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Chapter 1
time to thrive
life happens. No matter what you or I do, life just happens. There are high moments and low moments, easy times and tough times. There are pains and hurts, joys and achievements. Thatâs just life.
How do you live through what life gives you? That is the question.
You can pass through life, barely hanging on, scraping by, basically surviving. You can fight and fuss, believe that life just isnât fair, and see yourself as a victim. And you will exhaust yourself in a losing battle.
Or you can pass through, oblivious to what is happening, more or less assuming that life will get started at some point. Your âcruise controlâ is set and you are just passing through. And one day, you wake up and ask, âWhere did life go?â
Or, you can go through life fulfilled and excited. You can live life with a purpose and a deep sense of meaning, impacting lives all around. In other words, you can live a thriving life.
Hereâs the interesting thing: what happens to you is not the difference in those three trajectories. How you understand yourself and life, and how you respond to those life eventsâthat is what makes the difference.
Having nothing or having too much is not the determining issue. Many people, barely scraping by (materially speaking), live thriving lives. And many people, with more than enough, feel like they are barely surviving.
My friend John, whom you met in the Introduction, was in survival mode. He firmly believed that life had dealt him a bad hand. I heard, âLife isnât fair,â way too many times.
John pulled into my parking lot in a very expensive car, stepped out dressed in very nice clothes, coming from the business he owned.
âLife not fairâ? John was correct. Life was not fair to him. But he saw it from the wrong end. He had a winning hand. He just didnât see it. He lived in âsurvival mode,â but only in his mind.
John struggled every day, but mostly with himself. He had no idea that he had life by the horns, and not the other way around. His belief was focused on a lack of something every day. The âsomethingâ might change, but the feeling of lack stayed the same.
Sue, on the other hand, was someone I met during my years as a hospital chaplain. She was a frequent patient on the floor I covered, the oncology floor. Sue had been diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer two years earlier. The same week she was diagnosed with cancer, her husband told her he was leaving her for another woman.
In the dark evenings of our visits (I covered the second shift, a quiet time in the hospital), Sue and I chatted. She told me her story early on. âWow,â I thought, âI bet she is bitter.â
Sue was facing the end of her life. The radiation and chemotherapy only partially beat back the cancer from her post-operative body. It was never defeated. She had fought and fought, but the cancer was relentless.
Over the course of those couple of years, I saw Sue many times. And I kept waiting for the bitterness and anger.
One night, I ventured, âDo you ever just feel that life is unfair?â
âOh, God, yes!â Sue told me.
Finally, I thought, here comes the anger.
Then Sue continued, âLife is definitely unfair. I have had more than my share of joy. I have had more than my share of opportunities. And I have had more than my share of love. Life is definitely unfair ⌠in my favor!â
Sue shared that she had once felt the equation was tilted the other way. She thought that she was on the losing end. I asked her what woke her up. âCancer,â she told me.
She explained that she had been going through life, angry and upset. She tried to control others in her life, and tried to control her own life. But to no avail. Other people still did what they wanted, and she always felt out of control.
Then, along came cancer. âIt woke me up,â she told me. She said she realized, while waiting for surgery, that no matter what happened, cancer would not beat her. She took on the challenge, not to get well and live forever, but to live well while she was alive.
While many in a similar spot might bargain with God (or some higher power), Sue decided that she would live life as fully as possible. She was not trying to escape death, but live life.
Sue made a choice to thrive.
And that is the nature of thrivingâit is about making a choice to thrive. It is about not numbing out and living on automatic. It is about living fully.
Surviving Versus Thriving
John was stuck in survival mode. Sue had shifted to âthrival mode.â She had become a thriver.
The difference was not about what âstuffâ either had, or even differences in living a âcharmed life.â John was in good health. Sue was at the end of her life.
But there were differences. For example, there was a difference in mindset. John believed he had somehow been done wrong. So he looked at every event through that lens. Sue, on the other hand, had a mindset that life was precious and she needed to make the most of what she had. It was a difference in seeing lack or in seeing abundance.
John believed he had no choices in life. He was stuck. Sue believed she always had a choice, which allowed her to move through life with intentionality. And since John believed he had no choices, he would not see any intentionality possible on his part.
Sue was about growth. John was about being stuck. And that is key: survival mode is about âstaying the same,â in spite of the frustration of just holding on. Thrival mode is about changing, even if the only change possible is in oneâs own perspective.
Surviving is based in fear. Fears hold you tight, telling you what you donât have, canât do, and shouldnât do.
Thriving is about aspirations: what you want to move toward, who you want to be, and how you will live your life.
Thriving is a move toward meaning and purpose. It is about taking responsibility and raising your own personal standards.
(We will talk about all of this in more detail in later chapters.)
How I Got Here
In 2002, I got sick. Very sick. I remember overhearing a discussion between my wife and my doctor on the phone. My doctor was telling my wife there was an 86% chance that I would be permanently disabled. Eventually, the doctor believed, I would die from my illness.
