How to Find Peace Under Pressure

0:28So, hey, guys, are you frustrated with where you're at right now?

0:33this is the Ed Myron Show all right welcome back to the show everybody so I want to start out today by telling you what we're going to talk about which is we're going to talk about extending grace and kindness to people but actually doing it during difficult times during stressful situations and why it matters that you do it and I'm going to tell you two stories from my life that both happened very recently that I thought I have to teach this lesson today because it taught me one. And so the first one happened, I did a post about this a few weeks ago and it went pretty viral. So I'm driving down the road and I don't know if you ever had this happen, but just someone's messing with you next to you.

1:09Right. And this person was trying to agitate me and they'd cut me off. And then, you know, then they went around me and were behind me and kind of riding my bumper. And then they were yelling, then they wanted to race me. And I'm like, come on, man. Like, I'm not that dude. I'm a grown man. I'm not going to race you. Right. But they were trying to agitate me. And they didn't. I didn't get upset. I thought, what a huge win. Like I kept my emotions the way I wanted them. I stayed emotionally under control. I stayed poised when me, maybe five years ago, certainly 10 or 15 years ago, you know how you'd be.

1:42You start yelling back at them. You get agitated. You get anxious. You get angry. And I was allowing outside stimulus to affect my internal emotions. And so I thought, what a gigantic win. Like this was awesome. I wasn't upset. I waved at him. I smiled. And you know what else I found out? When someone's trying to get under your skin, trying to get you negative, trying to get you angry, trying to get you distracted, right? Trying to get you to perform in a way that's not reflective of your real character, right? When you don't give into that, man, it frustrates them. It was such a bonus for me to see this person getting more and more frustrated that I was just, I was living with equanimity.

2:20In my book, The Power of One More, I have a whole chapter on equanimity, which basically means, my version of it is peace under duress, finding peace in a stressful situation and circumstance and being able to live in that state, a state of equanimity. And I did. And I was very proud of myself because it's easy to do that when you're at a park or by a lake or on your boat or wherever, right, in a peaceful place, taking a walk with a dear friend, the simple things in life. But it's not so easy sometimes to do it when there's stress, when emotions get raised, when someone's intentionally trying to do harm to you.

2:55It was a better win than making a bunch of money by winning an award, by how well this podcast does. I felt so great that I won because winning in life is an emotional game. The quality of your life is the quality of your emotions, right? You don't want a bunch of money. You want how you think a bunch of money is going to make you feel if that's what you want. You don't even necessarily want a relationship. You want how you think that relationship will make you feel. You want to be super fit and jacked. You want how you think you will feel if you're super fit and jacked. So what we're all trying to find is an emotion is a feeling.

3:30And what I find is you don't have to chase them. They're within you right now. And it only happens when you surrender that emotion to the outside circumstance that you lose or to a person. You're going to have someone, you may even right now, who's antagonistic towards you or is hating on you. Or just they cut you off on the road or they're at work and you're competing with them for a job and they're trying to undercut you. Whatever it might be, right? Or someone's rude to you in a restaurant, right? Or dismissive to you. It's very easy to allow what that outside stimulus does to infect your internal emotional thermostat level.

4:05And every time you stay in control of your emotions, you win. and that's a muscle you build. And I found that it's pretty difficult now to get me to change my emotions based on your behavior. It's hard to get me to change my emotions based on the conditions around me. Yet I lived probably 50 years of my life where the conditions dictated my emotions. The treatment somebody gave me dictated my emotions, right? The circumstances around me dictated my emotions. The results dictated my emotions. And so you're probably nodding with me right now that you have a tendency to do that. And every time you don't and you stay in control and you stay kind, you stay graceful, you stay in a state of equanimity and peace, what ends up happening is you win and you build a muscle that becomes stronger and stronger and stronger.

4:51And that's what resilience is. That's what it is. That's what building something great in your life is all about, is doing it over and over and over again and developing the pattern of building the emotions we want. So, hey, guys, as you know, I've partnered up with my good friend Brennan Brouchard, who's created the greatest personal development system that has ever been designed called Growth Day. There's everything from journaling to accountability programs, live messages every Monday from myself and other influencers. There's an opportunity for you to get courses that would cost thousands of dollars completely for free.

