EPS 3: Endless Evolution - Part 3: The Precipice

Welcome to the architect of Resilience podcast, where we explore the secrets of overcoming life's challenges and unlocking unstoppable strength through deep personal conversations and expert insights. Today we're going to talk about the precipice. The precipice is being on the edge. You can imagine the edge of a cliff, and in front of you is a chasm, a chasm of the unknown. And it's not. Well, it is a scary thing, actually, and we're going to talk about that and how you manage it.

But it is momentum, and it's momentum for change throughout your entire life. It's how you live, it's how you grow, whether it's personally in business. And so you're going to take a step in to that unknown, a step into that chasm. You may leave and leap, and at times you might just get pushed there in life. The precipice is one of my favorite p's to talk about in the six P's methodology of the endless evolution. But before we dive into that, who am I and

what is this? This is the architect of Resilience podcast by Chris Duffin. I'm an award winning engineer and author on human resilience. My inventions are used in, well, nearly every professional sports team, major universities, all branches of the military, even the White House. And my passion for this human resilience is from my models that I developed in early childhood, overcoming fairly unbelievable levels of trauma and obstacles. And that's why I'm here today, is

sharing some of these approaches and how we look at that now. The entire endless evolution framework is built around intrapersonal, interpersonal, and extra personal development. And the strategies that we use within that, and every one of those, the kickstart for change, be it organizational behavior change, behavior change, your individual change, any of those within that is kicked off from this framework of

momentum. Being in a point where the pain of being in the moment right now is more than that leap, that unknown, the fear that's in front of you to get to the peak at the other end, there's an area out there and you can see it. It's this pinnacle of a mountain. It's where you want to be. It's the goals that you want to accomplish, and it has to be enough of a pain to be able to take that

step. A lot of times it's a story. Sometimes it's a story that you need to create for yourself so that you really understand where you're at right now to create that momentum, to create that pain, that's going to propel that step to get you off your ass to dive. And we talked about those other things that come after that in the previous episodes around the plunge and that state of being as you're falling into the unknown. You don't know where you're going to land at or

the pit and how to navigate that. Now, just like those discussions, every one of these is in micro and macro cycles. And we're going to come, we're going to come back to that because it's really important to understand that as we choose what to employ and how to use it within that. So in understanding, again, the framework, the cyclical pattern of this in the micro and macro cycles of it, it's really easy to take that first intro that I, that I did and kind of align that

with what I call a lot of like hustle porn. You know, the hustle preneurs, the people that just want you to push and drive and they're selling this out that, and it's really easy to go. Yeah, that's just like one of those, I'm going to lean into it. A lot of that common language that's used and not understanding that it's a cyclical nature. You're not always going to be leaning in hard driving, hard stepping into the unknown, because we want to be conscious, are those things aligned with our

passion, with our purpose? And is it going to deliver the things that I need so that I can develop the intrapersonal skills, the strategic, extra personal development for being able to tangibly accomplish what I want to accomplish in life? And so, because there's moments where we're going to specifically choose which precipice to step off of and which not to, and how to understand the signals that are being sent. So I'll give a really easy story.

This is actually a conversation me and my wife were having this last week with one of her friends. So she was talking with someone and they were talking about wanting to get out and start their own business, right? And they, at the same time, in that same discussion or conversation that they're having, we're talking about some struggle and some relationship problems with their partner

and what choices to do. And, you know, my wife, you know, familiar with these methodologies, she goes, do you think that you're going to be successful in having and starting and managing your own business if you can't have that hard conversation right there? And that's a micro cycle. That is an opportunity for a small precipice moment to be able to choose. I need to step into this, because if I can't handle these small things in life, how am I going

to manage the big things in life? So it's not purposely about taking on every single major, you know, obstacle or challenge in the world in front of me. It's about strategically choosing the, the ones that are aligned with where I want to go, what do I want to learn? Because every one of those is going to be hard, it's going to be challenging, and it's going to get you stronger. Now, we don't want to make

the leaps, too. So again, in this same example, we want to take micro leaps and slowly build our strength and our skills in these things before taking a big one and going off to a place that it's too hard to recover from. That pit is too big, it's too deep. It's going to take you years to build out of this because you jumped into something and you didn't have the ability, the skills or the strength. And so that's an example. But I'm going to give you a number of examples from my life

as we talk through this. So there's a long period of time that I wanted to be out and start my own business again. And we'll get to some other examples besides business for those that may not. That's not everybody's goal. Certainly

shouldn't be everybody's goal, but I made some big changes in my life, right? I walked away from corporate America with a big salary, security, to, you know, leverage, everything that I had to strike out on my own. That was a big move from where I was at is a, you know, as a corporate executive doing turnarounds in the world,

but I chose not to for a long period of time. And there's people that I mentored that I told not to do that, that wanted to do the same because you need time in the trenches, like developing these things. But when you do every time, it's still a scary thing. You are never ready.

