I'm going to tell you something.
Confidence is overrated. Overrated.
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Here's a secret. You don't need it.
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You don’t need it. Think of it this way.
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I want to do something. Typically,
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people want confidence so that
they can do something.
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So here’s the thing I want to do.
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Here is me.
I want to go from here to here.
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Ideally I would go this way. Here's
my achievement. Boom. I'm done.
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But do you know what we do? We say, ah,
wait, I need confidence to do this.
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So instead of going this way,
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I'm going to break my path
and I'm going to go
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on this wild journey to find confidence.
Where's this confidence?
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Confidence I need you. Where
are you? Where are you?
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And then once I get it, then I can
come back. You have done this.
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Such a windy road and gone all over
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the place that you either forget
to go back, you get distracted,
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or you lose faith. And we never achieve
what we want to achieve.
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And with that one other thing you
don't need is motivation.
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Motivation equals mediocrity.
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Often people think I need to be
motivated to do something.
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I need motivation to go work out. I need
motivation to study so I can go to school.
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I need motivation to do these things.
I will tell you something.
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If you wait to be motivated in life
to do something,
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you will do the bare minimum.
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When I went through US Secret
Service Training Academy,
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we would wake up at 3 a.m. , we would go
out on these runs for miles and miles,
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and you know what they did
to really mess with us.
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They wouldn't even tell us how
long we would be running for
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so it could psychologically
mess with our heads.
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You would go on these painful runs, your
legs burning, your lungs on fire.
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You would do it anyway. I had zero
motivation to wake up every morning,
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to go to training, to get bruised up,
to get beat up,
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to be threatened every day that I would
fail and get kicked out. No motivation.
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I did it anyway. Do you want to know
something else? That when you do things.
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That's when confidence and
motivation come in.
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But if you set yourself up to seek
these things, to seek motivation.
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And let me ask you a question. Every time
you look for motivation, where is it?
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Motivation. Where are you? I'm just
once it comes, then I can do this.
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And how often does it come? Sometimes
it doesn't come at all.
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But if you're lucky to get it,
what does it do? Hang out.
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Maybe a couple of hours, a couple
of days, a couple of weeks.
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Then what do you do? You never
finish what you start
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because you need motivation.
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Another common inhibitor, and a trait
that I would see in people is
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the mindset of me being a victim,
or me feeling like prey.
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When we think of ourselves as being
attacked, as being victimized by others.
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And I'm not saying that those
things don't happen,
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but when we develop that mindset,
we become that.
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There was a study done in New York City.
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What they did is they put up
some cameras in New York,
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and they started videotaping New Yorkers
walking, just walking down the street.
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So they took this footage.
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Then they gave it to people in
prison to convicted felons.
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And they said to them, I want you to tell
me who you would pick for your prey.
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Who amongst these people would you target
?
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Would you know that they all
picked the same people?
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They all picked the same
people to prey upon.
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Basically, they looked at the way
they walked. Who did they pick?
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Well, the first group they picked were
people that walked very timidly.
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They walked and they kind of had small
steps and they made themselves small
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and, you know, maybe a little bit kind of
to themselves. They put off this vibe.
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I'm very timid. I'm not sure
of myself. Boom. Easy prey.
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Then they picked people who had really
long strides, kind of sloppy walks,
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walking. I'm not really aware of my body.
I'm doing whatever I want with it.
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They targeted those people because
they had this lack of awareness.
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Do you know who they did not pick?
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They didn't pick people who walked
deliberately with conviction.
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Their steps weren't small.
Their steps weren't big.
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But they exuded this energy out to
the world. I am not your prey.
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We become what we think of ourselves,
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and it manifests through
our mind into our body.
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And that's what we show the world. You
are nobody's prey. Remember that.
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And with that, something important
to remember is fear. Now.
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Fear is a good thing. It can help you.
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It's what helps you pay attention
to cross the street.
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It's what keeps you aware.
It's what tells you.
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You know, I need to watch out for
this person. Fear is an emotion.
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So like any emotion, fear is something
that comes and it goes. It's like anger.
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You're angry and then it passes. Sadness.
I'm sad and then it passes happiness.
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All emotions. But what we have done is
we have taken the notion of fear
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and we made it our identity.
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So one of the things I would
hear from my mentees is,
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I'm afraid I'm just a very a person who's,
you know, I'm a fearful person.
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I'm not I'm not a person who's
brave or, you know,
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I'm not that person who can
go out and do things.
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And what they did unintentionally is they
labeled themselves as being fearful.
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Labels are for clothing. They
are not for people.
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Don't label yourself
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when you feel fear. It's supposed to come
pass through you and be released.
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Fear is not your identity. Don't let
it make a home in your head.
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Finally, you don't need to
heal to be resilient.
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When you tie in fear, often
people wonder, well,
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I've been through something really hard.
