Pivot: Empower & Inspire – The Power Of Resilience

 

You know when you’re doing your calling in life when you look at the signs. They are everywhere, but we sometimes ignore those signs. For Adam Markel, it was midway through his career as a successful lawyer that he realized something was off. He was having trouble sleeping at night and waking up feeling anxious about the day ahead. Adam is an inspirational speaker, an author, and a business leader who has reached tens of thousands worldwide with his message of resilience as a competitive edge in the face of today’s complex markets. Today, Adam joins Cece Shatz, the President of the Going Solo Network, Inc., to share how he started to make small changes and pivoted into an empowered and inspired life. Don’t miss this inspiring episode as Adam talks about his life journey, the power of resilience, and his brand new book.

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Watch the episode here

Pivot: Empower & Inspire – The Power Of Resilience With Guest, Adam Markel

I’m going to bring our guest right up here with us. Welcome, Adam.

It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Our wonderful guest is an amazing individual himself. He’s an inspirational speaker, an author and a business leader. Adam Markel, thank you so much for joining us. We’re going to talk about your life, your journey, and your book. Tell us a little bit about how did you start being a wonderful inspiration to others and reaching out in empowering them in this pivot mentality that you’ve got going on here. How did that start for you?

It started with a lot of personal pain. It’s not easy to start from that place but that’s the truth of it. I was a lawyer for eighteen years. My claim to fame is I’m a fully recovered attorney at this point. No offense to the lawyers out there but it was a profession that wasn’t suited to me. I did that work for years. It’s a long time to be doing something that was not my calling in life. It didn’t feel like it was the work I was meant to be doing. I was very successful at it. I was a workaholic. I was tenacious and persistent. I helped a lot of my clients take care of some significant challenges in their lives and I got paid well to do it. Midway through my career in that profession, I realized that something was off or something was wrong. Like so many people, there are signs. There are signs everywhere in life. We sometimes ignore those signs.

For me, I started to lose my hair. That was one of the signs and I thought, “I’m in a high-stress job and my grandfather didn’t have a lot of hair. That’s just heredity,” so I blew that off. I was having trouble sleeping at night. I was taking Ambien for about two years to get to sleep and sometimes waking up in the middle of the night. More often than not, I was waking up in the morning feeling unrested. This was the thing that got my attention after a period of years, not weeks or months. I’d put my feet on the floor and I would feel some low-level anxiety and sometimes not so low-level anxiety, even a bit of angst and dread about the day ahead. Ultimately, I told myself that if I keep working harder, work smarter and do the right things, I’ll make enough money and I’ll be able to win and buy my life back.

A lot of people do that. We convince ourselves that even when something doesn’t seem right or does seem off, that we can continue do it and do it may be harder, faster, smarter, or whatever it is. That’s the definition of insanity. When we do the same thing over and over again and we are somehow thinking we’re going to get a different result. I thought I could find my way out of it because I convinced myself I was pretty intelligent. I was a lawyer for crying out loud. I should be able to figure this out and I couldn’t. One Saturday morning, my wife and I were on our way to our son’s baseball game and I started to feel my chest pounding. My heart was beating so fast in my chest and I was sweating. I started to get nervous that I was having a heart attack. I ended up in the emergency room lying on a gurney with my wife standing next to me thinking that I wasn’t even going to see my kids again.

I was devastated and upset, which only made all that even worse. The doctor told my wife and I that day that I didn’t have a heart attack. I was having an anxiety attack brought on by probably too much caffeine, a lot of stress, not sleeping well, feeling disconnected on the inside and out of alignment. Just like many people get a bit of a look at the edge. I felt like I went to the precipice and looked down at the rocks and saw the scary possibilities there that maybe I wouldn’t be so lucky next time. The doctor said to me that a lot of people come into the hospital complaining of heart or chest pains and they don’t walk out. He said, “You’ve been lucky to get a second chance.” I took that second chance and I did with it what a lot of people do. I ignored it. I went back to doing what was habitual, what I knew and what was comfortable even.

