Feeling powerless

This past week was one of the worst to date. I woke up with a severe stiff neck which still hasn’t fully resolved. My tooth was also tender to the touch. I couldn’t concentrate; my energy was abysmal which led me to canceling 4 coaching sessions, 2 events, and 2 podcasts. Wearing a neck brace is not a pretty sight, and certainly not Zoom ready.

Even though I visited my chiropractor, acupuncturist, dentist, doused myself daily in hot showers, applied OTC ointments along with various holistic remedies, nothing seemed to work, until I did the most obvious.

I took time to get quiet within my thoughts. I didn’t try and fix anything. I didn’t take down any notes. I didn’t search for insights. I just sat with the uncomfortable feelings and the physical pain. In the end, it afforded me a truly wonderful perspective.

It forced me to look deeper within and to acknowledge my own power. It showed me that power is not always in the doing, it’s in the knowing and reminded me of an email post I saved a couple of months ago from one of my closest business mentors, Peter Shankman. An excerpt is included below.

“One of the many lessons the game drive guides taught us was about the elephants. See, elephants don't know that they're three to five tons of raw power. They don't know they can overturn cars. They don't know they can squash a lion into lion juice. They don't even know that they can knock down trees just by running into them. They don't know any of that. They have no idea how strong they are.

Until the first time they do.

In other words, elephants aren't given a lesson in how strong they are by other elephants. Their parents teach them lots of things - how to eat, how to stay in their herd, but not how strong they are. They need to find that out themselves. And once they do, well, you don't want to be in between an elephant and the tree at which he's charging.

Same thing is true with us. We don't know how strong we are until we're called on to be that strong. We don't know our power until we stand up to a bully, until we stop caring what others think of us, until we demand better service, until we raise our prices, until we stop allowing ourselves to be taken advantage of.

Until we discover the power we've always had inside of us, we'll never know it's there.

Like the elephant, you truly have no idea how strong you are.

Maybe it's time to find out.”

I’ve found that sometimes the answer can only be found when you stop searching.

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Every Monday morning at 10 AM EST I will post a powerful prompt and follow it wherever it leads. The aim is to resource all "three brains" — head 🧠, heart 💓, and gut 🤰 — in hopes of connecting the dots to those sticky parts in our nature that matter.

As a syndicated columnist for Authority Magazine and Thrive Global, I have interviewed nearly 175 cancer survivors from all walks of life. In my #1 best-selling book, I Survived Cancer and Here Is How I Did It, I share the true stories of 35 of those survivors and what they learned physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually from this very difficult experience which has forever shaped their worldview. The intention is to tell a survivor story — that cancer is not an ultimate death sentence. Help support this movement by purchasing and sharing this book.