How do I become resilient?
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I have to, I guess, heal. And then once
I heal, I make the pain go away.
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I make whatever I've been through go away.
I can move forward. I'll be all right.
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I'll be resilient. You can heal from
whatever you've been through.
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But healing is one thing and being
resilient is something else.
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Being resilient means I go through
something traumatic, hard, tragic,
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whatever that is, I go through it. But
then I am able to recover from it.
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And when I say recover, I mean I go
back to who I was pre stressor.
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I go back to can I function day to day
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as I used to function before? It is not.
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I'm going to make it go away. It is not.
I'm going to forget about it.
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It is also not. I want to be the
old Evie, the old person,
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the person who I was before I went through
this. That's not resilience.
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And you really want to master resilience.
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The more difficult things you get to do in
life, the more resilient you become.
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Because now you measure
your bounce back rate.
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I went through something hard,
I recovered.
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Now when I go through something hard again
, I recover again and then again.
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And do you know what happens? You
get faster and faster and faster.
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That is resilience. How quickly I
can recover. And you know what?
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I can move on and live.
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When I put these inhibitors together,
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I also organically realized that
these were things that
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I became aware of throughout my life. So
they're not exclusive to just my mentees.
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They're really tied in. And when
I think of inhibitors,
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it was these are things that keep
us from from moving forward,
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from achieving our goals. And I was a
special agent, U.S. Secret Service.
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And that job definitely was life
or death job every day.
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You didn't know whether or
not you would come home.
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But there were two key moments in
my life where I really thought
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I was going to die. The first time
I thought I was going to die was
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on nine over 11, and my specific moment
was when tower one was collapsing,
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the first tower and I happened to be in
an area where we were trying to triage
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and help people, the wounded people, and
we were putting them in paramedics.
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We didn't know the tower
was going to come down.
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But I remember in that moment, as I
started to hear it, I found shelter,
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I was outside, so shelter was pretty
much a corner on the sidewalk.
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I made myself small and my hope was
whatever falls might miss me.
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And as the tower started to
collapse around me,
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I had a moment and I was like,
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wow, I’m going to die.
And I was actually sure I’m like,
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I'm really going to die. And I had
this thought and this sadness.
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And I thought to myself, oh, there's
so much I didn't do.
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There's so many things I didn't do.
I didn't live.
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And, you know, I prayed in that moment.
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I said, you know, if I make it through
this, I'm going to live my life.
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So that way, the next time death comes
from me, I'm going to be okay to go.
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And so I did live. And then after that,
I made sure to live.
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Fast forward about 20 years later, I
had another near death experience.
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But the second one happened
when I had my daughter.
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I was giving birth to my daughter, and
when I had her, I lost a lot of blood.
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And the doctors at that point were trying
to to help me at that point.
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When I started losing a lot of blood, my
lungs began to fill with a lot of water.
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And so because of that,
I couldn't breathe.
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I was having a hard time breathing.
And I remember even my husband,
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I could hear him in my ear because he was
in the room. He's like, breathe, breathe.
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Fix your breathing. Breathe.
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And I remember thinking, what does
he mean, breathe, I am breathing.
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I started losing oxygen in my body,
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so they were worried about the
oxygenation in my brain.
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And then my kidneys began to shut down.
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It felt like it was my house.
All the lights were on in my house,
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and it felt like somebody was
going through the house
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and just going room to room and
turning off every switch.
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And I thought to myself,
I think I'm dying.
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But in that moment, I remember, remember
the first time and I thought, ah,
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but this time I'm I'm okay to go.
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I have done everything I wanted to do,
and if I didn't get to do it,
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I know I tried. I didn't let these
inhibitors keep me from living my life.
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I'm okay to go. And I really was.
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We have to really think about how we live.
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Because I can tell you when
it is your time to go,
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You’re not gonna think about your cars.
You’re not gonna think about your money.
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You’re not gonna think about your jobs.
You’re going to think, did I live?
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Am I okay to go? And you want to make
sure that you understand that you are not
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that special. And because of that,
you're not alone in the world.
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There are people there to help you,
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to help you get through the hard times.
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You are not suffering alone.
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And with that you will remember that you
don't need confidence to do anything.
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Confidence and motivation. They
will rob you of your success.
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They will rob you of time because you
will chase these elusive things that
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quite frankly, you don't need. I had
no confidence in anything I did.
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I did it anyway. And that
you are nobody's prey.
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Think about how you show up in the world,
how you walk into a room,
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how you speak to people, how
you present yourself,
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what message are you sending to the world
?
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And that even though you are afraid and
that you will fear from time to time,
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you will have that it is not who you are,
and that with all these hardships,
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you will build your resilience and you
will be able to withstand more and more
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and more, so that when your time comes,
you will look back and say,
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I'm okay to go because I lived. Thank you.
Athens, Greece. Special thanks.
