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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: [00:00:10] Welcome to the Life by Design podcast with your hosts, Jessilyn and Brian Persson. We work with professional couples to help resolve conflict and elevate communication within their relationship.
Brian Persson: [00:00:20] We are the creators of the Discover Define Design framework, which supports you in resolving conflict and communicating better.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:00:27] This week our topic is on adversity. Adversity can impact us in so many ways, and because it does strike everyone, we're actually going to break this into a two part series. And in our two part series, we're going to focus on what we call CORE. And that stands for Control, Ownership, Reach and Endurance when it comes to adversity. So this part one is going to focus on the C and O, Control and Ownership, of adversity. So Brian, what is adversity?
Brian Persson: [00:01:00] Yeah. Well in relationships it happens a lot as everyone out there probably knows. There's a, you know, you and your partner, you and your family, you and your kids often engage in arguments and problems of all sorts. And that's pretty well what adversity is. It's all the stuff of life that comes at you and tries to impact your way of life.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:01:25] Yeah. And that, I mean, can come from angles unknown. It can be anything from an illness, job loss, destruction to the home, the pandemic, whichever one experienced.
Brian Persson: [00:01:37] Pandemic is a huge one, yeah.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:01:38] So why is it important?
Brian Persson: [00:01:40] Because you have to face it. It's going to happen. There's no way to avoid adversity in life. There's no way to avoid adversity in your relationship. And there's no way to move forward. Especially moving forward you have to experience adversity in order to get anything new and anything bigger in life.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:02:00] Right. And the sooner you can understand it and understand your role in it, the easier you can move through it. So typically, how does it work?
Brian Persson: [00:02:08] In a relationship? It usually looks like blame or maybe resignation. So one partner just giving up, maybe you just kind of give up on your kids because they're little brats for whatever reason. Maybe you give up on your family, like you know, you got sisters or brothers or a mom and a dad that just don't communicate or operate properly inside of the family. And you just experience a lot of adversity and conflict when it comes to dealing with those people. You mentioned money and job loss. That can create a lot of strife in a relationship as well, which turns into blame or, like, that giving up factor.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:02:51] Yeah. Same with illness. All right. So our first takeaway is going to focus on control. So how much are you letting adversity control you? Or put another way, for those who caught our last podcast, how much is adversity taking away your choice.
Brian Persson: [00:03:09] Control and choice are fairly intermixed because there are things that you can control and there are things that you cannot control. And if you can't, if you continually try to fight for those things that you can't control, you're basically giving up your choice on those things. You're you're trying to make a choice where somewhere in an area you simply just don't have a choice to make.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:03:35] And that causes so much angst and negativity. I know a great example for that one was when we had our first son and it ended up being an emergency C-section, which of course I wasn't expecting and I didn't plan for. And so the planner in me just, I lost control, right? I had no choice. It was just, hey, this is happening, let's roll. And throughout I was trying to maintain some sense of control and I just, I couldn't, and that caused a longer healing time. It took me four days to get out of the hospital for that one. And there was a lot more pain, a lot more suffering, a lot more just, I guess, misunderstanding. And I mean, at that time, I didn't realize I was hanging on so tight to just grasp control and understand this. And what does that look like? And then of course, babe number two, when I was told it was going to be another C-section a few days in advance of having him, at first I was against it. And then when I realized medically, it just was,it was what it was.
Brian Persson: [00:04:44] It was the best decision.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:04:44] Yeah, yeah. And you helped me work through that. And so once I accepted it and I did have more control because I accepted that that's what was going to happen, I got to book when it happened and prepare for it. But then just even as it was happening, I knew what to expect because I'd been through it, but also I had, I took ownership like, this is what it is. This is how it's happening. This is, whether I chose the C-section or not at first, isn't as important as the fact that I chose it secondly, because that was my only real option. And just owning that I was in hospital two days. In and out, two days. I healed much quicker and just I had a different frame of mind. I had a lot more positive. And it's incredible that I, I mean, now looking back, reviewing those two experiences and just the whole dynamic around it based on really the control and choice over not.
Brian Persson: [00:05:39] Oh the, yeah, the difference between those two babies was incredible. Like our first son, like you said, a lot of difficulty. And ultimately what you were fighting for was areas of control where you had no control.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:05:55] Exactly.