This debating whether I'm going to go back to school, I'm going to make a job change, I'm going to, you know, get in a relationship or out of a relationship or any of these major events in life, like, they are going to make you twist up in your gut with, like, anxiety and stress around these things. But there should be a mixture within that of excitement at the same time. And that is where we need to create the story. That's where we need to

create that. Excuse me. That's where we need to create that pain greater than the gain that we're going to have of staying in the current situation, we need to create the story of this giant gain and the pain of where

we're at so we can step through that. Because when you have that mixture, and I call it the gut check, and this is how I advise a lot of leaders, a lot of times that would have those where you always want to, there's things in your life that you're always trying to put off, whether it's a difficult conversation with a family member or a coworker or a boss, things like that. When those come up and you have that feeling of like, I want to avoid that, those are those opportunities. So

that should be your signal of go. Is that aligned with the things in a way that I want to grow, that I need to step into it. So it's an easy piece of the gut check because you are never going to be reader. You're never going to be ready

for those big things, whether it's having a kid, getting married, let's say getting divorced. I've been through both of those, or all of those, actually, and I'm willing to talk about those, and I'll be talking about all those in the endless evolution forum and sharing my experiences on all sorts of things as it relates to this. But those things are that signal when it's sitting there

and it's coming back to you. I've had so many employees that have worked through me through the years that I have encouraged to go back to school, to take a new job, to do things, even though they may have been one of my most valuable people because it was for them. Now they're the only person that could answer that at the end of the day of what that choice is. And I certainly can't guarantee, nor will I guarantee that you will have success doing those things. In fact, there's a

lot of times you may have failure. So why would you do it? Chris, you told me to go do this, you know, and I made that shift. It didn't work out. Well, that piece of it didn't work out. But I guarantee at the end of the day, life is going to work out if you employ this methodology and approach. But again, we have to remember we've got to do this with purpose. There are things that we need to learn or grow, and it needs to be

strategic. We need to treat this and respect it in the cyclical manner that we need to be able to recover from that and understand all the progressions of that cycle, of the precipice the plunge, the pit, the climb, the pulling yourself out, reaching that peak, that next greater thing in having time to spend on that plateau, that moment to self reflect and recovery. Right. To look back on the things that

I did. Well, what are the things I struggled on? To have time for your self care and to get back on your feet, but not spending too much time there at the same time. We can look at a lot of these things just as the same analogies that you would with training. Right? Like if I don't get back and train on a regular basis, if I train once a month or once every two weeks, I never make progress. You just beat yourself down, you recover, but then you don't make any adaptation. Right.

But if I train constantly, seven days a week, daily doubles, you aren't going to make progress either. You go on vacation, you take a week off, great. You take three months off, you're restarting. Right? So it's about leveling that and thinking about that and just like the precipice moment. Sorry for all the lifting analogies. Imagine that coming. Coming from me, right? But, you know, it's like me walking out, any of us giant squat on your back, this massive load of the world coming

down on you, driving through you, and you're. I don't know if I can accomplish this. I don't know if I can pull this off, but you just start going down and you realize I have the capability. And again, that gets back to some of our lessons we had on the prior around the plunge in the

pit. But the goal is recognizing these moments. And that's the big takeaway I want people to have from today is being able to internally recognize the signals of those many moments and the major moments in life and to be able to, again, respect it as a cyclical and not treat it as something where we're just pushing the grind hard, the push hard, the hustle preneur of, like, burn that candle on both ends all

the time. Like that is not it. This strategic nature of being able to employ this and understanding where I'm at at this moment in time, but also definitely understanding that this is the core component of this. The core component of this is to kick off that momentum, that movement. And that's. That's the story. And sometimes you've got to create that and walk that through yourself. Right. So I talked a moment about me leaving that career, right. And

so I was sitting there myself. It was one day, I was having a moment in the evening with my two young kids sitting in the hot tub and I was looking at them at their age and, and realizing some of the hardship that I'd been through earlier in my life. And, and like I said, I was at a moment where I had a house with a white picket fence. I had an easy relationship with a friend. I had, you know, everything was easy in life, but it was like stabbing an ice pick

in my school every day. And I was looking at my kids and realizing the lessons that I wanted to share with them and the lessons I wanted to share with the world. And I knew the things that I had to in my bucket to be able to teach people about being stronger, developing resilience, getting out of pain and living a better quality of life. And this is in the physical realm. But that was, that was my driver, that was my essence of going, I'm gonna put this on the line. And I did.

