Note: We use AI transcription so there may be some inaccuracies
Danielle Cobo: What if the worst day of your life turned out to be the most transformative? Imagine being struck head on by a speeding SUV while cycling, narrowly escaping death and then finding a way to turn it into a life altering revelation and movement. You are one breath away from breakthrough and this episode holds the oxygen tank.
Today, we have a guest who knows the power of turning trials into triumph, Michael O'Brien. He's an executive coach, qualified meditation teacher, and endurance athlete who transformed his last bad day into the first day of the rest of his life. Our deep dive today is all about mastering mindfulness to tackle life's biggest challenges.
If you've ever faced a hurdle that seemed too high, a goal too distant, or a path that To Rocky, this is your Roadmap to Resilience. Thanks for joining us today, Michael.
Michael O'Brien: Thanks, Danielle. I'm super stoked to be on the show. We're going to have a great conversation. We'll dive into what it means to have a last bad day and resilience and grit and all that good stuff.
So I can't wait to dive in with you. Yeah.
Danielle Cobo: So you describe your cycling accident as my last bad day. Can you walk us through the pivotal moment when you decided that this devastating event Narrowly escaping death would become a turning point and not a breaking point in your
Michael O'Brien: life. I would love to. So I'll go back.
So the accident happened in 2001. I was at my pharmaceutical company's offsite meeting in New Mexico. I had just recently left the field selling What was in my bag and took over the job of being the product, lead for our flagship drug. So that's where I was professionally, 33, girls, three and a half years old, seven months old, married seven years.
Brought my bike out to the offsite while the other guys brought their golf clubs. I was gonna train for my race coming up and all that jazz. And that's when I got. Hit by a Ford Explorer going about 40 miles an hour head on. The doctors told my wife, we're really not sure how your husband survived.
He's lucky to be here. When they put me on the helicopter to take me to Albuquerque, the only trauma one center in the state. I promised myself I would stop chasing happiness because I was one of those guys who was chasing happiness. It was a bargain I was trying to make with whoever was listening. God, Mother Earth, the universe, you name it.
I didn't know how I was going to do it, but I was like, hey, if you save my life. I promise I'll do this thing called life better. Short story, got out of the ICU, they told me about the extent of my injuries. They said it would be a lifetime of dependency and limitation. I should be lucky that I'm alive and I couldn't spell happiness.
I was so mad. revengeful. I wanted to get back to the driver. He had a revoked license. He shouldn't have been driving that day. It was a whole bunch of muck and mud andpissed at the world, but I put a happy face on, and then I had a session with a mentor. And I unloaded on him. He was like, Hey, how's it going?
I go, you really want to know? I go, here's how it's going. And
Danielle Cobo: want to dive in a little bit more on something. You were told that you may not be able to talk, that you would be dependent on somebody else. you had a very successful career in medical sales.
Where a lot of your identity was probably tied in sales, a lot of the identity is tied to awards that we earn and exceeding quotas and it's that hustle mentality. So you go from that particular state to now being told that you might be dependent on somebody else. So going from independence to dependent, how did you feel?
What have deep inside?
Michael O'Brien: Anger. I can't believe this is happening to me. irritation, worry. To your point, Danielle, I had an identity as provider for my family, as a leader at work, an award winner, an athlete, and in a moment, just a brief moment, I got turned upside down and the universe shook me violently.
And I was like, if I can't be who I was, who the heck am I going to be? So if you had called me back in 2001 to check in on me, I would've put on a happy face. I would've been like, no, we got this. we're going to make it. We're going to do it. But behind that veneer was, I don't know what I'm going to do.
Am I going to be an athlete ever again? That was a big part of my identity growing up. How am I going to do my job? You cause part of my job was being on stage. Walking was going to be difficult. That's what they told me. So could I walk? up on stage, could I make a presentation? Like all this stuff would just rush through my head.
I had so much time in the hospital to fret and worry and have anxiety about all this. So I was, a bit of a mess and no one would argue that that was wrong. They were like, yeah, you had something horrific happened to you. And that's when my mentor said, Hey, you know what? Everything that happens in life is neutral.
Until you label it, Michael.
Danielle Cobo: Okay, elaborate on this one. Everything in life is neutral. Until what?
Michael O'Brien: Until you label it. So when you think about things, something might happen to you or something might happen for you, which I later saw that as my perspective with my accident. But something happens and we're quick to label it.
Good, bad, right, wrong, beautiful, ugly, you name it. really quick as adults to label things. What he was suggesting, what was offering up to me is like, this happened, and you think it happened to you, but the whole event is neutral. just an accident. How you look at it. is what matters. So you can look at it as maybe this happened for you.