Brian Persson: [00:05:56] Like you were, I don't know if you were actually mad at the doctors, but you were somewhat mad at the doctors because you didn't have control to have a natural birth, which is what you wanted. And then all of a sudden, you're in this emergency C-section with no control over what's happening, yet you're still trying to take control over what's happening. And that fight for what you can't have, what is just never going to be in your control, created you a lot of heartache and a lot of issues.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:06:24] And it was exhausting on my body, just the mental state of that. Never mind the whole procedure and everything I was physically going through.
Brian Persson: [00:06:32] Yeah. And then the second time you had, you basically gave up control on the areas you knew you couldn't control, they couldn't affect you anymore. You chose to not have control over those situations rather than choosing to try and fight for control over those situations.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:06:52] Gotta wonder, looking back, if those situations by any means played the dynamic of our sons where the second one is so calm compared to our first one? Anyways.
Brian Persson: [00:07:03] Oh yeah, our, both fantastic kids, but yeah, the first kid under the emergency C section?
Jessilyn Persson: [00:07:09] He's a fighter.
Brian Persson: [00:07:10] He's a fighter. Very impatient. Needs to get his way. Yeah. The second one, chill, waits, waits it out. Will do what he needs to do to get his way.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:07:21] Calm.
Brian Persson: [00:07:22] Calm, yeah.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:07:22] Yep, yep. Oh too funny.
Brian Persson: [00:07:24] I'm pretty sure there's some dynamic going on there. Yeah.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:07:26] Yeah. Yep. You know, another story I want to share about, I think control, would be throughout the pandemic. Of course, there's lots of opinions going around on what it was, what it wasn't, vaccines, whether you should be vaccinated or not. And that was everyone's choice. But there were the repercussions of the choices you made in that. And I know because I chose to get vaccinated, as did my older sister, and my parents chose not to, and while that in and of itself caused me strife, because my mom has a lot of illnesses she's dealing with and I was just, you know, wanting her to make the best choices for her health. But she made the choices she made. And then, of course--
Brian Persson: [00:08:08] -- later on--
Jessilyn Persson: [00:08:08] -- later on, when we were allowed to go out and visit, we went to see my grandma, who was in a--
Brian Persson: [00:08:15] -- care home. Yeah, but she was ready to go.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:08:18] Yeah, yeah. She was nearing end of life. And of course, to be able to visit there, you had to be vaccinated, of course. Mask up. There were no if, ands, or buts about that. They weren't going to change those rules. And so we were there and my sister and I got to go see my grandma, and my mom obviously couldn't because of the choices she made.
Brian Persson: [00:08:37] Yeah. And really unfortunate.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:08:38] Yeah. Unfortunately, we lost my grandma I think two weeks later.
Brian Persson: [00:08:41] That was really quick after.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:08:43] Yeah, but you just got to look at the control I didn't have for my mom, but for me. Right?
Brian Persson: [00:08:52] Yeah. Yeah, you you took control where you knew you could take control. And that looked like I wanted to see my grandma so I need to get vaccinated in order to see my grandma before she passes away. Yeah, and the area you couldn't control was your parents. You could not force them to get vaccinated so that, even though you knew that it would cause problems into the future and your mom would not be able to see her mom before she passed away, there was no control over it. You couldn't force your mom to do, to get a vaccination in order to see her, to see her mom. And you were, you freed yourself from a lot of mental heartache and, mental and heartache, by making that choice, saying I don't have control, like, this is just not something that I have control over.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:09:40] Yeah. What was in my control was what I could do.
Brian Persson: [00:09:43] Yeah. What you could do.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:09:44] Yeah. And then the choices from there stemmed based on how that transpired. Right.?
Brian Persson: [00:09:49] Yeah. Around the pandemic for me, I remember I did not have, I was like you in the C section. I was fighting for control over my environment when all of a sudden these kids landed in our house and we were working from home.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:10:05] And by these kids, you mean ours.
Brian Persson: [00:10:08] Yeah. These kids who were supposed to be at school.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:10:12] Yeah.
Brian Persson: [00:10:14] Not all the neighborhood kids, but our kids who, as I was saying, we work from home, so, you know, that time while they're at school is our work time. That when we got things done. And all of a sudden, these kids who weren't supposed to be there during that time, landed in the house, and I had no control over that. The world had pretty well been shutting down at that point. So I remember very distinctly fighting for control over that situation and not really realizing that I had no control over that situation. That the kids were in the house. There was not much I could do about that and I had to manage it in the best way that I could. And it took months for me to come around to a solution. And the solution was coming around to knowing that I had no control.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:11:06] Yeah. But I think a part that played in there is also like a little bit of the unknown. So we knew they closed the schools down, but they didn't give us a time frame because no one could. We didn't know. So we were thinking like a couple weeks, a couple months. And then as it just kept going, it's like, oh, like, I've got to figure this out.
