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Life by Design is a podcast that shares the experiences and tools to help couples align their wealth goals and reclaim their time, enabling them to experience freedom, abundance, and a life by design.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:00:09] Welcome to the Life By Design podcast with your host Jessilyn and Brian Persson. We work with professional couples to help resolve conflict and elevate communication within their relationship.
Brian Persson: [00:00:19] We are the creators of the Discover Define Design framework, which supports you in resolving conflict and communicating better.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:00:26] This episode we're going to talk about adversity part two of CORE, originally created by Paul Stoltz. Our last episode, we focused on the C and the O, which is control and ownership. And we went into unpredictability. This week we're going to go into the R and the E, which is reach and endurance, and we're going to wrap that one up talking about when you're up to big things, it can cause big adversity.
Brian Persson: [00:00:51] Yeah. Reach and Endurance. The way I like to think about reach and endurance versus control and ownership is control and ownership is you can be proactive with it. You know where your control and where your ownership lies. But with reach and endurance, I find for most people it tends to be a lot slipperier. You don't notice it as much, it just kind of as it says, reaches out and grabs on to things. The adversity kind of gets you and the endurance just keeps going and you don't really notice it.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:01:23] Yeah, no, that's a good way, good way to put it. So when we're saying reach like it's one thing to impact you, but the reach we're talking about here is when it rolls into your partner, your children, your work, wherever it's going to reach and it creeps in there. And then endurance is more like, how's it impacting you long term? If you don't like, wrap it up and let it go in a sufficient time manner?
Brian Persson: [00:01:46] Yeah. Reach is like, you know, the waves of a pond, right? It starts with you, goes to your partner, goes to your kids, goes to your family, your extended family, keeps on traveling. How far is that reach of that adversity and the impact that it made to you? How far is it going?
Jessilyn Persson: [00:02:03] Yeah. So when we're talking about reach here, we are looking at situations that reach into other areas of your work, your life. And to what extent does the adversity extend beyond the situation at hand. So we have a great story where your old position as an employee, how adversity struck and how we let it go further than it maybe should have.
Brian Persson: [00:02:29] Yeah, I think it's a common aspect of most careers and most professionals.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:02:34] Yeah.
Brian Persson: [00:02:35] And most anybody who has a job. Like that job on average takes up 40 hours of your week. That's a large chunk of time where, you know, you can't do your groceries, you can't do your cleaning, you can't do all these other things that you need to do. And then stuff happens at work, too.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:02:54] Yeah.
Brian Persson: [00:02:54] And now you have this situation where you're stressed out at work, you're stressed out because you got a life to live as well, and all of a sudden that stress at work starts coming home, starts affecting your relationship with your kids, maybe you treat them differently. Definitely a lot of relationships we see, the partners are treated differently for sure. And yeah, totally happened to me. 100%. I was at a company, employed, and I kind of just allowed the things that happened in that company and the stresses and the frustrations that I was experiencing come home and it looked like making excuses as to why I had to work late, when probably I really didn't. And I was actually just more stressed about what was going on than actually needing to work. And then, of course, that affects my partner, Jess. You.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:03:50] Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Persson: [00:03:51] And then it just, it can snowball from there. So it went, the reach of the adversity at work went way beyond work. It trickled into everything. And you need to compartmentalize that. And I didn't know that at that time.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:04:07] Yeah. No I didn't either, obviously. Otherwise, I might try to pull you out of it. But, just kidding. I say that knowing I've done it too, like I had a contract I was working on, and I remember it was too much. It was way too much. And I was doing it. And when I look back at that year that I did it, I don't remember a lot of what our kids did. They went bowling for the first time, and I didn't even know it happened until months later. Like that's how far out of reality I was with my home life, because I was so busy with my work and then talk about reach and endurance doing that long enough, it's what caused me to have burnout.
Brian Persson: [00:04:49] Yeah, you literally collapsed.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:04:50] I literally collapsed and I couldn't leave the house for almost two months. I was so sick. And of course, that had reach. Because now you're fully responsible for the kids and you're helping me try to get better and I'm trying to figure out what's going on. But to think of where that actually stemmed from, like it was months, even maybe years past, and it just reach and it just kept on enduring because we didn't understand how to really manage it.
