How To Stay Calm When Life Blows Up

Support by buying me a ☕️

Your day can fall apart in seconds: a crash, a firing, a mistake you can’t take back, or something as small as traffic that flips a switch in your chest. Let's talk about how to stay calm when it feels like everything is hitting the fan, and why three words can pull you back from the edge: can’t change it.

I walk through what that mindset looks like in real life, including a painful job loss tied to my own decisions, and the spiral that can come when you start living in regret. The turning point is learning that you can’t always control your first thought, but you can control your second thought. That’s where emotional regulation starts, and it’s also where real personal development lives.

We also get into self-mastery using Viktor Frankl’s idea that between stimulus and response there’s a space, and inside that space is your power. The goal isn’t to become emotionless. The goal is to shorten how long anger, anxiety, and stress control you, until the same trigger that used to ruin your week barely gets minutes of your energy.

I share lessons from the pandemic, anxiety that showed up out of nowhere, and why traffic is the perfect daily practice for acceptance, mindfulness, and staying present. If this helped you, subscribe, leave a review, share it with a friend, and support the show if you can.

Transcript

Chasing Goals Intro Track

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Losing myself and finding my strength came to the conclusion that I want it all. Feeling that pressure of tryna do better. I wanna reach heights, but too scared to fall. Too scared of failure. Way more scared of feeling regret. I'm not even trying, that's terrifying. I understand that chasing my goals, I bury my clocks because it takes time. I gotta go. I already know. If I wanna grow, you reap what you sow. That be the case. Planting my seeds or water my base. Yeah, I made mistakes. Yeah, I know you grow in your garden, but watch for the snakes. The people that act like you're crazy for trying this, they far away. They don't think it's possible, I think it's possible. That is just hate. If they hate themselves, cause they on the shelf. While you create a life that you love. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. A life that you love. Loving the fact to improving yourself. Decided that you wouldn't settle. Decided that you got the drive to do it. The road got bumped and you put on a pedal. You go up a level, you turn up whenever it's time for you to go put in that work. I know my work, huh? I know it ain't gonna be easy, yeah. I know it hurt, but hangers for sure. Yeah. Until it put me in this earth. Before I ride in that hearse, I'm chasing my goals. I'm chasing my goals. Love enough back to improving yourself. Decided that you in a settler, decided that you got the drive to do it to go. Got more put in the cutter. I'm chasing my goals. Alright, and welcome back to another episode. Thank y'all so much for being here. If you are on YouTube, go ahead and like and subscribe to the channel. If you were on a podcast platform, leave me a review. Most importantly, uh, I came up with a new way for you all to support me. Uh, you can buy me a cup of coffee. I love coffee. If you know me, I drank it every single day of my life. Maybe not every day, but it felt like every day, sometimes more than one time a day. But you can support me by buying me a cup of coffee. I left a link in the description. You just click on that cup of coffee and you can support me that way. It is much appreciated and it helps me keep this thing going. But let's go ahead and dive in today. We're talking about how to be more calm, more peaceful, and more loving, uh, more emotionally stable, even when it's hitting the fan. And you know what I mean by it. Let's talk about how to let go of the things that were negative in your past as well as things that are currently happening in your life right now, in this present moment. And the phrase that we all need to adapt and lean into is can't change it. Can't change it. Even in the most frustrating of moments, let's say you just bought a brand new car and you've been busting your ass, saving up, working on your credit to be able to afford this car, and on the way home from the dealership, you crash and you total it. Would that be devastating? Hell yes. But can you change it? Hell no. And of course, I get it, it ain't that simple. But there literally is no way you can make that car be uncrashed. Unless you got a time machine, that car is just crashed. You can't change it. When I lost my job because I got fired when I was in jail and had to miss work for the weekend because I had a DW I got a DWI. And it was the best job I ever had to that point in my life, money-wise. Still, I couldn't change it. I couldn't turn back time and not drive that night. Now, I could have let that completely derail me and make me lose my motivation and drive and feel like I was a failure with no job. I wasn't using my theater degree. I was working temp labor jobs. I could have let that steer away my ambition and only strive to get another job. But again, I couldn't change what happened. So I had a decision to make. I couldn't change the fact that