I didn’t want to rock the boat too much and all the rest of it. I kept doing what I was doing and about six months later, I remember getting home late from work, which was usual for me. It was customary that I would get home late even though I would tell my wife every day that I’ll be home for dinner. We all sometimes have great intentions, but my intentions and what I would do were very different things. I would routinely get home late, not see the kids for dinner. On this particular cold, fall, rainy evening, I walked through the door dripping wet. I knew when I saw my wife, Randi’s face that I had done it again. I didn’t just miss getting home for dinner, but I missed being able to even kiss the kids before they went to bed. I can feel even at this moment the disappointment and the shame that I felt. When I looked at my wife’s face, I could tell that she was upset as well. I walked straight up to her and I looked her in the eye and I said, “If I keep doing what I’m doing, you’re going to be a widow.”

It was one of those moments you can’t believe are happening until you’re right in the middle of it and it’s happening. The blessing for me to this day is that I have somebody in my life, the woman that I met in college that I am married to for many years. I had somebody in my life that didn’t look at me and remind me, “We’ve got two cars, two houses, two dogs, four kids, durable goldfish and a lot of responsibilities.” She didn’t remind me of that because she knew that I knew. She took a deep breath as I did and she said, “We’ll figure it out.” The good news was I didn’t have to have the classic mid-life crisis. We didn’t have to move, pack up the kids, and move to Fiji, even though that would have been probably fun. We instead planned for my mid-life calling. That’s what ultimately happened over the course of many years, through making small changes in a number of things.

I ended up writing a book, Pivot: The Art and Science of Reinventing Your Career and Life, which enabled me to not only share the message with thousands of people around the world but also to travel around the world, speaking to people, working with people and businesses. I do a lot of keynote speaking and a lot of consulting with entrepreneurs and others who are reinventing or pivoting. This book I supposed is a little bit prophetic in the use of the term pivot. When I wrote the book, pivot was very much a word that was defining a failure, a business model that went sideways, or something that you had to reinvent because it wasn’t working. Right now, the word pivot is being used in a much less pejorative way, much more positive connotation associated with how we’re pivoting. That’s a great jumping-off point for us because each of us now got to be serial pivoters. We can talk about what that means and ultimately how it is that we create results by becoming more resilient.

I agree with you on that because we feel like we have to do something, even though it’s not working for us, to be able to make a change. To me, pivot is evaluating your life and making a change that’s best for you. We come up with challenges that create this pivot for us. If we want to think that it’s negative, in turn, it is positive because it’s pushing you into maybe who you are to become or who you are. We start our careers based on when we were younger, on money, on our family, makeup or whatever our family said, “Get into law, be a doctor, do all of this stuff.” Your inner being or your inner soul may not be driven for that. You may not have that actual passion. Could you do the job well? Sure. There are many jobs that we can all do very well, but is it our passion? You’ve trained as a mentor. You lead programs around the world. You help business leaders. You help individuals that want to be into business. You help relationships and public speaking. You do it all and you’ve been able to embark on a career now that you have passion for. What pivot is that?

It’s what you said. People don’t realize that we are so addicted to comfort. We’re addicted to security and safety. I’m not saying I don’t want to be safe or I don’t want to be comfortable. What I mean is often, it’s those things that we crave like comfort and security that are the things that keep us playing small and showing up less than what we’re capable of being. We then feel this aching in our hearts that we could be doing more, that we ought to be doing more. We have this aching that somehow is saying, “I don’t know if this is my purpose in life.” We come to those moments and it is in those challenges that you described that we are growing and move to a new level in our lives. That’s the whole point of it.

When I started writing Pivot, I remember I was writing it initially as a memoir for our kids because I had been successful in one career. I had been using the process that is what I write about in this book and the case studies of other people who’ve used similar ways of reinvention. I started wanting to have the kids know that their dad had come to a fork in the road in my early 40s and that I found a way to make better decisions that were right for me at the time. You point this out that the decisions that we make when we’re 18, 25, 45, 60 years old or whenever it is, they’re based on different things.

I started writing this book to tell the kids what I was going through. It’s a little look inside my head and how I had made these decisions. Our oldest daughter, Chelsea, walked in on me one day as I was scribbling away in a writer’s notebook I had. She said, “Dad, I think this book is more than a book for us.” She was appreciative that I wanted to leave a legacy for the kids of something that was so intimate to me and describe what I was going through. She said, “This book is about so many people that are in transition and probably at many times in their lives. I think you’re playing too small.”