Brian Persson: [00:05:17] Yeah, yeah. And in my position and my employment position, the endurance was actually even inside of the company itself, where I probably should have left that position a long, long time before I actually left that position. But I didn't know. And so, you know, the adversity that was basically striking me every day going into work was just going farther and farther and farther down the road. And the endurance of it was snowballing and sticking around for forever. Then we both quit pretty close to the same time.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:05:52] Yeah.
Brian Persson: [00:05:52] You had your burnout and we were going through a huge amount of personal development at that time.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:05:58] Yeah.
Brian Persson: [00:05:58] And, about 4, what was it 4 or 5 months later, I think it was, I decided to leave my position. And I remember, like, the adversity in all the things that I experienced in that position, the endurance of that still stuck around even after I was out of the position because I was operating in a similar fashion to how I was operating in that company. It took a while for it to like, truly leave me and finally kind of get my head back on my shoulders and actually, like experience normal life, I guess you could say.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:06:34] Yeah. I don't think we really realize how adversity impacts us. The reach it has, the endurance it has. And I say that because my mom, obviously you know, obviously got really sick in 2010, right? Like 2010, that's a long time ago. And back then, of course, like that impacted my sister, my dad, myself. But as we worked with her to get her health back, which again also didn't happen overnight, that took months. And there are a lot of things to work out in there. I just remember I was bitter, right? And I was not bitter on my mom or anything like that, but I was bitter because of the situation and how it transpired, how it could have been prevented, how it almost impacted our wedding because my parents almost weren't able to make it. And I was just really bitter at my younger sister because I knew she was at the core root of why my mom ended up getting as sick as she did and what happened. And I remember hanging on to that for I don't know how many years until, again, through some self-development, I realized I was actually still hanging on to this misery, if you will. And until I learned to forgive it and understand it and then this weight came off my chest. But we're talking years this, like that this reached and carried on and impacted my life, our life, our families.
Brian Persson: [00:08:03] Yeah, yeah. And this is what I'm saying. It's sneaky, right?
Jessilyn Persson: [00:08:07] Yeah.
Brian Persson: [00:08:08] There was no way for your mom to not be sick, right? Like, I mean, we can all take care of ourselves better, but, like, sometimes it just happens. And in your mom's case, it was one of those things that it just, you know, it was just one of those things that happened. So how do you prevent that? You can't. So adversity came and kicked your butt.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:08:27] Yeah.
Brian Persson: [00:08:27] You never really saw it coming. And then you really never saw it sticking around from that adverse thing that happened in your past. And yet here you are, you know, years later and all of a sudden you're still experiencing the adversity of that original situation.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:08:45] Well, I don't think I am so much now, but I carried it around like a ball and chain, like it was just a weight I didn't realize that was weighing on me until obviously I recognized it and forgave it and let it go.
Brian Persson: [00:08:57] Mhm. Yeah. And that's why reach and endurance are so sneaky. Because they just happen and then they just stick around and it, I think a lot of people think it becomes the new norm. And they don't, they don't even realize that it was actually a shift downwards where the adversity, its reach and its endurance stuck around and dragged you down and became the new norm when really you were in a much better spot beforehand. But then you're here today not really noticing that that reach and that endurance of that original event was still sticking around.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:09:36] Yeah. So when adversity strikes, if you, you know, have the control and the ownership of it, you can really nip the reach and the endurance in the butt like right away. Right? If you learn how to just kind of manage everything that it is in your control of it around it, so it doesn't impact your family, your future, and however that's going to look. Another thing about adversity, we found out, as you mentioned earlier, when we both kind of left our jobs around a similar time frame, is that when you get up to big things, there's big adversity. The more you get up to, the more adversity you will face.
Brian Persson: [00:10:17] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we, you had your burnout and I was totally done with my employment position. I, like I said, I should have left it years before I did. And then we both quit our jobs. Now we go from fairly well paid positions to no money whatsoever.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:10:36] But we were building a business.