Maybe you're not the victim. Maybe this is happening for some other reason. As cute as it sounds, maybe you go from victim to victor. So he goes, you have some space here. You have some openness, whether you choose to use it or not, it's totally up to you. But you get to look at this moment in any way you want to.
And at first then, yeah, I was like, What is he talking about? This is crazy. Yeah, I was
Danielle Cobo: gonna say, if somebody told me, here I am laying in a bed, and possibly being told that I'm gonna be dependent on somebody, and to say that this is just an event. And it's how you look at it. That might be a little woo woo or almost in the sense of, well, can you really relate?
don't think you understand the difficulties that I'm experiencing right now. And that's easy to say, but not always easy to
Michael O'Brien: do. Absolutely. I think one of the benefits he had is that I knew him and we had some trust built up, but it's very easy to say something like that too soon. It's like way too soon for that.
I'm not ready. I'm still grieving because I was going through a grieving process of who I used to be. So he shared that with me, maybe slightly prematurely, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt because I knew him and I trusted him. So I sat with it. I let it marinate for a bit. And then I had a moment in rehab when I looked around the whole rehab.
Center and I noticed how some people were getting better and some people weren't and some people were plateauing and I had a little conversation with myself to say, hey, listen, you can put more effort into this. Maybe what he was saying was correct. You can look at this whole situation differently
The reason why I call it my last bad day. It ties back to a parable called 1st arrow 2nd arrow and the story goes like this. There's a great warrior. He's walking through the woods, and he gets shot by an arrow. He can't see where the arrow came from, but he gets shot. And of course, that first arrow that arrow that shot Adam causes a whole bunch of pain and suffering, and it's debilitating,
As you would imagine, anyone getting shot by an arrow would feel. But then what happens soon after is he starts to think about, Oh my God, this hurts so much. Who shot this arrow at me? I gotta get back at them. Am I ever going to get out of the forest? That's the second arrow. So the second arrow is the one that we shoot at ourselves and we add to our pain.
We add to our suffering. So the way I look at that day is that that was my first arrow that moment, and I don't have to give it any more fuel than it deserves. So I'm not gonna. Shoot a second arrow at the moment and make that bad moment turn into a bad day or even longer. So it's my way of tipping my cap to that story to say, okay, we're going to have bad moments in our lives all the time.
Challenging moments, scary moments, any emotion can come up with their moments, and maybe they last for a few seconds. Sometimes they last for a few hours or longer, especially if we lose someone. So it's not just a brief moment. So literal, but we can sit with it. We can process the emotions we feel with it, and we can decide if we want to give it more fuel than it deserves.
So that's how we prevent a bad moment from turning into a bad day or longer. So, with a smile, I call that day my last bad day, because every time I go to bed at night, and my head hits the pillow, and I have my wife and girls and people who love me and who I love back in my life, how can I call the whole day?
a bad one. we can use a lot of different labels for it, but I don't have to be so binary that it's either good or bad. It's complex. It's complicated. It's all that, because that's what life is all about.
Danielle Cobo: It's these events that happen to us. And it's whether we decide in those challenging moments to fuel that event that we may perceive as negative and fuel it going into this victim and going into the anger and the frustration, I believe that there's value in feeling the emotions.
And recognizing the emotions and acknowledging them and then also saying, how are we going to choose to use these emotions to move forward? Are we going to use these emotions to fuel this, stuck? Are we going to use these emotions to fuel the going, in saying that I'm going to be a victim, this is an event that happened to me, and this is who I am now, or are we going to use these emotions to recognize them, acknowledge them, and saying, how can I shift my perspective to understand that this is an event that happened?
Whether it was within or without of my control and what am I going to do differently moving forward so that this day or this particular event does not consume of the rest of my life forever.
Michael O'Brien: I love what you just said. Perfect. So I'll add on to that I totally believe much like you just said, we've got to feel all the emotions.
So when we feel Anger, or we feel angry and feel it we don't deny that we don't,deny grief when we feel grief or sadness when we feel sadness. The trick is, is do we get caught up in it? Does it start to own us? And so with my practice of mindfulness that I found later in my recovery. that we can recognize when we're feeling anger.
We don't personalize it. We don't become it, but when we're feeling it, we allow ourselves to feel it. And then when it's appropriate, we take action to move forward. And again, some of these moments last longer, grief. If we lose someone close to us, it's more than just a.moment it, it lasts for a while some would say you never really get past losing someone you love dearly and angry.
that's human. It's part of life. And so My last bad day and how I look at it isn't to, deny what we're feeling. It's not to rush through our feelings is to acknowledge them, accept them as part of our humanity. And then when it's appropriate, take the right action as opposed to.