It’s the things that we crave for like comfort and security that keep us playing small and showing up less than what we're capable of being. Share on X

How old was she?

She was probably nineteen years old at the time. She was very insightful. She was literally doing the same thing for me. She was holding up the mirror and saying, “This is comfortable for you to play in this little arena where you’re writing a book for your kids. What if you decided to write this book with many people in mind and maybe even millions of people in mind?” That was one of those breathtaking moments for me where I got to once again eat the cooking as it were. We are in these times of prolific change. More than anything, I feel called to share this message or the work of Pivot and how it is that we are able to embrace change now because it’s a constant. It always was and it always will be, but right now it is right up in our face more than it has been at any point at least in my adult life.

Knowing how it is that you adopt a pivot mentality or pivot mindset is one thing. What ultimately you can do to become more resilient is what’s on my heart these days. In my own experience in having reinvented several times through several careers and been able to create “success” in all of those areas, it wasn’t because I didn’t make mistakes. It wasn’t because I didn’t fail. It wasn’t because everybody liked me or everybody appreciated what I was doing. It wasn’t because I wasn’t in my own way. It’s quite the contrary. It’s because I’ve been resilient. That’s what’s enabled me to continually create the right kind of success for me at this stage in my life.

When I was in my 30s, I hadn’t thought too much about going to law school. I had seen it as something I could do to earn a lot of money and take care of my family. Having come from almost nothing financially and growing up in a tiny little apartment in Queens, New York, I wanted that. I wanted my kids to have a house. I wanted them to have a pool. I wanted them to have a lifestyle that we didn’t have. The legal profession was great for that. It provided for that and I was willing to trade at the time, my time and other things, including what was deep inside my heart for this security and the safety. I would not make that same trade now. It was fine then and what I learned through that process enables me to be here.

Right now more than anything, we’ve got to learn the skills of resilience. With those skills, at any time we can succeed and do the things that ultimately bring us joy, fulfillment and money. There are lots of ways to define success, but you can’t experience it if at some point you’re not around. That goes not just for individuals but organizations. One of the things that are most important to me these days is not how it is that we are individually more resilient, but on an organizational level. Our organizations and associations have such a massive influence in the world and how we are developing resilient organizations by caring about people within those organizations. To me, that is an epic place to be having an impact. That excites me and our team.

With this world and all that we’re going through, it hits it on the head. We’re seeing everyone scramble around trying to do things in a different way that they hadn’t done before and embracing many changes that are happening in their lives. Many of them are doing it very well. Some of them are struggling with it. We can see that, but then others are embracing the change and saying, “This maybe is the new norm and we are going to have to embrace it. What can we do from it?” From my own perspective, what I have found is being creative with change when it happens versus looking at something that’s taking place in a negative form. I look at it as being creative. What can I do differently? How can I embrace this? How can I shake it up a bit? That is being very resilient.

There are three things that we find the most telling of resilient people as well as resilient companies. This is through lots of research that we’ve done. We have a Resilient Leader Assessment tool that we can share with your audience as well. It’s a way for people to know a little bit more about what resilience means because we could spend hours and hours talking about that one topic. I’ll say a couple of things about it and then I’ll give you these three traits to look for in others. If you’re leading teams, you want to look for these things in other people. You yourself can begin to model those things even more and ultimately develop greater resilience for yourself. Embedded in what I said is the fact that resilience is something that you can learn.

Resilience is something that can be taught and can be adopted. Meaning we can train it and people can learn and begin to use it. They can create greater resilience for themselves whether they’re 50 years old or they’re fifteen years old, it doesn’t matter. Resilience is baked into our DNA. Let’s start there. We’re all resilient individuals. That’s why our species is even here. We’ve been resilient for thousands of years and have been able to adapt to situations and conditions, etc. What we found through the research is that there are three traits of resilient people. The first one I will share is we’ve got to have the ability to reframe situations. Meaning somebody who is resilient is someone who naturally looks at challenges and finds the meaning in them.