5:25It's incredible. Go to growthday.com forward slash ed and check it out. Really, we learn these negative emotional patterns as children, don't we? When something doesn't go our way, we start screaming and crying, right? Or we fall down and, you know, we get really upset. Or someone does something to us at school and we come home very set. So we start these patterns very young in our life and we never undo them. And we all have what I call like an emotional home. And what that means is that in your life, you know, no matter what the circumstances are, most people have a pattern of emotions they're going to get back.

5:57So for some people, that pattern is, you know, they find every single day of their life, they find a way back to grace and peace and bliss and ecstasy and joy and passion. For other people, though, no matter what the circumstances are, they find a way to get their anger, to get their anxiety, to get their worry, to get their fear. And if emotions are the quality of our life, I was losing. I remember, I'll tell you a quick story. Many, many years ago, I was blessed that I was doing very well financially, finally, in my life. And I was building my first dream home. And the contractor had messed something up that day.

6:30And I had appointment canceled. And another client of mine changed their mind. And then the house was under construction. I walked in. I was mad at the contractor. I walked in. They were angry and stressed. And I looked. And there were a group of gentlemen who were working on my kitchen. They were all carpenters. They all happened to be from Mexico and I watched them and I'm standing in my mansion okay that was being built angry and frustrated and frankly scared anger is usually the other side of the coin is fear scared all the emotions I didn't want I'm experiencing my body that was my life experience at that moment who cared that I had money or a mansion or those things because it wasn't giving me those emotions then that I thought it was going to give me and I was watching these men in my kitchen and all of them they had their mariachi music on most of these men were not making a lot of money by the way they had left their families in mexico and most of them were working here to send money back home to their family i later got to know many of them pretty well because they were there for a long time and i befriended most of them but as i watched them they were singing and dancing and enjoying their time and laughing and cracking jokes with another meanwhile doing work that they were great at that was meaningful that was beautiful and in that moment if you said who's winning the game of life, the guy with the mansion or the men who were building it for him?

7:48And in that moment, they were winning the life game because they were doing work that mattered to them, that they were passionate about. They were laughing. They were joyous. They were in a blissful state. They had a state of equanimity and joy and passion and focus about what they were doing. And meanwhile, the rich guy with the mansion over there, he was in a state of anger and fear and frustration and worry and angst. So if the quality of our emotions are the quality of our life, I remember clearly in that moment watching these men, there were six of them, in this kitchen that was being built thinking, they're winning the game of life right now.

8:23I'm losing it. Yet the outside world would probably say the guy with the mansion is winning. That's not winning. Winning is are you in control of the emotions that you want? And somehow we get our emotional home. You'd ask yourself, what's your emotional home currently? Like over the last six months, what's the primary emotion you feel every day? Is it fear? Is it frustration? Is it anger? Is it worry? Is it depression? Is it frustration? Is it just sort of blah? Or are you getting a whole bunch of peace and a whole bunch of bliss and a whole bunch of happiness and joy and ecstasy or not? Are you doing work that means something to you and you feel a sense of contribution from it and growth from it or do you not?

9:05And so for me, I had to evaluate that. And so between the ride in the car that I had that day and that man in the mansion, I've grown a lot. And so I'm proof today that you can do it because it's a pattern that you build. And then the other thing is, for me, the pathway to feeling these emotions is my ability to extend grace and kindness to other human beings. We're in a world today where we're so divided and at each other's throats, it seems. and we all believe we're separate, that they're separate people. You're this, I'm that. You believe that, I believe this. You're from there, I'm from here.

9:42All these different things in life, the different religious conflicts that we have, the wars that we're in, but even just the day-to-day way we treat one another, there's not enough kindness. So my call to you today, my plea to you today is to begin to live a life where even more, even if you're doing it, to extend more grace and kindness to people in your everyday life. And then the measure of it also is can you do it when they don't extend it to you? See, that guy in the car that day wasn't extending me any of those things, but I extended grace and kindness back to him. See, it's easy to be kind and gentle and beautiful with people when they're doing that for you.

10:21But what happens when they're not? Because that tells us who you really are, doesn't it? It tells me who I really am. Can I extend kindness and grace to you when you're not behaving in a way that's worthy of it? When you're antagonistic towards me, you know, I'm in a little bit of a business thing right now where there's some strife in one of my businesses and everyone's being so horrible to one another. And it's my ability to not reciprocate, not reduce myself to that level and extend them grace. I don't know what they're going through. I don't know what problems they have. Give them kindness and grace when really they're not even earning it right now.

