Sunday Serenity

Good evening and happy Sunday to the Cadre crew out there. Happy to be with you again this week. My name is Jason Lennox and I am your resident recovery champion. Hope you're all having a wonderful weekend here in Minnesota. The great state metro area was beautiful out, great weather. Looking forward to sharing with you all tonight. I was at a conference last week, so I didn't get a chance to. But you know, one of the things, my title, and maybe just to backtrack a little bit, who I am in this space is your resident recovery champion.

I'm here to talk about all things recovery, mental health, well being, and just love speaking everything recovery into the universe. I think recovery is good for all of us. So anyhow, my title tonight was. Good evening, Jules. Always great to see you here. Sherry, some others jumping on. Great to have you all here. But the question I posed was, how do we transform pain to power? And, you know, if you're connected with me on social media, specifically Facebook, I guess I had done a little bit of post.

If you're not, I would love to connect with you. Facebook, LinkedIn, check it out. I love to stay in touch with people who are just trying to play with getting better and, you know, personal growth. So I had posted something. I had a long trip. I told you I was at a conference in Colorado last week and spent a few days down before the conference in Colorado Springs, four days of a conference in Denver a few days after, north of Denver with family. And I, you know, exercise is something I like to do three to four times a week.

I block off my time. I try to stay pretty religious about it. When I'm out of town, it's a little bit harder. And so I do things like maybe run, and I don't do a lot of it. So I decided that I would go for a run. I was at my cousin's and she said, well, there's this lake. 8 miles. 8, drive back. I didn't really want to drive, so I decided I would run. So I mapped this thing out. 25 miles. And I was running up against several things. One, I've never run more than a five k, so about half that. Two, I didn't really know where I was going.

I could map it out a little bit, but there were so many different turns and I had to cut through this park and everything else. And in Colorado, I'm 5000ft up in the air. Elevation makes it a little bit harder to breathe. It was also fairly warm. It actually started downpouring, and then I was running into the wind about half of the run. And probably most of all, I've had six knee surgeries, five of them on one knee. And a couple of those kind of changed my life. They were pretty serious and risky knee surgeries, and that all happened within a span of four years.

But since 2018, I haven't had a surgery and I've done a little more running lately and can keep up with it. Point being, I'm running. I'm running. I get about halfway. I mean, I miscalculated because I've never run more than half of it. I think I'm halfway. I'm not even close to halfway, but I do get to what turned out to be the halfway point. And I can see that it's going to start raining. And it's. It doesn't just rain, it starts downpouring. And I'm, uh, you know, I'll say a couple hundred yards from some shelter, there's some trees, there's a little shelter with them, like picnic area.

And so I get up there and I'm thinking, okay, I just gotta get to that. And as I'm running up every step I'm taking, I've already beat my previous record because I've gone past that five k mark. And as I start to talk myself into those things, and I'm getting to a point here, and hopefully you can relate a little bit. As I start to talk myself into, hey, Luke. Good to have you here, my friend. Always great when the man who creates this thing shows up, but I'm talking myself, I start to go down this path of, okay, if I just get to the shelter, I'll take a pause, I'll take a break.

I hadn't stopped. I didn't want to stop. I didn't know how far I would get. I didn't know how fast I would do. I realize that, you know, I'm starting to get there where I want. I'm thinking about taking a break, and immediately, and I do this regularly. This is the point. I'm trying to drill home. I do this when I'm working out, and I'm going to ask you all to think about this and do this. I'm getting to this point where I'm ready to throw in the towel, at least take a break, at least pause a little bit till the downpouring stops.

And then I think back. I think back to all the things that I've gone through in addiction and the mental health struggles, and I think about all those days that I didn't have food, and I think about all the nights that I didn't have a place to sleep in the cold Minnesota winter. And I think about all those thoughts that I had of suicide, and maybe it's just I'm better off not here. And then I think about, you know, all the admissions to the hospitals with overdoses and all those times that I had to sit jail time and had everything taken freedom.

And just think about all those brushes I had with death. I mean, I had a stack of those things, and the list could go on and on. But as I'm thinking about those things, all of a sudden, I'm not thinking about, you know, the rain that's coming down. I'm not thinking about the legs that are just not quite used to running that far. I'm not thinking about all the things that would have normally stopped me. My point was, and the question I asked when I posted this on Facebook, was, why should you have someone on your team who's been through h*** and back?

And the answer was, because when you have someone who's been through h*** and back and they can think about, and they can drum up what it was like to go through all that, the resilience, the grit, the determination, the persistence that it takes to show up, living that kind of life and make it through some of those hardest times is so far beyond what it takes to run the extra 3 miles. And so, as I thought about those things, I never thought about stopping again. I just continued to think about, man, this is what a life.