Brian Persson: [00:11:23] Oh yeah. And this is what you were talking about at the beginning of the podcast. Like adversity comes from anywhere and everywhere, and it often happens when you're never going to see it coming, you won't see adversity coming. Sometimes you'll know, most of the time you won't. And this is one of those situations. I remember either I wasn't checking the news too much at that point, but I remember coming in on the Monday morning and my coworkers were packing up their stuff at their desk, and I'm like, what are you guys doing? And they're like, well, Alberta shut down. Like, we, you know, everyone's going home. And I'm like, what? Really? And then all of a sudden like the kids, and then all of a sudden this, that, and everything else that happened in the pandemic started to hit me and literally came out of left field for me. And all of a sudden I'm in a situation where I never expected myself to be.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:12:15] And I think that left a lot of individuals scrambling, families trying to figure out who's going to help educate and manage the kids. Same with, like, aging parents. And now you're at home with your spouse also for the, I mean we were starting to work together a lot more then so we were experiencing it more. But most couples don't. They go to their office or their place of work, and then they come home and see each other. So now you're with your significant other all day. That alone caused like anger and arguments and strife for many individuals.
Brian Persson: [00:12:52] Yeah. I'm grateful for two things that happened in that time period. And that was, it was actually the same action, but two really beneficial things came out of it. Number one is we started working from home. So just working from home and already being at home before the pandemic happened was fantastic. And then secondly, we were working from home together. So like, we didn't have to try to experience what it was like to work with our partner inside of the house together already. So both of those things, we kind of checked off those boxes before the pandemic hit. And I'm really grateful that it kind of happened that way because like you said, I think a lot of relationships did not experience it that way. I know we have a lot of friends who work out of town. And I've seen the dynamics of some of their relationships change when the husband or the wife comes back in to town, their job changes, and all of a sudden they're in the house a little bit more often, and all of a sudden the relationship doesn't go south or anything, but like, you can see there's all of a sudden an adversity level in the house that wasn't there before. And I don't, I'm not even sure most people look at it like an adversity thing, where all of a sudden their environment and their life is impacted in a way that that they didn't have a week ago or a month ago.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:14:12] Yeah. Things shift in terms of all the freedom they had and control of their lifestyle at home with the kids, whatever they did in the day. You now have a partner in there who is in your space, who maybe can or can't help, but you're now got to work around that. And that's not something you originally accounted for. So yeah, it causes a bit of disruption for sure.
Brian Persson: [00:14:35] Huge disruption. Yeah. What are some other areas that we see in ourselves and in other couples that experience some control and some ownership problems in terms of adversity?
Jessilyn Persson: [00:14:48] I think money is always--
Brian Persson: [00:14:49] -- money, yeah--
Jessilyn Persson: [00:14:50] -- always a key topic for almost anything. But yeah.
Brian Persson: [00:14:53] Money, real estate for us. As real estate investors, it took a long, there was a lot of adversity at the beginning. Mostly with me.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:15:02] Yeah I was fine with it all.
Brian Persson: [00:15:05] She made the decisions and then I had to make sure it actually worked. But at the beginning, even though I owned property, I was kind of against becoming a real estate investor. And part of that adversity was just sort of the knowledge of it. So the control of having a real estate portfolio, I didn't know where I had to control it. I didn't know where I had no control over that portfolio. Probably the fact that it was your decision initially kind of made me like react a little bit, saying I don't know, this is not my decision. This is your decision.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:15:43] Yeah, exactly.
Brian Persson: [00:15:44] So it took a while for us to get on board with real estate.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:15:48] Also understanding our roles in it. Right? Because we both were thinking we could just both do everything. And it took time to sort out where our strengths really lied in that, and what I had to let go of and what you had to let go of, and what we had to accept in that whole environment and way of doing business when it came to real estate.
Brian Persson: [00:16:09] Yeah, yeah, we're both certified real estate investment advisors. And inside of that course, it's funny, there's no actual real estate advice in the certificate that we earned for ourselves because most real estate investors can't even figure out if they can even handle real estate and shouldn't even be in real estate. And that was one of the things that we had to figure out too, is is like, okay, what is our sleep at night factor? Like when we invest in real estate, what is going to be the thing that allows us to sleep at night?