So, you know, I walked away from a career making a, well, this is making a quarter million dollars a year back. Well this is in the earlier know, 1015 years ago now almost. I made that choice, you know, mortgage my, you know, my, my home. I leveraged my four hundred one k. I put everything on the line. And you know what? I still never hadn't dug myself

out of that. And that's okay because I'm living my purpose and my passion and I did the same thing again several years after that. So again, I said that one was about this physical aspect of resilience, but I had a moment. It was almost the same process, but it was about writing my book, my autobiography, and sharing and bearing to the world like some of the things that I've been through so that those lessons and I could use that story to help imbue and share those

lessons with people. But man, that was a hard process to sit there and spend a year talking through some of these, these hard moments and getting these out and being like, I'm going to put this out. Like, this is a challenging thing to do and there's a lot of soul searching and there was a lot of times of like uncovering memories and experiences that I really didn't want to deal with. And at the end of it, I'm really proud of what I did. But man, that, that was one of those steps. Quitting

powerlifting. That's, yeah, so sometimes it's walking away from things. I was a competitive power lift, right? I had been ranked number one in the world for eight. Let me, let's keep, let's skip the bragging part, right? It was a big part of my identity. Right? And I was told by people in the, in, in the field, other athletes, business owners, like, when you do this, you are going to. There's going to. You're going to have zero relevance at this point in

time because that's what happens. This is how you show up. This is how people know you. This is how things move. Your business is the fact of you being on the platform and constantly setting records, showcasing what you can do. And this was a big step for me to go, I'm just. I'm not going to do that anymore because that is, for me, that was an essence of one of my, several of my values. It was a way for me to express those values in the world, right? That the expression of

my competitive drive. Right. The expression of a lot of the learning that I had. And it was the driver of being in that learning because I did learn so much about human resilience, putting myself on the edge. And that's. We're going to come back to that topic, but around being on

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I had to make that choice at one point in time of taking that step and going, I'm walking away from this because it's actually creating an identity that is wrapped into the lifting. And I am more than that, and I want to

be more than that. And so these are some examples of some major steps that I've taken, just like walking through the divorce that I did a number of years ago, which, the end of the day, these things all, every single one of them ended up leading to the next greatest thing in my life. Sure, they were major obstacles and struggles and like, oh, did you survive that? And that's the point. It's not surviving it. It's using it as a tool to leverage yourself to the

next thing. And in every single one of these instances, whether it's walking away from, you know, a high paying career as a master's NBA holding, you know, corporate turnaround executive to walking away from competitive powerlifting as being one of the top guys in the world, walking, you know, stepping out of a marriage, like all of these things ended up leading to the next greatest thing in my life. They weren't things that I had to, like, deal with. Those were the

things that were. That was a prior peak and the next one was coming, right. As long as I knew what the goal is, what the objective and why, I'm not just, like, taking stuff on. Because the other aspect of how you learn and grow, it's not just the micro cycles where I talked about, you know, having that hard, hard conversation like the one my wife was, you know, counseling, uh, her friend on, hey, let's take on this conversation, because if you can't do this and manage

this aspect, you're not going to be able to do that in your business. But at the same time, every one of those, when you get that churning in your gut, what does it tell you? It means that it's an opportunity to learn. Because when you're on the edge of your capabilities, that stretches us and that allows us to be able to grow. Those are the moments when we learn. Just like when I had myself on the edge, when I, I decided to squat 800 pounds every single

day for 30 days. Like my body, my nervous system, everything was just on the fragile edge of falling apart. But in those moments, you can discover, like, one minor change. You can see what might take you years or decades to learn at some other time. So we have to understand what the opportunities here are. So again, we'll wrap this all up and just talk about where does this fit in as a whole. So the precipice is the most central of the six P's framework of human development,

right. It's the quintessential piece that creates momentum. And that momentum we're going to use in our larger framework on growing better mind, body and soul, for developing that mind, body and soul, your intrapersonal strength and development and alignment with your values, your passion, right. How we interact with the world, with others, with our community, in those interpersonal

relationships, right? Whether it's, again, navigating your community, an organization, uh, a group, to the next level of, like, how do we extra personally use? We'll dive into this at some point, but, uh, it's a very in depth Hoosian Connery philosophy of STR, of strategy, strategic development and execution of goals. And uh, yeah, that is, that's the larger framework, how that fits together. I hope that you find value in this, this excerpt piece here and those key things.

Right. What is the precipice? It is momentum. It is a pain that you need to create to get to the next game. We do that through story with ourself, with others in an organization. We must use it strategically. We

must respect the micro and macro cyclical nature of this and we must be able to recognize the signal of the moments and how to use that. Please join me with the endless evolution. I'd love to hear stories and comments of how this discussion hit you and maybe ways that you have tackled that. And I encourage everyone to do just that. Go out this week and pick a micropreprecipice. Doesn't have to be big. What's one thing that you've been pushing off and avoiding?

Go step into it this week. Come back and tell me about it.