Brian Persson: [00:10:37] We were, we were aiming for money, but there was no actual dollars coming into the bank account. So basically what happened is we went from like 100km an hour to zero kilometers an hour. First of all, we didn't know how to experience it at all because we'd never been in a position like that. And then we're taking on all these new things and we're both working from home. And then the pandemic happens. And like, there was some really stressful moments inside of this household where we didn't know how to handle, like, what was coming at us.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:11:16] Oh, yeah. I mean, it's one thing to not really have an income coming in, and then the pandemic strikes. Nothing, no one could have predicted that, right? And we're going, oh, and it wasn't easy to find work in the pandemic because so many things were shutting down. People were cutting back, right? Yeah, pretty much everything was shutting down. So it was like, okay, what do we do? Right? And so of course, we were building a business and working on that but still managing that with now teaching the kids because they were home full time.
Brian Persson: [00:11:49] Yeah, yeah. Classroom is at the table next to you?
Jessilyn Persson: [00:11:53] Pretty much.
Brian Persson: [00:11:54] Yeah. Yeah. So inside of that we had to navigate that and figure out like a whole new way to handle the adversity that was coming our way. And I think in that situation it also extended, even though we were both working from home and there wasn't a lot of reach, per se, for it to go anywhere, it still had a lot of endurance and it stuck around for a long, long time inside of this household as we sorted ourselves out. But we knew that, you know, we wanted to get up to something bigger.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:12:29] Yeah.
Brian Persson: [00:12:29] And I think that's what we're really talking about here is that you can hide out from adversity, but you're going to stay small, right? And you're not going to do a whole lot.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:12:39] Yeah. And I mean there's an opportunity you see and you want to take it and you do. That's fantastic. Just know that there's some things that could happen that may not be in your favor. And some things you can plan for and some things you can't. I mean, we took the big leap and tried to build a business, and it didn't quite go the way we would have liked. And that's okay, we had a lot of learning from it, but it was like almost going broke, like we were at the end of even like our borrowing because of course we didn't have income coming in. And so then that's where we had to learn to revise our life and like, not resist the change that we were hoping to not have to go back to.
Brian Persson: [00:13:24] Yeah, a lot of resistance in there too, which added more adversity to the situation. But at the end of it, we were looking at trying to do something bigger, and at the time we didn't know that, you know, we were going to get punched in the face all these different times over the 2020 and 2021 years. And at the end, we look back at it now and there's a whole bunch of amazing things that came out of it.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:13:48] Yeah.
Brian Persson: [00:13:48] Through all that adversity and all that strife that occurred. You know, we went through a tremendous amount of personal development. There's people who ask us, it's like you almost went broke and like you did all these, like, horrible things that seemed right, like to your family and to your to your life, to them it was horrible, anyway, to us we were like living the dream. It felt like, some days it felt like living the dream. And but we look back at it and go, okay, we almost went broke. We went into all this debt, all these things, all these things happened. Would we take it back? And the answer every single time is like, no, we would not take that back. We would, we're planning on not going broke again, we've learned our lesson once.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:14:31] We have learned our lesson. And, you know, we learned a lot of lessons in there because we were of course, doing self development and doing reading of books. But I know before the pandemic, our goal was to not go back into the industry that we were both in. And then when we go for broke there, unplanned, of course, it was like, oh no, like we need to start making money, we need to start making money fast. We don't have a lot of options. What do we do? And that's where we both, because we had discussed before that, you know, if it didn't work out, one or both of us would go back to a contract or a job. And we got there, we got to a point where it was like, we're out of money here, we're out of the runway. We got to start looking. And that, I did not receive that favorably. I was like, well--
Brian Persson: [00:15:18] -- why did you not receive it?
Jessilyn Persson: [00:15:20] Oh, because I was really stuck on the concept of I wouldn't have to go back into my previous kind of role.
Brian Persson: [00:15:26] And it was also my idea. I think that's why also you did not receive it favorably.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:15:31] I think you said you'd get it first. But anyways.
Brian Persson: [00:15:34] It was my brainchild and that takes some time to stew before it comes across.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:15:41] Yeah, maybe. But I think the concept is more like if you say, for example, you were a mechanic and you decide, I'm not, I'm done with this world. I'm going to now run a business, an ice cream shop, I don't know whatever, right? And it doesn't work out. And you know, you need to make money and mechanic is your right hand man because that's what you know, that's where you got to make a decision and go, you can go back and be bitter or you can go back and go, this is a stepping stone to get me on the next path I want to go on.