I didn't have a job, but what I could change was the way I felt about it. How I felt in those moments. And I'll be honest, there was a lot of days that I was down, and I mean really, really down. And eventually I had to come to the realization that, hey, sitting here feeling sorry for yourself ain't gonna make anything better. I was right in the middle of that situation, of that current season of my life, and the only thing I could control was my reaction to it. And one of my favorite quotes, and I use this quote on this podcast a lot, is from Victor Frankel. And you probably heard me say it before, but he says, between stimulus and response, there's a space. And in that space lies our power to choose a response. And in our response lies our growth and freedom. I'm gonna say it again. Between stimulus and response, there's a space, and in that space lies our power to choose a response, and in our response lies our growth and freedom. So the stimulus, your laptop crashing in the middle of a deadline, or your car crashing, you crashing your car, or your house getting broken into, or you losing your job, your response, you can freak out, you can scream, you can cry, you can panic, you can definitely do one of those, maybe even do all of those. Or you can focus on how you can calm your body down and try to remain as calm as possible and see what the next best steps are. Because the fact is you can't always control your first thought, but you can control your second thought. Can't control the first one, but you can't control the second one. So even if you do freak out or panic or cry, that's fine. We human. We have emotion. I ain't asking you to not be human, but that next thought is actually the most important one. We have to be in full control of how we feel in those moments. And this is 100% true if you are on a path in your personal development. And I'm pretty sure all of you know this already, but I'm gonna say it again for the people in the back: personal development, it ain't about making more money, it ain't about having better relationships, it ain't about being more intellectuals, not about being a better business owner. It can affect all those things, it can improve all those things. It can be a reason that you may become a better person or a better parent. But what personal development really is, is self-mastery. Mastery, right? Your responses to everything you do. The mastery of yourself to the way you think, and recognizing how to change your thought patterns over time so you're not limiting yourself. And how to limit the time, a certain event, a certain stimulus, like Victor Frankl says, a certain thing that happens to you, limiting the time that this negatively affects you. And maybe that maybe at first that thing that pissed you off, or it have you pissed off or in a bad mood for a week. And then you work on yourself, and then that same thing will have you pissed off for just a few days. Better, but still you waking up and choosing to get pissed off about it voluntarily, voluntarily, voluntarily, I'm saying right, voluntarily letting that letting yourself get mad about something that happened to you seven, two hours ago. And you keep working on yourself until that turns into only a day that you get pissed off. Then a half a day. And then after a while, it only makes you mad for a few minutes. And like I said before, this work takes time. You ain't gonna work on yourself for a few weeks and all of a sudden see a big difference. Nope, this is gonna take way more consistency than that. And however, and over however long of time that takes of working on yourself, the goal, or one of the goals, is to get to a point where something happens to you that would normally really make you mad or get you upset. Normally you will be upset for a while and it happens again now after you've worked on yourself, and there's no response. That's the goal. When that response is completely gone, and that's self-mastery, being able to fully control who you are and how you show up in every situation. Because we can't control the majority of what's happening around us. Hell, we can barely control ourselves. Literally. So many people say they want to make a change in their life and they want to better themselves, they want to be more successful, they want to make opportunities for other people in their lives, make a change in other people's lives. They want to be able to control all that, and yet they can't control their urge to buy a bunch of stuff that they don't even need from Amazon. No, I ain't talking about you. Don't get offended. But no, if you want to make a change in your life, then it really ain't a realistic thing if you don't work on yourself. Because that's something that you can actually control. And I think it's safe to say that about 99.9% of the things happening around us are out of our control. There's so much stress, so much anxiety, so much anger, so much hopelessness, and a lot of times the reality of it all, it just comes down to the fact that people just resist the things they can't change. Resisting the things you literally can't change will have you stressed, will have you depressed, will have you full of anxiety, all because we can't just accept the things that we can't change. Sometimes