Adding on to it with that second arrow story so we can put some goodness into the world as I like to say, we can ripple something worth rippling, because it's all energy like anger as an emotion is energy. So how do we want to use the energy of anger just like ripples on a pond? That's energy as well.
So how do we want to use our energy to create the life that we want and also make a difference in the lives of people that we are surrounded by?
Danielle Cobo: You had mentioned energy, and I remember a psychologist sharing this perspective with me. and you're talking about the energy that we have and the ripple effect that it has on others.
And they say, imagine yourself driving in a car. we're with our family or our friends or even a colleague, and all of a sudden somebody cuts us off. And our immediate reaction is, how could they do this to me? And then our energy goes from this calm driving to this explosion of anger. And the ripple effect that that creates is not only anger within us, it's filling the entire car. with anger. So everybody in the car around us is feeling that anger. how we choose to use these emotions not only affects us and how the perspective that we have and in particular events that take place in our life, but also it has an effect on others because it's the energy that we hold and also reflect towards other people.
Michael O'Brien: Absolutely. So imagine that same scenario. You're on your way to work, you get cut off, you get all irritated and pissed off. And then you bring that into your first meeting. And now everyone's like, what's up with Danielle? she seems off. She seems irritated. It must be me. She must be irritated with me.
Cause now we tend to personalize things when we don't know the full story. And then everyone's on edge. Like,so then you don't have a really good meeting. And then you, as a leader of the meetings, like, why didn't anyone show up the way I wanted them to show up? And so now the day's off to a pretty crummy start.
And until you recognize, Hey, this is what's happening. This is my vibe, my juju, my energy, whatever you want to call it, and find a way to bring that down. So you can put a different type of energy into the, room or into the environment. We're going to continue to add to it much like a snowball effect.
Danielle Cobo: Okay, so let's talk about, you have created this movement, the pause, breathe, reflect, and I call it a movement because I'm seeing how you're creating this ripple effect in how it's affecting other people in such a positive way. So let's say you're in that situation, this event has happened to you, you're in these frustrated anger moments.
How can you apply what you teach, this pause, breathe, reflect, to help us process these emotions, change our perspective, build resilience and grit?
Michael O'Brien: Great question. So this all came out of my recovery. So in that moment when I had, Hey, Michael, little pep talk, you can do better. And I felt really overwhelmed.
Like, my medical team was telling me everything that was in front of me, and it was, So consuming. I did feel overwhelmed. Like where do I begin? How am I going to get out of the hospital? I just want to find my way back home. And I knew enough as an athlete. To come back to my breath. So every athlete out there knows that when you have a tough moment, the coach is going to say, slow it down, take a breath.
So I knew enough to take a breath. So the very next day I rolled myself in my wheelchair to a quiet place in the hospital, which was really hard to find. And I did a box breathing pattern. Which is something that the Navy SEAL team will do, and other military operatives will do, as a way to slow down and focus.
And that was my very first practice. Now, you also were in medical sales, as I was in pharma sales. And so we had this metric that we had to be graded on, called profit before royalty. PBR. And I hated this metric, Danielle. Every meeting was, what's your PBR? What's your PBR? And when I was in the hospital, I was like, okay, what am I doing right now?
Well, I'm pausing and taking a breath and then I'm having a moment of reflection. Oh, it's PBR. So I took this acronym that I didn't really like and turned it into something that I appreciated a bit more. And of course, a lot of people think PBR and they think of like a beer. But it's not that it's slow down.
I'm not stopping because I'm still like a type a personality. So pause, take a few breaths and the moment of reflection is okay. What am I grateful for or what do I want to do or say next? So thoughtful about my approach to life. And so I did it the first time and then it felt really good. So I was like, I'm going to do that a little bit more.
And then I started just sprinkling these five minute. Or sometimes three minute sessions throughout the day. And then I brought it back into my corporate life when I finally got back home, the hospital. And to me, it was my secret sauce that I told no one about in corporate life. Cause this was still early two thousands.
So mindfulness and meditation was a little like, boo, boo, no, no serious sales or marketing leader was meditating. Or at least they wouldn't admit it publicly. If I got up on stage in front of my whole team at a POA, a sales meeting and said, okay, we're going to meditate. People would have been like, wow, that accident really affected him more than we thought.
So I kept it quiet, but this was my secret sauce that allowed me to get to the executive suite because I could be more thoughtful and focused and have more awareness and approach those stressful moments we have in business with more. So I started doing this practice and then eventually I left my executive career in pharma and started talking about it a little bit more as I became a coach.
