Resilience How to Emerge from your Tragedies Stronger
imagine
you’ve just finished up a long day of
work at the studio that you’re recording
your brand new free workouts every
single day for the entire world
and it’s finally time to lock up and go
home you lock the key in the door and
you turn to go down to your car
when you see four men walking up the
street
as you walk down to your car you hear
one of them whisper don’t move
you turn back over your shoulder to look
and see what that was
and you see that one of the four men is
now pointing a gun at you
turn back to your fiance who actually
didn’t hear the speaking
and say get in the car they have guns
you get in the car
and right before you sit down you look
back and you see now that two of the
four men
have guns pointed at you as we were
sitting down
we heard the shots fired pop pop pop pop
pop
pop pop pop eight shots
we drove out of the parking lot and as
dustin called the 911 operator
i realized that my hands are wet as i
crawl out of the passenger side
floorboard
i look at my hands and as the street
light passes over the car and lights up
the inside
i see that they’re now covered in my own
blood
i realize i’ve been shot
i believe that my life and your life
have both been defined
by overcoming obstacles i want to talk
to you today about how as a fitness
professional
and someone who’s experienced a lot in
the short life that i’ve lived
about how we can turn this adversity
into our superpower
resilience i’ve been known to be an
eternal optimist and always positive but
this is not as a result of me being
naive
or oblivious or unsure about what’s
around me
in fact it’s the exact opposite i’ve
experienced my fair share
of life-altering tragedies and today i
want to talk to you about two of them
specifically
not to make you feel sad for me or to
feel sorry for me but more importantly
to make you
see yourself in me i want to show you
what’s possible when life throws things
at you that you never
expect and how we can come out stronger
together
and i want you to think for a minute
before we get started if i asked you
have you experienced something terrible
you would likely be able to say yes
right
now if i asked you looking back at this
thing were you able to move forward from
it
knowing you handled it in the best way
that you could he felt confident about
you growing stronger from that tragedy
and most importantly if life were to
throw another tragedy at you today
would you be prepared to say i’m going
to grow stronger
from this tragedy i want to talk to you
today about how we can work on answering
yes
to that last question in june of 2017 i
got a call from my mom early on a sunday
morning which i knew was not normal
she informed me that my brother had been
in an atv accident
and would likely need brain surgery my
brother had just gotten married he had
just had a kid and he was always
accident prone so i just knew he was
going to be okay and maybe my mom was
being a bit dramatic
only i was wrong
the next couple weeks our family slept
in the hospital waiting room and
listened to doctors tell us we’re doing
everything we can
it was a roller coaster ride of
infection and
he’s sustaining his stable status
there was never any positive projection
for any quality of life
we learned that my brother’s severe
brain damage had left him with three
percent brain function
he would never get better and he would
never wake up
we would have to make the decision to
let him go
in a coincidental twist of timing i had
been reached
out by a gym in charleston west virginia
which was my brother and i’s hometown
prior to zack’s accident they had asked
me to write a story about a time
when i had decided not to give up now
initially i wrote my story about moving
to charlotte
and not knowing anyone and chasing a
dream where i was in the fitness
industry but i had no support
everyone made fun of me and called it a
pipe dream and never supported me in
that mission
then my brother had his accident and i
decided to trash that story
and write about how i knew that my
brother would never give up in his rehab
journey
i visited the gym to take a picture
there while i submitted my article and
told them about my brother’s accident
and they gave me a t-shirt it was a blue
t-shirt with red writing across the
chest that said never give
up they told me to give it to my brother
because they thought he might need some
motivation
in his rehab journey back to his
strength
my brother died the next day
i will forever believe that that was his
message
to me never give up
that message surrounded the most painful
thing i have still
ever experienced and simultaneously what
i decided would be my start of leaving a
legacy
of being a living example of resilience
i decided right then
to turn all of my pain into my purpose
never give up the choice i made after
losing my brother would in fact change
the trajectory of my life i decided to
start thinking about the legacy that i
was leaving and
would it be one that i was proud of i
was a personal trainer and i technically
had a full schedule of clients
which i had worked three years in a city
where i knew nobody to try and achieve
i would offer free boot camps in the
park i was training at five different
gyms when i worked here when i first
moved here
and now i had my own personal training
in an apartment complex gym
where i was fully booked out of clients
which was something to be proud of
but i had no room to grow i couldn’t
scale i couldn’t offer more than what i
already had because i had no more time
i decided then that i was tired of being
complacent and i was tired of being
stagnant
i knew something had to change when i
decided to funnel this pain
and take my pain into my purpose i took
my in-person personal training company
to a digital platform with my fiance
dustin who was
a cpa by trade but also a photographer
and videographer by talent which we
didn’t know
until he decided to rent a camera and
google some camera settings
when he proposed to me he calls it cheap
i call it
destiny he decided to take that picture
and as we took that picture and posted
it on my instagram
and continued to help me market my
fitness career with his photography
we learned that he was really sought out
and really incredible what he was doing
he was really getting some big names for
freelancing jobs
all while still being a full-time cpa we
decided then and there to start
combining our passions and our talents
and start creating our legacy
how would we do this how would we make
sure that we stood out in a very
saturated fitness industry the digital
world was so crowded and we needed to do
something that was not already being
done
we took inspiration from a daily youtube
vlogger casey neistat and decided to be
the daily fitness vlogger
and post a brand new workout video every
single day on youtube