My grandmother used to talk about how we have to mine and dig for the meaning in things because often the situations that are around us don’t make sense. It’s the whole idea of everything happens for a reason. I don’t buy that. That’s BS for me. That statement can be changed a little bit and then I do buy-in. Everything happens for a reason and that reason is there to serve. That’s the curiosity that I have around the challenges that are happening now in our world. The challenges with whether it’s the COVID-19 crisis or any other thing that we’re experiencing. I want to get to a place where I’m curious. The way for me to get into a curious place is to ask different questions about what I’m experiencing and what I’m seeing.

I go back to my grandmother’s advice and counsel. I wish she was still around. I miss her every day. She would say, “Where’s the meaning? How can we dig for the meaning?” That’s something that Viktor Frankl when he was writing his book, Man’s Search for Meaning and talking about when he was an Auschwitz Holocaust survivor or a concentration camp survivor. He was thinking even in the midst of that brutal situation that he was immersed in, “Someday I’m going to be able to share the meaning behind all of this with other people.” Can you imagine being in that situation to be thinking that 5, 10 or 20 years from now, people’s lives will be made better because of the meaning that you were able to find out of something so horrific? He wrote a book and he did exactly that. He changed people’s lives by the thousands or maybe by the millions at this point because he was searching for meaning.

The first thing that resilient people do is they reframe what they’re seeing and experiencing to find the meaning in those things. One great question. I’ll pause right here to say this. My wife Randi asked me this question and it’s the perfect question when it comes to reframing. You can think about everything that’s happening in our world right now. If you could ask that question consistently, “What is the creative opportunity that is presented by what is going on and what I’m experiencing?” It puts you in a place where you’re no longer judging it as right or wrong or good or bad. The charge of that energy is dissipated at the moment. You were neutral so that you can examine, where are the opportunities for my own growth, for the growth of other people, our world, our countries? It’s significant, but you don’t get there unless you reframe your mindset at the beginning. That’s the first trait of resilient individuals as well as organizations.

I want to talk about the other two points because this is so important for those that are looking at their lives. I hate to say it, but what we’re going through is a wonderful period to evaluate yourself, your life, your work, your family, and what’s important to you. We can take that as a growing period that we can embrace. I totally get what you’re saying and I love it. It’s very well said and something we definitely need to know.

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We have with us, Adam Markel. He has written this wonderful new book. He empowers and inspires people, empowered resilience, and he’s an inspirational speaker, author, business leader. He’s a trained mentor. I can go on and on and on about how wonderful you are. You help people all over worldwide. What we’re talking about is resilience. We’re talking about your book that you have out, which is Pivot: The Art and Science of Reinventing Your Career and Life. It’s inspiring people through this moment that they’re going through to embrace their pivots, embrace their change, embrace what they want in their life. In the first half of the show, you talked about your journey and how you got to where you are. Being a very successful attorney, then pivoting your life and realizing that you wanted something different for yourself. Moving towards now being an author, helping other people, inspiring them, inspiring business people and individuals and businesses themselves. We talked about the first point and now we’re going to the second point of resilience. Tell us a little bit more about that.

It is through challenges that we grow and move to a new level in our lives. Share on X

Part one again is to reframe, take a look at a situation, find the meaning, and ask that question, “What’s the creative opportunity?” Part two is about recalibrating. It’s about looking at where you are and knowing that to get to where you want to be, you may need to make some changes. I’m not a big believer in the jump ship methodology. We have a house in this beautiful little island off of Cape Cod. A couple of years ago, they were building a drawbridge. We were driving over this bridge and I stopped to ask what they were up to. They said, “We’re building a new bridge next to this bridge because this bridge may not last through another winter,” another Nor’easter or something like that. It took a couple of years, but they built this new bridge next to the old bridge and then they tore down the old bridge.

I thought that’s a great metaphor for pivoting and what it looks like. At least how we teach pivoting is we didn’t tear down the first bridge and strand everybody on the other sides but built the second bridge and then we’re able to remove the first bridge. I thought that’s such a great example of it, but it got a little bit better. We were driving on that same bridge maybe a year later. We see them constructing something again. There’s the Army Corps of engineers, we pull over and we asked, “What the heck are you doing now? It’s millions of dollars and it’s a year later.” They go, “That bridge that we built was the replacement bridge, but it wasn’t a permanent bridge.” I thought this whole metaphor keeps getting richer because as with my career, with so many other people’s careers as well that we’ve worked with and your business certainly, you don’t pivot once.