Jessilyn Persson: [00:16:46] Yeah. And so it's around mindset really.
Brian Persson: [00:16:49] Yeah, yeah. And a lot of people should just not be real estate investors.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:16:54] Yeah. It's not easy.
Brian Persson: [00:16:55] Not, it's not easy. No. Most people don't have the grit. They don't have the determination. They they don't have the ownership as we've been talking about and we had to find that out too. And we ended up, real estate is so vast, like the real estate investment sphere is so vast, and there's so many different ways to make real estate work for you. But a lot of them didn't work for us, and we had to really figure out, okay, where can we handle the adversity of this type of real estate? Where can we handle the adversity of that type of real estate? And we ended up boiling it down to our personal sleep at night factor, which is the portfolio we have right now. And there are literally no problems in the portfolio.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:17:44] No, there's no problems in our portfolio. But once we figured out what we kind of want to do in real estate and whose role was what, the adversity didn't stop, right? So it still hit us. So when we decided we wanted to sell one of our properties and the market dipped and we're like, oh, like, that's going to be a huge hit. If we sell, what do we do? Like you got to figure that out. Or when one of our sewers backed up or our basement flooded in one of our properties, like those still happen.
Brian Persson: [00:18:12] Oh yeah.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:18:12] It's just how do we manage it now?
Brian Persson: [00:18:14] Yeah. But those things that happen are inside of our, of what we consider to be our sphere of control and our sphere of ownership. And because we consider them to be in that sphere and we know what we can control, we know what we have ownership of, none of that causes us any strife. Yeah. It's just kind of like, oh, the sewer backed up. Okay, let's go deal with it. And, trust me, a sewer backup is gross. No one wants to deal with it. But the fact is that we already understood where that particular event was lying inside of our sphere of control or our sphere of ownership.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:18:54] Yeah. And, I mean, it took us time. Like, this didn't happen overnight. It took years of building and understanding this to get to where we are. But as a new, say, real estate investor or even a homeowner, when something like that hits, it's big and, like if you haven't dealt with it, that's the first step. Like you're trying to figure out, oh my gosh, what do I even do with this situation? And then everything surrounding it. And there's not just that, there's the money, because there's always money impacts of that. There's emotions. And now you got your partner going like either they're with you or they're not, you're not sure. But like they're stressing about the money. They're feeling the emotion too. Like it just, it can just like blow up if you don't learn how to kind of manage the control and the ownership of the situation right off the hop.
Brian Persson: [00:19:40] Yeah, well, I mean, money's a big thing in a lot of relationships. Money is a big thing for you. We come from different mindsets in that sense. And that's part of the reason, as you were saying, you know, finding out our roles inside of our real estate portfolio. There are certain things that I do that you never know about because they have very high adversity like content for you.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:20:05] Right.
Brian Persson: [00:20:05] And so for you to deal with that, for you to even think about that, is like stressful. Right? For me, no big deal. It's just something to handle inside of the relationship.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:20:15] Yeah.
Brian Persson: [00:20:15] There's other things that you handle that are, as you know, are really big stressors for me. And so we have this kind of dynamic where it's like, I understand that you can handle this, but I can't handle this. So why don't you take the ball here and I'll take the ball over there. And sometimes you got to do that inside of a relationship. There's, it's not exactly an equal playing field.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:20:38] No. It's about understanding the roles and where you have control and where you don't. And I'm going to lean into that a little bit more for the example. So when it comes to real estate and money, for me when tenants didn't pay, I like, oh like my heart rate would go right up. I'd be so like furious. I'd be like, what? Just pay! But you knew that, you learned that early enough on to just not really tell me. And you would manage them and you do it fantastically, but that's in your personality where it wasn't in mine. And for me to accept, firstly that that's not my personality and that's okay, secondly, that I'm going to give you the control 100% on managing the tenants and the money. Right? There's a lot there to kind of break apart and understand and be okay with.