But when the pandemic hit, I was like, ah, this is a moment for mindfulness. And I have to share this because this was so instrumental in my recovery and my ability to be resilient and gritty and tenacious and all that good stuff that you coach about and speak about. I was like, I have to share it. So I started sharing it more, started doing public meditations, just short practices, because I believe that a lot of people are busy today.
And it doesn't take a lot to believe that because everyone will tell you how busy they are. And so a lot of folks will say, listen, Michael, I'm sort of interested in this whole meditation thing, but I don't have 10 minutes in the morning. My morning is so busy. And so I say to them, but I bet you have 10 times.
Or maybe five times throughout the day where you have a minute or two. So give me 10 minutes throughout the day just to slow down, come back to your breath and reflect on how you want to be. How do you want to show up for that next call? How do you want to show up when you walk through the door to your family?
So be thoughtful, be intentional about how we do that. And so that was the start of it. And now it's become an app and a practice that has stretched all over the globe, which is pretty cool.
Danielle Cobo: Okay, so before you share where people can find the app, I want to add to the science of this four box, it's called the four box breathing technique.
And I know exactly what you're talking about because it's actually one of the tools that I share in my book, Unstoppable Grit. And I share this four box breathing technique because it's one of the techniques that when I was going through cognitive behavioral therapy, when I was recovering from my postpartum depression, that changed how I was able to approach the anxiety that I was experiencing during that time.
And I use that today. Anytime I am experiencing self doubt, self criticism, I will use the four box breathing technique. And actually, I do it with my six year old twins as well. one of my twins is I like to call him a feelings kid. He's just very feelings, based. And so we'll go through those exercises as well.
But I put it to the ultimate. test. So if anyone's saying, I don't know, breathing, is this woo woo, or is it, really going to make a difference? I was having medical procedure done, and I was having a medical procedure done and I'm laying in the hospital bed. My husband's sitting next to me and he looks over at me and he says, wow, you have a really low resting heart rate.
And I said, watch, I can control. My heart rate and he goes what and I say, okay, hold on and so I started to think about the IV I am trying to recover from this fear of having IVs, and for some reason it does not sit well within my mind, so IVs I get really anxious over, and the doctor was about ready to put the IV in, and I applied the four box breathing technique, as they started to talk about the IV, my heart rate started to increase, increase, increase, and the sirens were going off on the heart monitor and then I did the four box breathing technique a couple times with it actually able to bring my heart rate down while they were putting in the IV.
So I know a lot of times sometimes we hear meditation might be woo woo, these breathing techniques might be woo woo, but as you can hear, Michael has applied this in his life, and I have applied this in mine. And we're both able to see the benefits of how it can affect in a positive way, any anxiety that we may be feeling, any doubt that we may be feeling, but also helping us build resilience to get through some of these challenging times.
Michael O'Brien: I love that. And so we share another thing, Danielle. So before my accident, the whole idea of. IVs or donating blood, like no way. needles and me, we didn't have a good relationship. It was somewhat dysfunctional. But I had to learn really quickly to get comfortable and calm. With all the IVs I've had over the last two decades.
So I love the fact that you write about it because there's some hard science to it. The really cool thing about my school of teaching, mindfulness based stress reduction is that there's a wealth of clinical data out there that shows how mindfulness based stress reduction or meditation, mindfulness if you will, can help with a whole bunch of conditions and diseases from anxiety to depression to hypertension to how we deal with pain.
So we have hardcore clinical trials much like The pharmaceutical industry has clinical trials, so there is really solid evidence and data that points to the fact that our breath in a mindfulness practice can help improve our overall well being and hey, it's been around for about 2700 years if you tie it all the way back to Buddha and Buddhism, and so it's one of those things that has stood the test of time, if you will.
It's not, an everyday hack or just this new novel approach. It's our breath is something that, when we welcome ourselves to the world. It's the first thing we do. It's the last thing we do when we pass this world and it's our body's regulator. And so we can use it to amp ourselves up when we're a little low on energy.
And when we need to calm down, we can also use our breath to do just that. So I think Our breath is that wonderful tool that we all have, that we tend to forget about, because it's automatic, but the breath never forgets about us.
Danielle Cobo: And so combining, I know we talked about this four box breathing technique and as you had said, it goes back thousands of years, but also sharing the Navy SEALs, toughest of toughest soldiers out there are using this technique and what the four box breathing technique is.
You breathe in for four seconds. You hold for four seconds. You breathe out for four seconds, and then you hold for four seconds. And that's why it's called the four box, because it's an actual box, and it's a four by four by four. So in those moments, for our listeners out there, when you are experiencing and feeling anger, frustration, anxiety, or maybe you just want to take a pause before going into a big meeting, pause.