Brian Persson: [00:16:11] Yeah, we were smart enough to have already decided that before we even quit our jobs or anything like that, any of this adversity we're talking about happened. We always knew that we could fall back to exactly where we were that day when it happened and we were aiming for higher, though. We were aiming for higher than that. And looking back at it, all the adversity we faced over those years, like I said, we asked ourselves, would we change anything? Nope. Because if we changed anything, then we wouldn't be the people we are today. Like, the level of growth we experienced because of that adversity is exactly why we became the people that we are today.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:16:52] 100%. And when you look at it, I mean, I went back to a contract, one that I really despised back in when I left it in 2019. And granted, I had burnout. So there were a lot of negative things that hit me with it. But I went back into it with a different mentality in 2022. Right? Like I didn't have, it wasn't the same Jess, and that was a whole new world for me to go back into the exact same thing I was doing, like literally, but looking at it from a different lens and now it was like positive. And it wasn't just because I see it as a stepping stone to get where I want to go. But I looked at it as in like, how can I do this differently and receive this differently and see it differently so that I'm happy in it as well? And I am creating change in the environment that I have access to at the time.
Brian Persson: [00:17:48] So imagine if you went back to that same position without all the adversity that you experienced over that time, like, what would that have looked like for you?
Jessilyn Persson: [00:17:59] Well, the adversity and all the personal growth?
Brian Persson: [00:18:02] Yeah.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:18:02] Oh yeah. Like I would have been a Little Miss Bitter Boots going back going god. Right?
Brian Persson: [00:18:06] It probably would have been the very last option that you ever chose.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:18:11] Yeah, it probably would have.
Brian Persson: [00:18:12] Yeah. And like, and yeah, you would have been extremely bitter at it. But you experienced the adversity. Now you came in as a different person, literally your whole reality was different.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:18:26] Yeah.
Brian Persson: [00:18:26] And you dragged that new reality into the old situation. And all of a sudden the old situation is something brand new and totally not what it was like, you know, five years before.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:18:39] Yeah. And you just see it in a different light and you go, well, you know what? This isn't so bad. And now you're kind of enjoying it. I mean, obviously doing it and we're still building some businesses on the side, but I think you had a similar experience as a, you know, doing code as a developer. You know, you wanted to get out of it and you were just like, hardcore, I'm out, I'm done. Right? And then you had some trials and tribulations there. You figured out, well, wait a minute, maybe I do want to run a business where I am designing websites and what are the benefits? What are the values? Like maybe speak to that for our audience.
Brian Persson: [00:19:13] Oh, yeah. Like, so again, I became a different person. Right? And I was so sick of the developer world that I would not even want to type into a Word document.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:19:28] Yeah, I know.
Brian Persson: [00:19:30] Like, the keyboard was like poison to me almost. I didn't want to be anywhere near a keyboard. I didn't want to type on a keyboard because I typed so much for so many years, and I just wanted to be, I didn't even like computers. I remember there was like a six month period where I could barely even look at a computer. I had to because we were doing some things. But yeah, you know, I was extremely bitter at technology in general.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:19:55] Yeah. You were.
Brian Persson: [00:19:56] And then yeah, you're right. You know, we went through a lot of that adversity, went through a lot of that personal development, all of a sudden like we come out the other end and our reality is totally different. And I'm like, what if I create something in, you know, create a technology company, but the way that I want to create it?
Jessilyn Persson: [00:20:14] Yeah.
Brian Persson: [00:20:14] And I created a, which to me seemed like a little tiny model of how to do websites. And it did quite well. And now, now it's a nice little passive income stream for us. Yeah. But if I had maintained, if I hadn't learned from that adversity, then I would have dumped, I would have burnt all those contracts. And I would have tried to get rid of them. And we wouldn't have had that nice, pleasant little surprise at the end of it, of a little business. Right?
Jessilyn Persson: [00:20:41] Absolutely. Just again it comes down to perspective, sorry, of how you see the situation. And you have full control and ownership of how you see it. Right. As we spoke to in the first bit. And then of course, we know the reach and endurance, we know how long it impacted us. But now, like from the negative of like I do not want to touch a keyboard, and like you said, like six months, you're like, god that thing is evil.
Brian Persson: [00:21:09] I hate computers.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:21:11] And then now here we are, we own a successful website business. Because we cut those ties of the negative of it. And now here we're experiencing all the positivity of it. Not just, of course, the income and building the business, but I mean, we have amazing clients like, it's just, it's amazing what can happen when you can shift your perspective on something.
