Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592

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I'm saying I just have to get through this day, right? It's okay if I just survive today. I'm not even going to set the bar at thriving.
But don't we all deserve more than to get by every day and to survive and say, well, at least I made it through the day. I feel so strongly about that because I think with the amount of change and challenge that we're all facing, many of us have unintentionally lowered the bar.
Welcome to Passion Struck. Hi, I'm your host, John R.
Miles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.
If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes.
Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hey, PassionStruck fam.
Welcome to episode 592. Whether you've been with us for a while or tuning in for the first time, I am so thrilled you're here.
You're now part of a global movement dedicated to unlocking your potential, forging resilience, and making what truly matters matter most. Let me ask you this.
What if resilience isn't just about bouncing back? What about bouncing forward? What if the key to overcoming life's toughest challenges isn't just grit, but the ability to adapt, pivot, and transform adversity into a fuel for growth. That's exactly what today's guest, Dr.
Tasha Yurk, explores in her brand new book, Shatterproof, How to Overcome Adversity with Strength and Resilience, which officially launches today. Tasha is a renowned organizational psychologist, New York Times bestselling author, and one of the most sought after voices on self-awareness, leadership, and psychological agility.
In today's episode, we go deep into the science of resilience, what it really takes to withstand life's pressure and come out on the other side, not just intact, but stronger, clearer, and more intentional. At the core of today's discussion is the Shatterproof Roadmap, a transformative research-backed framework that includes tools like probing your pain, auditing your identity, and crafting choice.
These aren't just abstract ideas. They're tangible, science-based practices that will help you take control of your narrative, reframe struggle, and turn hardship into personal power.
We explore why some people thrive through chaos, while others feel crushed by it, the danger of over-identifying with suffering, and how you can train your mind to face adversity with self-awareness and mental agility. Tasha also shares actionable strategies for breaking free from victimhood, rewriting limiting stories, and developing real resilience, the kind that serves your growth, not just your survival.
If you've ever faced a moment that knocked you down, a personal loss, a professional setback, or a season where nothing seemed to go right, this episode will equip you to rebuild, re-imagine, and come back stronger than ever. But before we dive in, let's take a moment to reflect on the incredible week we just had here on PassionStruck.
Last Tuesday, I welcomed Wes Adams and Tamara Miles to discuss their new book, Meaningful Work, a must listen for anyone seeking to align purpose with performance. Last Thursday, Donald Miller shared his updated Building a Story Brand 2.0 book and gave us an exclusive look into his AI platform that's revolutionizing how we can communicate and connect.
And then on Friday, Dr. Kurt Gray, now the Weary Family Foundation endowed chair at Ohio State, joined me to discuss political division, moral psychology, and how to find common ground in an increasingly polarized world.
If you missed any of those episodes, I highly recommend Going Back. They're packed with transformative insights.
And if you're new here, we've curated episode starter packs on topics like mental resilience, personal mastery, leadership, and intentional living. You can find them on Spotify or at passionstruck.com slash starter packs.
For even deeper tools and exclusive insights, sign up for my live intentionally newsletter at passionstruck.com. And if you prefer watching these powerful conversations, head over to the passion struck YouTube channel., let's dive into this empowering conversation on the true nature of resilience and how to become shatterproof with Dr.
Tasha Yurik. Thank you for choosing Passionstruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.
Now, let that journey begin. Hey, Passionstruck fam.
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I am absolutely honored and thrilled to have Dr. Tasha Urick on PassionStruck.
Welcome, Tasha. Thanks for having me, John.
Thrilled to be here. Today, we're going to be discussing your brand new book, Shatterproof, which debuts today, the day that this podcast is coming out.
But I have to tell you, when I was opening up the book and I came to your dedication, I always love looking at them. And then a name just jumped right off the page to me, Marshall Goldsmith, someone that you call your honorary dad.
And I have loved Marshall's work for decades. And I've actually had him on the show.
And his work has been so deep to me that I ended up anchoring a whole chapter in my book, Passion Struck, on his lessons from the earned life. I wanted to start out today by asking you what role has Marshall played in shaping your approach to leadership, resilience, which we're going to be talking a lot about today, and ultimately this book? Well, I could talk to you for the entire 60-minute podcast about that.
I actually, funnily enough, right before we started recording, I just got off the phone with him. We're talking about a friend's birthday party we're going to in a few weeks in New York.
But Marshall came into my life when I was just finishing my first book, Bankable Leadership, in 2012. And it was through a mutual connection who had been waiting to introduce me to Marshall until he deemed me ready.
And I was ready upon publishing this book, trying to get it on the New York Times bestseller list and all the fun stuff that comes along with that.