It’s not a one and done thing. We have to learn the art and the science of pivoting on a serial basis. Many of those pivots are gradual pivots. They’re small micro pivots and it’s science. It’s physics. You cannot change the input in any system without also simultaneously changing the output. It’s also called the Law of Small Differences or the Butterfly Effect. When we make small changes, ultimately everything in the system will be impacted by that. Looking at the COVID-19 charts that we’ve been seeing for months, it’s the exact chart of what we’re talking about. It’s a slow, gradual line and then it hockey sticks up. That’s the compounding effect with interest on your money. That’s why Einstein called the compounding effect a miracle. It’s the compounding effect with something like a pandemic. It’s the compounding effect of small changes in what you do.

The second step or trait that resilient people and resilient organizations do is they recalibrate. They make small changes. I often like to refer to it as recalculating even. It’s like if you’re driving in your car and you make a mistake on the road. Your GPS is telling you this is the way to go and you make a left when you’re supposed to make a right. The GPS doesn’t stop you right where you are and go, “You idiot. You never listen to directions.” It’s like what your father said. It never does that. It doesn’t yell at you. It doesn’t break you. It doesn’t judge you. It simply says one word. What’s the word that the GPS says over and over again when you make a mistake?

It will say, “Recalculating.”

It’s going to say recalculating and that’s what it does. It recalculates a way to get from where you are to where you want to be. This is such an important trait of resilient people and resilient organizations. They don’t go into judgment about the fact that they’ve made mistakes. They simply recalibrate, recalculate, and then move forward. That’s step two. Is there anything that you want to touch on before I move on to the third trait?

It’s a point taken and spot-on because it is so true. You can’t throw up your hands and give up. You have to stay with the game. With step one, reframing, you have to think about what you’re doing. Maybe you do need to make small changes as you’re adapting to something new. Nothing great happens overnight. You have to learn and adapt to it and grow from it. You’re absolutely right.

 

Let’s talk about the third trait of resilient people and resilient organizations. Let’s go back to the definition of resilience. If I asked ten people to define resilience, 9 of 10 at least would say it’s the ability to get back up when you’ve been knocked down. It’s what I like to refer to as the Rocky Balboa model. In 1976 is the first time I saw that movie. I’m eleven years old and my dad, we got out of the movie theater. I’m running to the car, my mom’s over there. I was singing the song. He has to corral me and bring me back to the car. I was so excited. If you’ve seen that movie, Rocky gets knocked down many times. He probably gets knocked down more than a dozen times in that movie. He keeps getting back up and getting back up.

That’s the way people define resilience. It’s this ability to take a punch and get back up. Here’s the thing, Rocky wins our hearts in that movie, but he loses the fight. He didn’t just lose the fight, he also doesn’t look too good. In the end, he’s bruised and banged up from the process. Our research is clear that resilience is not about endurance. It’s not about being Rocky. It’s not purely physical. Resilience is about how we recover. Resilience is about how we regenerate our energy, our capacity to be able to not just come back but to come back stronger, wiser and more able to do things that work now at the moment, to be able to create momentum. That’s what it looks like when you’re resilient. It’s not just you survive, but you take what you’ve learned as a way to thrive. That involves developing new rituals for regeneration and recovery. We’re not just talking about how it is that we recover ourselves physically. We must realize that resilience is holistic. It’s mental, emotional and even spiritual.

When we think about mental, emotional, physical and spiritual, those four areas, we will work with individuals on how to increase their resilience in those different quadrants. We use this resilience tool that I mentioned. We’ve got this assessment tool to figure out where are you lacking or where is something not optimal and optimized in one of those four areas? If you’re not optimized for your mental resilience, then you’re finding that you’re like me. You became exhausted in the middle of the afternoon. I needed to have another cup of coffee. I needed to have something sugary to get through the day. I was agitated. I got angry easily and I was a litigator. For me, it was an advantage I suppose in my work because I could use that stuff. For the most part, it didn’t work for my personality, my body, and my relationships. Long story short is that we’ve got to look after ourselves in those four areas. We’ve got to create new rituals and by that, I mean conscious habits.