we just gotta have that mentality to throw our shoulders up and say, can't change it. Can't change it. And I can't believe it's already been, what, six years now? But during the pandemic, and we was we was all on lockdown, and it was dark for a lot of people, especially me. At first, I was angry and stressed, then depressed, and my anxiety got so high, it still can be. Matter of fact, I think that's where it all started for me, having anxiety, because I never used to have this. I developed this feeling of feeling like I just needed to be doing something. Like there was this deadline or this responsibility that I was neglecting to do. And I and I felt it in my chest, right? And it felt like like I should be doing something right now, like I got this big ass assignment or something that's due tomorrow, and it's midnight, and I haven't even started yet, right? Even though I needed to start it. I had that feeling, that's how it felt to me, that kind of anxiety. And that would literally wake me up out of my sleep. With that feeling, in the middle of the night, I would wake up feeling that. With nothing to do, but just felt like I'm not doing something, something I should be working on right now, something that I need to be finishing or completing, and I just felt like it's just anxiety, right? I was dealing with that. And I started to gain weight, I started I started to lose my muscle mass. I got smaller muscle, smaller muscle-wise, and I gained weight. I started to see the weight gain in my face. And Jim's was closed, right? And I was slacking hard with doing anything, any kind of routine at home, and I was drinking way too much, right? And the moment that made me really wake up when it came to my fitness, at least, I was bringing my auntie uh a case of water from Costco, and she saw me, and she was like, You gaining weight? And I was like, Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. My polar pride was hurt. But I was dealing with all that, and I know everybody went through their own stuff during that time period, too. That wasn't even that deep, what I'm talking about. We all went through some hard times. And the thing is, we could have sat there and be worried about it all, be stressed about it all, be frustrated about it all. But in reality, the only thing we can change is the way we showed up. And when I started this podcast, it was uh first just for my workout clients to help them focus on the way they showed up and what they can't control, right? Because we couldn't control the fact that there was a lockdown and that there was this virus and that we were stuck at home, couldn't change any of that. But what we could what we could control is the way we showed up in those moments. And a lot of people had horrible things happen to them during a shutdown. They lost so much. And on the flip side, a lot of folks found some benefit in it. For me, the biggest benefit I found in that lockdown was personal development, and it's helped me accomplish so much. And I'm in love with it. And I started to focus on what I could control. And the perfect example of this is traffic. Traffic is the perfect example, and we all been in some bad traffic, and we all done cussed somebody out, and probably been cussed out too. You might be in traffic right now. You could get pissed off and stress about being late and grip that steering wheel extra hard and cuss and yell and put your body through all that stress the whole drive. Or you could put on your favorite song, you could put on a podcast, enjoy your coffee, whatever it is, whatever way you can just sit and find something to enjoy in this moment, knowing that no matter what, no matter how much you want the traffic to be better, no matter how late you might be, no matter how much of an idiot that person was that almost caused the accident, no matter how horrible that person was at merging, should be easy, but they don't know how to merge. I'm about to make me cuss. You're gonna get to work at whatever time you're gonna get there, regardless. And I know easier said than done. And for some of y'all, roll rage, run deep in them veins. I get it. Maybe you ain't trying to hear nothing I'm talking about right now. Trust me, I feel you, believe me, I feel you. I need a lot of work on this one. But which one would you prefer? Which one, which one would you prefer? To be stressed out the whole way and fussing and cussing and be mad at how horrible these drivers are, or just try and remain as calm as you can, with the understanding that your body will be happier without that unneeded stress about something that you can't control. Something you can't even control. You can't control it. And how do you think you're gonna show up to work when you eventually make it in? Which one do you think will be better for yourself at work? Which one do you think is gonna lead to a better start of your work day? Right? Changing the way you think about your present moment, especially the things that happened in the past, it can help you enjoy life better in your future. And time travel ain't been invented yet, so you can't go backwards in time and change a damn thing that happened. Don't matter how mad, how depressed about it, how much you judge yourself, how much you shame