And the first conversation Marshall and I had did not go the way I thought it was going to go. I thought it was going to be very calm, very nice.
Oh, you're going to do great. And he gave me the most candid, helpful, loving, but very honest and truthful advice that actually completely reshaped the way I ended up bringing that book into the world.
And also the way that I was thinking about my objectives around the process. That was how Marshall came into my life.
That was a very long time ago now. And since then, he is everything from a mentor to someone that he and I coach CEOs together.
So he's a colleague to somebody that I love going to a piano bar and having a glass of champagne and singing show tunes with. So I think the biggest thing that Marshall has taught me is this, and this is a Peter Drucker quote that he often recites, which is that the purpose of life is not to prove how smart you are or how right you are, but to make a positive difference.
And that's instilled in everything that I hope to do. I love that.
And I have to tell you, when I had him on the podcast, if people want to go back and and listen to it he gave me teachable moments midstream as we were doing the podcast and then once we got off he stopped before he got off and gave me very frank feedback for about five minutes straight and then after he did it which he did in a kind way but a very straightforward way he said you've got to get to nashville because i walk every day the next time you're here, I want to take a walk with you. So I got to take him up with that.
But one thing that I love about his work is he emphasizes this idea that fulfillment comes from the alignment of our values. And then he often talks about our aspirations and our ambitions rather than external achievements.
How does that concept connect with your vision of becoming shatterproof? Well, one thing that Marshall says a lot that really resonates with me is that happiness and success are independent variables. And what that means to me is chasing success is not going to bring you happiness.
You have to, if you want to be successful, chase that. If you want to be happy, chase that.
But don't assume that there's a causal relationship. And the way that comes into my new book, Shatterproof, is a high level.
This book is for stressed out strivers. People who have big ambitions, who want to be the best version of themselves, who want to contribute and make a positive difference.
But they are increasingly weighed down by the demands that continue to come at them. And I think we can all agree that we live in a world where the world is going to just keep asking more of us.
And so where I think Shatterproof comes into that concept is we spend so much time pushing, right? Striving. I'm a terrible example of this this week.
I was up until 5 a.m. yesterday writing my newsletter, which proves I am just as imperfect as all of us.
But if we do that, we often do it at the expense of our own well-being, our own happiness, and more fundamentally, our own needs. And so what Becoming Shatterproof is all about is not sacrificing your success.
It's finding a parallel path and a parallel skill set in order to feel better, do better, and live better that goes way beyond whatever it is we're accomplishing. I couldn't agree more.
And I was one of those stressed out executives for so much of my career.

And so I know exactly what it feels like. And over time, I finally got vulnerable enough to

talk about it because I think there's so many millions, I use the word millions of people who are in the same shoes that I was. So one of the biggest takeaways from your book is that resilience alone is not enough.
And you write the best response to hard things isn't merely to survive them,