We have a podcast that’s all about The Conscious PIVOT. That’s all about, what do we do consciously on a ritual basis to make changes in our lives versus when I think of habit, I think of the way I brush my teeth. I don’t even think about it. I brushed my teeth with my right hand or my left hand because it’s my habit to do it. I drive home on the same route because I don’t think about it. I do it habitually. For me, where the problems begin is when we don’t have a level of consciousness about where we are and what we’re doing. To be more present gives us more creative options. This third trait of resilient individuals and resilient organizations is that we are adopting rituals for our recovery, for our self-care, and for the care of those around us. In many ways, this is a cultural thing. Meaning on a company level or within some group, even entrepreneurial groups, often what the culture represents is a culture of exhaustion. It’s a culture that’s being modeled by the leaders in whatever that that group is within that team.

If you’ve got leaders that take themselves for granted, that doesn’t believe they need to adopt self-care rituals because they can just go the distance. They can continue to run themselves on empty and not run out of gas is the wrong example for creating greater capacity, productivity, and performance for the long haul, for longevity. There’s a Harvard Business Review article that compares the highest performing athletes in the world like Olympic medalists and professional athletes to business executives. There’s no question that the level of performance at the highest levels among those athletes and those executives have one thing in common. That thing they had in common was that they had rituals for their own recovery. It is a myth that we should get the night owl award or we should develop cultures within organizations that are perpetuating a model of exhaustion.

Instead, what we need are cultures that are producing resilience within those organizations, cultures that are more defined as a “got your back” culture than a “watch your back” culture. Those kinds of small and not so small shifts in the fabric or the culture of those companies are something that our team loves to work at those levels with people, with the leaders themselves and with those companies because the impact of those organizations on the world is so big. I don’t think there’s anything unusual about this. We’ve all been raised to think that we’ve got to be able to work harder. We should feel shy about asking for time off or asking for time for ourselves.

In many ways, that’s a sign of weakness when we do that. It’s telling somebody that maybe we’re not a team player. There are a lot of issues around permission and shame when it comes to how it is that we take better care of ourselves. I don’t mean care in a self-indulgent way. If you are going to run a marathon tomorrow, if you are going to have an Olympic performance tomorrow, if someone’s life was on the line tomorrow at your job, would you get a better night’s sleep? Would you take care of your body better? Would you drink? Would you hydrate yourself? Would you make sure that you were mentally prepared for the tasks of that day? The answer is always yes. You would treat yourself in a very different way than if you were just going to show up at work. “I’m going to put my work in, I’m going to put my time in, and I’m going to get paid. I’m going to do what I’ve got to do.”

With resilience, we can succeed and do the things that ultimately bring us joy and fulfillment. Share on X

Maybe it would even mean that you would look differently at the habits that have you exhausting yourself mentally, which is a lot of the time now. You would realize that if I’m not at my best mentally, then maybe I’m not doing everything I can for my business or my employer. It’s a small but important mindset shift. That first trait of resilient people is they are able to reframe and find those creative opportunities. Step two or trait number two is they can recalibrate and recalculate their position. The third thing that these resilient individuals always model is this innate ability to recharge their battery, to recover and regenerate their energy so that they continue to keep their capacity level high. They’re also able to go the distance. To me, those are three powerful traits.

I let you talk because I felt that you were saying what we need to know. Taking this not only to business but taking it to a personal level. I handle a lot of relationship loss and those that are coming from that segment are pretty beat up roles and trying to find their lives and trying to figure out their whole being. When I’m listening to you, I’m thinking this can’t just be applied for business. This can be applied for your life, as you’re moving forward in life. Marriages are often not there simply because people are working so crazy like you were doing in the first part of your life. You were putting the gas to the metal and you weren’t coming home, you weren’t connecting with your family.