That was a big wake-up call. Well, the âwake-upâ actually came a bit later. First, I had to struggle through several months of feeling horrible, tired, and defeated. I simply dragged myself (quite literally) through the day. Morning came, and I stumbled through the day, trying to do whatever work I could. Evening came, and I promptly fell asleep, reliving it over and over, like the movie Groundhog Day.
But I was fortunate. I started to recover. I am not disabled, and have, as of yet, not died. My body got the upper hand. The doctorâs diagnosis was correct, but his prognosis was wrong.
When I got better, I woke up. I realized that, although I study resilience, I was not thriving.
Let me back up just a bit.
During college, I was trying to decide what I would do with my life. My wise mother asked me what others came to me for, how I naturally worked in the world. It was a great question. She was asking a question about passion and potential: what did I love doing, and what was I good at?
People always came to me for advice and assistance, support and guidance. It never really occurred to me, but I was already doing what I wanted to do: I was helping people live a better life.
My initial understanding of that âcallingâ was to be a therapist. Originally, I thought I would pursue a career as a Marriage and Family Therapist. This changed to the ministry of Pastoral Counseling. So, off to graduate school I went to gain training as a Pastoral Counselor. Two masters and a Ph.D. later, I was headed toward that career path.
But there are a couple of other important details. First, during my graduate school training, I began to have misgivings about the theories and approaches to helping people that I was being taught. I began to question the underpinnings of psychotherapy and family therapy. Throughout my graduate studies, I raised questions and searched for the answers to the problems. Over time, I grew more and more disenchanted with the pathology orientation of therapy. âWhat about the up side of life?â I kept wondering. We were always focused on the downside, but not on how to help people get to the upside.
Second, as I was finishing up my dissertation, I read an article about Life Coaching. This was the early days of âlife coaching.â When I read the description, I turned to my wife and said, âThis is how I do counseling.â Needless to say, my wife, with a little frustration, given the years devoted to my studies, asked, âSo, what are you going to do about it?â
I completed my dissertation, graduated, and started a three-year coachtraining program one month later. That was in 1996.
My reading had already shifted during graduate school, but I began to really seek out positive psychology, resilience, and growth theory studies.
How was it, I wondered, that people could rise above the hurts and struggles in life? How could people live a full, meaningful, purposeful life despite the hardships theyâd encountered?
I never doubted that people suffered through life. I had just lost faith that therapy did much to actually eliminate the suffering. In fact, in many ways, it seemed that therapy had the potential of keeping someone stuck in their suffering.
Sigmund Freud, arguably the father of modern psychotherapy, even stated that the goal of psychoanalysis was to move from neurosis to âcommon, ordinary unhappiness.â Perhaps Freud was having a bad day, but that is not a lofty goal.
I began to see that people really could live above the old hurts and wounds. People could discover a deeper meaning, make a greater impact, and live a higher life. I began to see that life was not about solving your problems and making it to zero, but about moving into the positive. In fact, I now see that those issues that âheld us backâ are the fuel to âpropel you forward.â
Let me be clear: I donât make a claim that I am thriving in all areas of my life all the time. I do claim that I keep learning and growing, moving toward more thriving. My current business card probably says it all. It states I am a full-time Thriveologist (meaning I spend my time learning and teaching the skills of thriving), but that I am a part-time thriver. Just like everyone else, I struggle to always apply the principles of how to live a full, thriving life. My goal is to close the gap on how to always thrive.
The principles in this book are the same strategies I employ. They have proven invaluable for shifting me from striving and surviving to thriving. I hope you find them useful in your building a (more) thriving life!
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Chapter 2
a thought is a thought
by my definition, thriving is about becoming our fullest and ever-better selfâactively involved in the world, living an engaged and meaningful life in the present on the way to an even greater future. Ideally, our past serves us as a reservoir of learning and experience that enables us to move forward on our path and to help others do the same.
For most people, however, the past still holds us in its grip. Weâre caught up replaying and regretting itâover and over and over againâin our minds and often in our daily lives. We focus on what we donât want and donât have rather than on what we do. Our challenge, then, is to orient ourselves in the Here and Now and to find ways to thrive from now onâno matter what.
Moving ahead in life is always a struggle between our fears and aspirations, our doubts and our desires. But these polarities need not result in an internal tug-of-war that brings us to a standstill. Instead, they can work together to propel us in the direction of our dreams.
For instance, some of our fears help us steer clear of dangerous situations. But they can also indicate where it is we actually want to travelâoutside the safety of our comfort zone. And while self-doubt can keep us stuck in unsatisfying patterns, our burning desires can motivate us to do what it takes to move beyond them.
As you may have noticed in your own life, the fear of success can be as debilitating as the fear of failureâif we let it stop us. We may be afraid we canât have what we want, that we don...