Do the four box breathing technique, reflect and understanding what are the emotions that I'm feeling right now, acknowledge them, recognize them, and then what are steps that you can take to shift that perspective. Soeither you're approaching any difficult situation that you're going through right now, you're able to approach mindfulness.
Michael O'Brien: Perfect. I could not have said that better myself, Danielle. So you can be our first spokesperson for pause, breathe, reflect. It's awesome. But it's exactly that like. If the Navy SEALS uses the breath to help them accomplish their missions, then why aren't we doing it in our everyday normal lives or our corporate lives?
We don't have to tell anyone that we're doing it. Remember, I didn't tell anyone for about 14 years I was doing this. It can be your little own secret, but it will help you approach life differently. And it's something that you always have, and you can do it on a Zoom, you can do it in the car, you can do it before bed or when you wake up, so you can live life in alignment very intentionally and thoughtfully, and I think that's what we need more of as we look to start the new year eventually, and we travel down this road together and hopefully put some goodness into the world.
Danielle Cobo: Yes, well you've created this app. Tell us a little bit more about this app. 'cause I believe that could be a great resource for our listeners to take in what they've learned in today's episode and the wisdom that you shared with us and how they can apply it on a daily basis with
Michael O'Brien: this app. Yeah, so the app is available in that app store at Apple or Google Play, and what I've done is over indexed.
the meditations to have a lot of one, two and three minute practices. There's a daily practice that's about five minutes long and there's some longer practices for people who love to do that. But we make all the practices really relatable and practical and sometimes funny. And we also hold a live practice each day, Monday through Friday, because there's a whole bunch of people out there that want to practice in community.
They thirst for more belonging. So I hold a practice each day throughout the week. We do a little talk around that little lesson to pull through some of the practices, but it's an accessible app, really foundational. It's all in nature. So what people tell me all the time is as soon as I come in, I invite people to take a nice, healthy inhale and a slow releasing exhale, and they're like, I feel calm already.
And so My pop in to do a one minute practice and then they go on to do their thing. That's next on their to do list. And then they come back to it. So my hope for the app is that people come back to it multiple times throughout the day. Cause I think you and I both know a whole bunch of people that might practice something in the morning, whatever it might be, and they don't pull it through throughout the day.
So I want. folks to live mindfully to pay attention to their everyday moments because life is amazing. It's also really hard. And so if we can approach all of our moments with this awareness, that we're going to have some hard moments, we have some beautiful moments. So we're not going to push the hard ones away.
We're not going to cling to our good ones. We're going to experience. all of them. I think it enhances just our ability to live life. And so through the app, my hope is I give people a beautiful tool to do just that. Of our
Danielle Cobo: listeners out there as we were talking, I'm a big believer that the first hour of our day sets the intention of our day.
So being your community, going through that lesson each morning, using your app, and then also carrying it through. And what I really like about what you did, Michael, is A lot of times it's, we're busy. And I get it. I'm a mom with six year old twins. I'm running a business. I have a book coming out. I got a podcast.
I've got speaking engagements. Life is, I don't like to use the word busy. I would say life is very full. And oftentimes we may say, I'm too busy for something. But what would it look like if we just took one to three minutes, couple times throughout our day. To practice mindfulness what would the outcome be and having no more bad days and having great days.
So I'll include a link to the app and the show notes for you listeners. definitely open up the show notes, go down and click the link and you can go ahead and download the app. Also can I include the link to your community as
Michael O'Brien: well? Oh, absolutely. Danielle would love having people were a like hearted community open to different And so we're all about putting some goodness into the world. So yeah, absolutely.
Danielle Cobo: Fantastic. So I'll go ahead and include that. Well, thank you so much for joining today, Michael, really appreciate it. You provided such valuable wisdom that we can apply. every day in our lives to practice mindfulness, to pause, breathe, reflect, and enjoy every moment, those neutral moments so that we can see no more bad days and always looking at great days.
Thanks, Danielle. For you listeners out there. Thank you so much for tuning into the unstoppable grip podcast with Danielle If this episode resonated with you, I invite you to write a review on the podcast, share this episode. With your friends, your families and colleagues, because as we talked about today, there are a lot of people out there that are experiencing difficult times and whether they show it on the outside, I believe that all of us are facing something deep inside and this episode can empower them with the tools to be unstoppable.
And then also stay tuned for next week's episode because I'm going to be sharing some Exciting news about my upcoming book, Unstoppable Grit, Breakthrough the Seven Roadblocks Standing Between You and Achieving Your Goals. Thank you so much for tuning in.