Because of that, a lot of these individuals are now finding themselves pivoting into single life. They’re trying to grasp on, “Now what do I do? How do I handle all of this? The steps that you have explained here can not only benefit you in business but can benefit your personal life if you use them. If you think about them and you apply them is very important because resilience is something that we need to understand and be able to embrace not only in business but in our personal life. In our personal life, it will reflect upon our business. It’s glorious what you’ve done. Your book is called Pivot: The Art and Science of Reinventing Your Career and Life. Your website is AdamMarkel.com. Is that test that you were referring to on your website?

You can find it on the website and the URL if people want to go directly to it. We’re not selling anything. It’s something we feel is important. People find out not only where they are on the scale of their own resilience in those four areas, but also what to do to make some small changes. There’s nothing drastic here, but the small changes over time are powerful. You can go to Your.ResilienceCulture.com. You can get this assessment. It takes about three minutes to fill it out. You then get your results, as well as a very significant research paper with suggestions specifically tailored to the results that you got on your assessment. Hopefully, a lot of people will take advantage of that to take a moment and take stock in where you are.

I agree with you so much, Cece, people could benefit so much from learning what resilience is right now, what it’s not, and how it is that they can more consciously create that for themselves. Their relationships will be better. Their sense of well-being first and foremost will be so much more improved. In times like this, we’ve got to feel grounded. We’ve got to feel as though we are safe and secure. We’re our best solution to that. In my humble opinion, it’s not the government, our employer, the economy, or the markets. That’s where our well-being comes from. It comes from within and we can create that ourselves.

You’re spot on with that. This book is going to change the lives of many. They’ll start to understand and put those little elements in play because that’s the key. It’s not thinking, “I’ve got to make this huge change.” It’s putting these various steps in play that will benefit their lives and that creates that pivot that happens. It feels like a momentum as it keeps going. It’s wonderful, brilliant, and definitely positive and inspirational. Thank you so much. It’s been a joy to have you on the show.

It’s my joy and my pleasure. Thank you so much, Cece. Thanks for having me.

 

Is the link that you were referring to, is that on your AdamMarkel.com site?

Yes. You can get that there. You have to scroll down below the fold on the first page to get it. There’s a question that gets asked if you’re as resilient as you need to be. If you hit the Find Out button, you can get it right there as well.

We’ll make sure everyone gets that information. We’ll put it up on the site so they have it because it’s important to be able to get to that. We want to check out your site and see what you’re up to and what’s going on with you. We’ll definitely keep that on our list of sites to be watching.

Right now our opportunity is in virtual training. That’s what we’ve been doing for years. I’ve been teaching the pivot principles as well as principles around creating more resilient organizations. People that are looking to have those kinds of training for their teams or their companies, that’s a great fit. You can go to our website and leave us a note there and we can get in touch with you. We’re always looking for that opportunity as well. One last thing. If people love TED Talks. The TED Talk I gave about a year and a half ago got a lot of wonderful feedback on it. If people dig TED Talks and they want to find out a little bit more about the ugly side of my pivot story, they can watch that TED Talk on YouTube as well.

Thank you for sharing that. It’s important for us to realize that we can change our lives and that we have control of it. We think that all the elements around us, they’ve got us and it’s controlling us. It isn’t. It’s allowing the change and pivoting to happen. It’s marvelous what you’re doing. Your book is Pivot: The Art and Science of Reinventing Your Career and Life. Please go out and get it. If you want to make a change, start with reading the book. That would certainly help. We appreciate you coming on. You’re a joy as always. We hope that you’ll join us again sometime in the future. We appreciate all that you do. Everyone, we’ve got to go. Thank you, Adam. I appreciate it.

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We hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. I got a lot from it. I hope that you did too. We love it. I love that pivoting. Think about it. A little bit of change, a little bit of action that you take within your life. It creates something great and wonderful for you both personal and business. That’s what it’s all about. It’s creating the joy and the center and making sure that you’re doing what you want to do in life. That’s what I’m here on earth for. It’s making that change, embracing other people, embracing what we do, and loving life. That’s what we want to do. We want you to love the life you’re in and embrace it. I would suggest again his book. It’s a wonderful book out there. We hope you’ll join us right back again. We’ll catch you back next time.

 

Important Links

• Adam Markel
• Pivot: The Art and Science of Reinventing Your Career and Life
• Man’s Search for Meaning
• Harvard Business Review – article
• YouTube – Adam Markel TED Talk