yourself, how much shame you feel, it don't matter. It ain't gonna change the past. And I'ma use a line from a play I was in at the Guthrie a few years back, the Guthrie Theater. Um, it's a show I was in by Lynn Noddage. It's called Sweat. And my character, Evan, he says, and we can keep talking. But what you gonna do about where you at right now? And like I said at the beginning of this episode, you can't change it. Don't put yourself through unnecessary stress. You can't change it, you have to move on right now. All your fear and anxiety and depression and all those negative emotions you feel are in direct relation to how much you are resisting the way the world is, the way your life has unfolded in the past. Think about that. The more you feel fear, the more you feel an anxiety and worry, it's all in relation to how much you are resisting the way the world is, how much you resist the way things are, that you just can't change. Too many people are ruining a beautiful present moment, worrying about, thinking about, and being down about a moment that they 100% can't change. Ask yourself this question in this moment, am I safe? In this moment, am I okay? And 99.99% of the time, you are you safe right now, you are okay right now, you're not in danger. Now, do you have a lot of stuff to get done today? Tomorrow? This week? Yep, you do, you damn right you do. But right now, wherever you are, you're okay and you're safe. Yes, you have things to face in the future, and things that you are navigating from your past, but in this moment, right here, right now, you're safe. So let's work on controlling what you can control. Don't let the things that you can't control negatively control you. So that's what I got for y'all today. Thank y'all for being here. Again, I would love it if you can support this podcast. It helps me keep this thing going. Please buy your boy a cup of coffee. So the next time I'm in try I'm in this traffic dealing with these drivers who cannot drive, I can just relax and sip on this coffee and just be in the present moment as I'm on my way to my destination. But uh, yes, I left the link in the description so you can buy me a cup of coffee. Just click on that cup of coffee. Uh let's go ahead. Oh, also please share this episode if you think this would be beneficial to a friend or a family member, uh, or share it to your social media and make sure you tag me in it. All those things help me out. But let's go ahead and get to this music. The song I got for y'all today is called It All Makes Sense. Let's ride out. You ain't got a touch to know my brear. Close your eyes, you can hear. I tasted too many tears. It got me thinking. If you really feel me, that I'll make sense. I feel like the song really touching me. I can feel the rush in me of what a feeling. It feels like I'm on the high, like I can touch the ceiling. I felt it in my heart right from the beginning. You can tell I'ma cancer out here talking about my feelings. Not to be too touchy, but your words are never killed me. Hope you felt that. And I've been tryna touch a million. I wanna touch the finer thing, wanna touch all kinda things. Take me to the cemetery, let me touch my mama, Granny. Thinking about my past, I've been seeing all kinda things. Twin-20 hindsight, probably shouldn't try some things. Okay, I see now. Yeah, I see now. Look me in my eye, nigga. Tell me what you see, huh? I see progress, I see prosper, I can see the treetops. I swear I hear the birds, and that's the music to my ears. And I taste one of my tears. Thinking how I persevere, but you ain't got a touch. I tasted too many tears, it got me thinking. If you really feel me, that all makes sense. You ain't got a touch to know I'm real. Close your eyes. You can hear, I tasted too many tears. It got me thinking. If you really feel me. Uh-huh. That all makes sense. I feel like you niggas' feelings never matter to me. I feel like Urka family matters to me. Feel me or not? I feel for George Floyd's family. His life matters to me. I feel like I can feel the damage in me. Feel me or not, but I feel like I'm one of the realest rappers I see. I look around and look the same as far as that I can see. You see it? You see my three fingers, you see me, let them linger. I made my own lane, won't never see a blinker. Once on myself, that's a failure. Let me tell you, the victory never taste the sweeter. And keep my name out your mouth. I hope it tastes like ether. I wanna taste the deepest thoughts and designs. Do what it requires to keep her coming. I make sure she arrive. I watch the news, but a divide, I gotta thinking different. And Donald Trump got white people out here thinking ignorant, thinking like some bigots. And think how to make me feel. But you ain't gotta touch. Yeah. You see, I can't speak for nobody else but me. But believe me when I tell you, all I want for you to do is feel me. You feel me? You ain't gotta touch to know I'm real. Close your eyes. You can hear taste too many tears. It got me thinking. I'm not looking for no handouts or no pats on the back or no favors. I just want you to feel me. You ain't gotta touch to do I'm real. Close your eyes. You can hear I tasted too many tears. It got me thinking. If you really feel me, it all makes sense.