10:55but I'm worth giving it to them because it makes me feel better about me when I give somebody that grace. I'll give you an example. Last story. Several weeks ago, I was out to dinner with my family. It was a pretty nice restaurant, like crazy nice, but pretty nice. And there was a family at the table right next to us. And right when we walked in, I could hear this family in the lobby and the kids were real rowdy. You can picture it. You've been somewhere like this not just a little rowdy i'm talking about like screaming and yelling and you know running around the table during the meal it was a decent restaurant right it was distracting to other people in the restaurant i remember we sat next to them you can imagine probably like i was like oh man i just wanted to have a nice beautiful meal with my family and now i'm gonna deal with this all all night and i did deal with it they were these kids were misbehaving pretty heavy and you know there's that part of you when you look at the parents you're like discipline your kids.

11:52I start judging them. I would never let my kids act out like that. Have your kids sit down, tell them to be quiet, have them put the napkin on their lap. Like, you know, they're yelling at each other. This is a restaurant. There's decorum here. There's manners. And so I found myself not only tending towards frustration with the noise level and the kids, but also judging the parents, judgment and frustration. And I'm not kidding you because I know I do this for a living. I went, are these the emotions I want to experience during this meal? Is this what I'm going to do at dinner? I get this two-hour dinner too, so I'm going to choose to be judgmental, angry, frustrated, and totally distracted with their table instead of present with these people that I love.

12:35Can I in this moment find a way to extend grace and kindness to that family? And I did. I made this shift, which surprised my own family, frankly, I think. and I was totally present with my family and laughing and blissful as this chaos was going on. Now that's a test for your emotional makeup, right? And so they ended up leaving about three quarters of the way through our meal. And I remember literally going, I could see other people in the restaurant, like, ah, they're gone. And I had a lot of judgment that I could have had. Anyway, a few days later, something incredible what happened i was at the golf course and i was hitting some balls on the driving range and the man next to me i looked up and it was the server from two nights before at the restaurant and he walks over and says mr mylette thank you for such a great experience you made me feel so good about myself i'm sorry for the noise level at that table over there and i go yeah it was and he says yeah they um they're they came back from the funeral of their grandmother and I went what yeah they they had just returned from the the grandchildren's their grandmother passed away and so they had come back from the funeral to have dinner and the kids were pretty wound up and the wife was very very sad it was her mom and the son and the wife had met when they were young so she was like like like his mother too and I went oh wow and I went hmm the old me I would have judged that family I would have spent my entire meal obsessed with with their inability to parent their kids and the noise and how crazy it was.

14:12Yet, I was so grateful. And by the way, I've made this mistake 100 times, so I'm just telling you the one time I've done it. I did extend grace to them and kindness because you never know what someone's going through. You never know what battle someone's fighting. You never know what burden they're carrying. You don't know what someone had just recently done to them. You don't know what they're acting out of. You don't know what pain they're acting out of or stress they're acting out of or loss, in this case, they're acting out of. And so remember that when you go to judge. Remember that when you go to react, that you don't know what that person's carrying.

14:43And your ability to be a superhuman has nothing to do with your ability to lift a bunch of weights or build muscles or make millions and millions of dollars. Superhuman is a person who treats other humans in a superhuman way, even when they don't appear to be worthy of it or deserve it. That's when you've done something superhuman in your life. So I wanted to challenge you today to really reflect on where can you be more kind? What would our world look like if everybody just took a moment and gave their other fellow human beings, their brothers and sisters, just a little bit more grace, a little bit more understanding, a little bit more kindness, and went out of their way to express that to somebody?

15:24And what you're going to find is that when you give someone that gift, you're giving it to you because now your emotional home becomes equanimity. It becomes peaceful. It becomes blissful So that i'm saying to you is the way I control my internal environment Ironically is the way that I treat people in my external environment not the external environment dictating it to me I dictate it to the external environment And so I just ask you maybe the next time you walk by a stranger just say a quick prayer for them Peace be with you. I wish you well. I wish you wealth. I wish you health Just quiet prayers for people quiet thoughts quiet kindness quiet gift of grace and I think our world will be a whole lot better but your internal world will be better anyway I wanted to share those stories with you today hope you remember the story of the car and the gentleman that built my kitchen in that house God bless them and then this precious family who had lost their grandmother those are three examples of why controlling your emotions matters in the life that you live all right everybody God bless you max out your life This is the Ed Myland Show