Brian Persson: [00:21:31] 100%. Yeah. We invest in real estate. And that's another place where I find adversity really, really strikes a lot of people.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:21:39] Oh, yeah.
Brian Persson: [00:21:39] Imagine a tenant not paying. Oh my God, that like, literally turns people over in their grave.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:21:46] Yeah, or, you know, a sewer backing up.
Brian Persson: [00:21:48] Sewer backing up. Yeah. Had that happen, yeah.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:21:49] Nasty.
Brian Persson: [00:21:50] Yeah. But we went to conferences, real estate conferences, and these people are still trying to get into real estate, but they're hearing all these stories about what it's like to be a real estate investor. And the reach of those stories is like running straight out of someone else's real estate portfolio in through the conference and into this other person's future real estate portfolio.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:22:13] And it either like paralyzes them, many don't even go forward with investing, they're so scared.
Brian Persson: [00:22:13] Yeah. And we have people come to us, like friends and acquaintances, come to us and be like, I don't get how you do it. Like, are you not worried that your tenants aren't going to pay? Are you not worried that you're going to have an electrical fire and the whole house is gonna burn down? And then some people, like, have wishful thinking too, about the adversity of being a real estate investor. We have a buddy who wants to buy a lot of properties. He has a very good job, does very well for himself. And I was going through some of the sort of mechanics of what it's going to look like to get to the number of properties he wants to get to. And I'm like, Guy, like you statistically are going to have three furnaces fail in the same month with that number of properties. And you could literally see him go cross-eyed.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:23:07] Yeah. Like he just froze. Like that is just, how do you compute, right?
Brian Persson: [00:23:11] And what happened? He didn't, he still hasn't bought a property.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:23:14] To this day, years later.
Brian Persson: [00:23:16] We're still working, we're still working on it. But like, but the adversity hasn't even hit some people yet in that, like in those cases. And it's already kicking them in the face. And so they don't move. It's kind of, to us it's kind of crazy. And you know, there's things like from our education, our background where we we're financial life professionals and we're real estate investment advisors. Some of the criteria that we put our clients through is actually how to face your own adversity.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:23:47] Yeah.
Brian Persson: [00:23:48] And so we have done the work on ourselves as well that we do with our clients. And we just know that there's certain areas that we shouldn't touch, there's certain areas we shouldn't touch. There's certain ways of investing in real estate that we shouldn't touch because that type of adversity, even though if it happened, we know we could handle it, but why try to go and seek it out and experience it.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:24:11] 100%, like if you know it's not for you? I mean, that is just crazy. Like, don't go invite adversity into your house. But I mean, and that's not the same as, say, like investing in real estate. That you can't, there's not necessarily just adversity to invest in real estate. But if you are a real estate investor and you know, there's all different types of real estate investing, if you've tried several and you know which one works for you and you know one that really doesn't, go with what works for you, like that just is common sense.
Brian Persson: [00:24:41] Like for example, in our portfolio, I don't like commercial. Like everything about commercial just will not make me sleep at night. But I want to invest in commercial. So what do I do? I hand it off to someone who can handle that type of adversity. And so we have some very good REITs that we've invested into. And now we have a commercial in our real estate portfolio. But someone else is managing it.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:25:08] 100%.
Brian Persson: [00:25:08] Yeah. Give me residential real estate all day long. I can handle tenants. I can handle the problems in those houses. I handled some problems in Mexico on a recent vacation of ours. Because I, you know, that kind of thing does not bother me. I can sleep at night. I can deal with the adversity without breaking a sweat.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:25:27] Yeah. You just gotta know what works for you and what doesn't. Just to recap our takeaways, the first one is reach. How far does the fallout of the situation reach into other areas of your work or your life? Number two, endurance. How long will the adversity endure? And the third one, remember, big things equal big adversity. The more that you get up to, the more adversity you will face. Our next topic is going to be on meaning. What meaning we put onto things. Why does the same situation have a different meaning for me versus my partner?
Brian Persson: [00:26:01] We release podcasts every two weeks. Be sure to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app to journey with us and create your life by design.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:26:09] Thanks for listening to the Life By Design podcast with your hosts Jessilyn and Brian.