Brian Persson: [00:21:21] Yeah. Like I knew I could not control having tenants that were, you know, making six digits and upstanding citizens and all these things that that the perfect tenant looks like. I have fantastic tenants, but they are not fantastic for, how to say, like someone who would very easily interact with you, right? Because you're very career-driven woman. You're looking for a lot of different businesses to start up. You have a lot of activities going on. So the tenants that we would have in our portfolio are not necessarily those kind of people. And you had a tough time like associating that, like why they weren't kind of coming up to your level. And I think that, I think that can be a big problem in a lot of adversity. Is that, kind of like what I was saying earlier, sometimes the other partner has to handle the ball. And if you can't figure out, like, which person has to handle the ball, that alone can create strife. So in certain situations, I just take that ball away from you because it's my turn to play the game and some other situations, you need to handle the ball.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:22:33] Yeah, yeah. So I don't know if we really rolled in there, but we were talking about it, the takeaway number two, which was ownership. To what extent do you hold yourself responsible for improving the situation, or accountable and playing a role to make it better? I know we walked through that one, but I wanted to make sure we let our listeners know what takeaway two was. Yeah, go ahead.
Brian Persson: [00:22:54] Well, I was just gonna say the opposite, the easiest way to explain it, ownership is the opposite of it, and that's blame. Which I'm sure anyone out there in a relationship has experienced. Either they are blaming their partner or they are being blamed by their partner for something. And in both cases, it's a lack of ownership that's going on. So you're either not aware that you should have ownership of it or you just don't want to take ownership of it. And early on in our relationship that, I mean there was a lot of blame.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:23:25] Oh yeah.
Brian Persson: [00:23:26] Yeah. Everywhere. Like in all situations, family and kids and money and all kinds of stuff. And until we started taking ownership of all those individual things, did we really stop blaming each other? And so it wasn't like a you game. It was like, it started off as a me game. Like what, where do I have to start? Where do I have to take ownership in order to like, stop all the blame and make the relationship better and then make the family better?
Jessilyn Persson: [00:23:57] Yeah. And I mean, we talked about ownership when it came to, you know, even just me owning the fact that I was having the second C-section and where ownership lied in the real estate. So takeaway three is adversity is unpredictable and can strike at any time.
Brian Persson: [00:24:14] Yeah. We talked about that a lot. Real estate happens all the time. Family happens all the time.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:24:20] Illness.
Brian Persson: [00:24:21] Like I guess this is a story of adversity. But when we were in Mexico just recently, a bottle fell on one of the tile floors and cut our son, our ten year old son's ankle. You were off at the spa at that time.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:24:36] Yeah.
Brian Persson: [00:24:38] And, you know, we handled it. You know, his first stitches were in Mexico. That was, that's not a typical event to happen for a ten year old. But, it literally had no impact on the vacation. In fact, you didn't even notice that his foot was wrapped up when you came out of the spa hours later and--
Jessilyn Persson: [00:24:57] -- yes I did!
Brian Persson: [00:24:58] No, actually, your best friend pointed it out.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:25:03] So I didn't look down.
Brian Persson: [00:25:05] The point is that like even though it happened and even though you weren't there to control it, and even though it happened in Mexico, which is not perhaps mentally not the best of places for it to happen, although medically it was a fantastic experience, there was like no impact to it. So we had, we knew where we had control over that situation. We knew where we needed to take ownership and do what we needed to do. And the whole rest of the vacation was totally fine.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:25:35] I think we managed, like you said, we knew what we had to do with it and we knew kind of what to help him with expectation-wise and pain-wise. And we just managed it. And he was still, aside from that day, not being able to go in the water of course, the next day he was able to pretty much perform any of the normal activities he was doing anyways.
Brian Persson: [00:25:53] Yeah, but who could have seen that coming? And I think if you don't know that adversity is going to come at you at all kinds of unpredictable times, then that vacation might have been a totally different vacation, and you might have been like, oh man, like, why did this happen on my vacation? Why did it have to happen now? Why couldn't it have happened a month later? Right? You have all these stories about like the what ifs, but the reality is that anytime, anywhere, adversity is going to come and try and kick you in the butt.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:26:25] Yeah. And the sooner you can take ownership and control of that, the sooner you can get through it.
Brian Persson: [00:26:32] Yep.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:26:33] Absolutely. So to recap today's takeaways. First one, control. How much are you letting adversity control you? Takeaway two, ownership. To what extent do you hold yourself responsible for improving the situation? And number three, adversity is unpredictable and can strike at any time. Our next topic is going to be on adversity part two, where we're going to dive more into reach and endurance and what you experience when you're getting up to big things.
Brian Persson: [00:27:06] We release podcasts every two weeks, so be sure to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app to journey with us and create your life by design.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:27:14] Thanks for listening to the Life by Design podcast with your hosts Jessilyn and Brian.