we decided this and we ran with it a lot
of people told us
we were crazy that this didn’t make any
sense this mission was too big for just
two people
that we would never fulfill our mission
of giving free fitness
every single day to people all over the
world
but that voice kept coming back in and
our pain kept pushing us to fulfill our
purpose
never give up so we didn’t
to say this was initially a struggle
would be an understatement
it was a lot of fights with each other a
lot of fights for long hours
breakdowns tears frustration and we just
couldn’t figure out how to get it
rolling at first
all while working 80 to 100 hours a week
individually
to be able to afford the media studio
that we were renting out to record these
workouts
to put out for free to the world after
about a year of posting youtube videos
every single day for free we finally
started to catch some traction
we felt like we were growing our
worldwide audience they were giving
great feedback and we were finally
accepted into the youtube partner
program
most importantly lives were changing we
recorded late one night on a sunday
evening
in the middle of september and we
decided to lock up and go home and start
our edit for the evening
as we locked up we turned to go down to
our cars in the parking lot and we see
four men walking up the street we walked
down
and as we walked down the stairs i hear
that same whisper
don’t move dustin didn’t hear the
whisper but i remember clinching
my backpack and turning around over my
left shoulder
and seeing one of the four men pointing
a gun right at me
i turn back to dustin and say we have to
get in the car they have a gun
so we both ran to the car to get in and
right before i sat down for some reason
i decided to look back again
now i notice two men have guns pointed
at us
we start to sit down and i hear eight
shots fired
dustin managed to get us out of the
parking lot and we were screaming and i
was in the floorboard of the passenger
side car
he called 9-1-1 and as i crawled out of
the floor i noticed that my right foot
is really cold and my hands are really
wet
and because it’s nighttime the street
lights are going over our car and about
a block away from the studio
i open up my hands to see them covered
in my own blood
and i realize i’d been shot the operator
tells dustin to pull over into a parking
lot because we were closer to an
ambulance than a hospital
we pull over and she instructs dustin on
how to get out of the car
go find some towels in the back of the
car to which he grabbed a yellow
towel that he used to clean his car with
and hold my foot up in the air to apply
pressure to stop the bleeding
i saw my pink nike pegasus slowly
turning red
as he put pressure on the outside of my
foot i remember being completely silent
in the ambulance and not saying a word
to the paramedics
i was so confused about why i wasn’t
feeling any pain yet
the adrenaline was still going and i
couldn’t feel anything and they actually
awarded me
the most calm gunshot victim they had
ever worked with
when we got to the hospital we learned
that the bullet had hit the branch of an
artery in my foot and i had to go into
emergency surgery to cauterize that
artery
and also heal my heel bone that had been
shattered in the accident
i remember waking up from that surgery
and realizing that i was alive
and that dustin was alive we both still
had our lives we were still here
i had that same decision to make again
in that moment
yes it was painful but i promised myself
i was going to turn my pain into my
purpose and i promised
to never give up
for months after my surgery i was in a
boot i was wearing a wound vac i was
using a scooter to get around everywhere
and i was also cleaning and packing my
own gunshot wound
doctor’s orders twice a day three months
after my shooting i was cleared to put
weight on my right foot
and two weeks later i decided to come
back to the youtube stage and film
workouts
to start my comeback story the beauty in
all of this tragedy
is that because i was shot i’m now
actually a better personal trainer
when i decided to come back to youtube i
started my journey with a community of
tens of thousands of people supporting
me in my comeback
and virtually joining me in these
workouts and up until that point because
i was a division one athlete and a full
scholarship track and field high jumper
i had never been able to relate to
people who were very new in their
fitness journey and very beginning
coming back from an injury or starting
their journey completely all over from
something
now i was able to show that every single
day since december 10
2018 i have shown up on my channel and
fought for my strength
now over 1 million subscribers and over
115 million workouts completed later
i can’t imagine not showing up and not
having a fulfilled life where i know
it’s all because i didn’t give up what
tragedy pain or
exposure to failure are you still
holding on to without allowing it to
push you
into the next chapter of your story we
all have a decision to make and we all
have a path to choose when we navigate
how to move forward from a tragedy
what if now moving forward you were able
to say i got through this thing and i
can tell that i’m stronger
because of it what if instead of saying
i’m a victim of this thing you can now
say
i look back and say all the ways i can
display my resilience
and most importantly if something were
to happen to you again
what path are you going to choose are
you going to choose the victim mentality
or are you going to choose to not give
up and allow it to push you
into your best life in losing my brother
i honor him by living every single day
to make sure
i give access to fitness to people all
over the world
i went from my apartment complex gym to
now a new
media studio that is over 20 times the
size of what i used to be training in
with four full-time employees and i
can’t imagine if i would have skipped
out on something like this
over 115 million workouts completed
or opportunities that could have been
missed
being a survivor of a gunshot i am now
able to say i am a stronger
and mentally and physically healthier
person i feel my physical strength come
through
i’m more confident i feel alive and
thankful for my life
i’m also a better personal trainer now
because i can relate to people of all
fitness levels
knowing we’ve all been at the beginning
at some point together
life will continue to take shots at us
but now you know it’s possible
to go through your tragedies and come
out stronger
don’t think of things that you’ve gone
through in the past as your baggage
unless to take it from a fitness
perspective
you view that baggage as equipment that
is challenging you
and making you stronger and you can look
back and say because i’ve carried this
i’m stronger today in life the choice
will always be yours
give in or never give up