What a life. I have to be able to get through these things. And so my answer to that was, why should you have someone on your team who's been through h***? Because when logic tells the normal person to quit, the person who has been through h*** and back is bound to defy that. I'm not stopping. There's not a little rain that's coming down. There's not a little pain in the leg that's going to stop me from going to the finish line when I think about all the things. And so my point in this to you and the ask to you, and what I would urge you to think about is, what are those challenges?

Because we all have them. I mean, I've got that story. So many people I know have that story. Share the lukes, the other people of the world who've lived that kind of life and who understand and who get that. But it's not just that there are people that grow up. We, so many of us, almost all of us grow up. And we have these experiences as children. And whether they're one extreme or the other, it doesn't matter. We perceive them in the same way. It's hard. We don't feel like we're good enough. We don't feel like we make it.

And, you know, all those things lead us down these paths, and we've all got the mental health. There's some degree of mental health going on with all of us. We bounce back and forth on that spectrum. Whatever. You've been through a hard divorce, you've lost close people. We've all had to do these things. We've lost jobs, we've lost family members, you know, people who suffer from, you know, addiction, and they don't make it out alive. I mean, a quarter million people in the US died last year. And so my point is, start to drive.

And I know that's not comfortable always to think about and to go down that. But in those moments when the times get a little bit challenging, and again, I do this with my workouts, when I feel like, man, I do some very intense workouts and I'm trying to beat certain times and I'm doing this and I'm doing that, and I want to set a new goal and a new record. It always comes to my mind when work gets challenging and life is hard and it's a grind. I just think back to those times. I use that trick and that tool regularly, and it always makes it feel a little bit easier to go through what I'm going through now.

And I believe that is why. That is how we can transform pain to power. I mean, there are several ways we can do that. We can transform pain to power for someone in our life, to share with somebody, to be an example like I'm doing with you. We can transform our pain to power for the entire world as we try to do, sharing our content, sharing our stories. Or I can take that pain, transform it to power, internalize it, and push myself to limits that I otherwise would not have gotten to. And that's where I really love it.

I love internalizing, thinking about all the things and the obstacles and the barriers that we have to overcome and using them to make the task at hand feel not so big. And I just think it's a great way for us to trudge through this life, because there are those times that are hard. There are the six and a quarter mile runs that I've never done, that I'm going to do. Heck, would like to be like Luke someday and run from here to duluth like I know he wants to. And so those are the things, and would love to hear your guys feedback and what you do and what you use in those times of trials and tribulations and the things that are just, you know, they challenge us.

If I'm a firm believer that if I'm not feeling challenged in my life, physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, and I'm sitting idle and I'm getting complacent, and I know that that's not where I want to be, and I can't afford to be there to keep my health and my wellness and my recovery long term, sustained in a good place. I need to be challenged. I need to be growing. I need to be continuing down the path of what's next and what other goals can I set and how can I do this thing called life for me, for my family, for the people around me?

So I really just had a moment when I was thinking about that. I documented it, I wrote it, and just thought, you know, I got to share this story. And I really want to leverage the lesson behind that that I use, like I said, regularly in different times in my life and hopefully pass it on to you. So the call to action is take this thing, take this message. Think about where this fits into your life. Think about where you relate with some of the things I talked about. And if not, then think about those barriers, those challenges, those obstacles.

Write them down. I've got story. I've got a story inventory where I'm writing down the most powerful stories of my life that took so much persistence, determination, grit, resilience to get through, because I like to go back to those, and I like to tell those stories, and I like to think about them and use them. So document these challenging times, the things that you've gotten through, because you've. We've all gotten through things. We all perceive them a little bit differently. But one thing I've learned over my life is I don't pretend like my story is any harder, greater, better than others because I just don't know.

I can see from the outside, but we don't know what's going on up here and what the challenges are that bring us to places that we are today. So dig down, find that inside. Write that out. Make a story inventory for yourself. Start thinking about how you share that, how you use that and come back and talk to me next week. We'd love to hear how you turn pain into power and what some of the other methods are that you all are using. I'd love to learn a little bit from you as well. And so hope you all have enjoyed Sunday serenity this week.

Love being with you guys and love sharing powerful stories. Hope you got something valuable here tonight. And again, call to action. Think about all those challenges, document them. Do the beginning of a story inventory so you've got something to reference. You've got a toolbox to open up and say, I'm plucking that story. I'm going to remember the food less days and the homeless nights and, you know, and I'm going to make this task at hand seem just a little bit easier when I think about that. Look forward to seeing you all again in a week.

I hope you all have wonderful weeks. Looks like it's been another great week of weather here in Minnesota and hopefully you're having good weather where you are and look forward to doing it again and continuing to plug through August. Hang in there, everyone, and we'll see you next Sunday.