it's to harness them. That's a major distinction from how resilience is traditionally framed.
Can you explain how being shatterproof is different from just being resilient? I can. Before I do that, if you would indulge me, this is what my agent calls a book with a two-part premise, right? The first premise is we have to deconstruct the myths of resilience, right? The things we expect it to do for us that scientifically it cannot do in order to introduce the idea of becoming shatterproof.
But I'll be as efficient as I possibly can. The idea behind resilience, obviously, is it allows us to cope with difficult things.
And it's generally defined by researchers as the capacity to either bounce back or to maintain our functioning during stressful events. Unfortunately, the hype around resilience, this really started in the early 90s.
The research on resilience actually started as early as the 1950s and 1960s. But the hype around resilience has outpaced what scientifically it's proven resilience can do for us.
So the three myths of resilience that I think lead us astray, number one, we believe that resilience is a tool that's gonna help us thrive, right? No matter what difficult or bad things are happening, if we practice gratitude, if we have a positive mindset, if we get social support, that we will actually get better and happier and stronger through challenges. But as I mentioned earlier, what resilience scientifically can do for us and what the most renowned resilience researchers say is that it exists to help us survive, right? There was one study that was done in Italy during COVID lockdowns and they didn't define resilience as the ability to thrive through a global pandemic.
They simply defined it as the absence of depression and anxiety. So the second myth is that our level of resilience is not just learnable, but wholly under our control.
And what we know from the research on this is actually two things. Number one, in terms of the learnability, this is not a slam dunk.
There was one meta-analysis, which is a study of studies. They looked at 45,000 data points of interventions designed to improve resilience.
And they actually found that not only were those interventions not effective, but in many cases, they reduced the well-being of the trainees. Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't other studies that show that there are small effects, but by the way, there are usually only small effects.
There are other studies that show no effect. So that's the first piece.
The second piece is the people who need resilience most are the people who often have the fewest resources of resilience. So examples of this might be people who went through early childhood trauma.
It might be people who are living, as I do, with a chronic illness and disability. But the idea there is if we see resilience as wholly learnable and wholly under our control, it leads to

something I call grit gaslighting, which is if you can't cope, maybe you just didn't spend enough time on that yoga mat. Maybe you just didn't think positively enough.
The third myth, and this one's actually pretty simple. The research shows that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger is actually The truth is, when we're exposed to ongoing chronic stress, it actually depletes our resilience and makes coping and staying strong and not breaking even harder.
So that's the landscape that we're in. That's what we're dealing with here in terms of the myth versus the reality of resilience.
Now you asked the question, how is being resilient different from being shatterproof? There's a couple ways that I think this distinction makes sense. So where resilience is reactive, right? We wait for things to get better.
We do our coping practices and our self-care. Be becoming shatterproof is a new complementary skill

set to resilience that says we will get stronger through adversity if and only if we proactively

harness it to grow, right?

Bad things just happening to us does not magically make us more resilient.

But if we harness those events, it can make us shatterproof.

The second distinction is that resilience can be pretty defensive, right? It focuses on endurance. It doesn't focus on upping our game.
And it gets us back to the baseline of where we were. Becoming shatterproof is offensive.
It gives us access to the best version of ourselves. and my and others' research on this shows that it increases meaning, personal growth,

inner peace, even physical health.

And then the last distinction that I actually think is in some way the most important is

that resilience is a one-size-fits-all approach.

No matter what you're going through, if you're optimistic, right?

If you exercise, if you sleep a lot, if you engage in self-care and have a gratitude journal, that will help you cope. What's different about becoming shatterproof and specifically something I call the shatterproof roadmap, which is a four-step process to follow to become shatterproof, is that it's aimed at reducing the specific needs that you are not getting met that are causing adversity to have an even worse effect on you.
And so I think you can think about those terms interchangeably, and they're not in contradiction with each other. But shatterproof is really a new scientifically supported skill set that can help us, especially

when our resilience is running low.

Tasha, I'm so glad I read your book because I know the connection points that you're making,

but people always ask, why do you read every single book?

Because when an interview totally goes a different direction than I'm planning it to go, it's

nice to have it as the backdrop so you can read it right.

Uh-oh, have I taken you off track?

Thank you. When an interview totally goes a different direction than I'm planning it to go, it's nice to have it as the backdrop so you can read it.
Uh-oh, have I taken you off track?

Have I ruined the plan?

No, you took two sections and just combined it in one, which is great.

So I'm going to just go back a step to the introduction of your book, because I don't want to leave it without talking about Emily's parking lot brawl, because I think it really does a good job of illustrating how the most high achieving resilient people can take a hit and reach their breaking point, which is exactly what happened to me. Why was that the right starting point for the book? So Emily, just to briefly summarize, is a successful professional in healthcare.
She has three children who are younger and therefore require a lot more time and energy. She has a husband who is battling health challenges.
Of course, at her job, they're asking her to do more with less, as we all are continuously. I wonder how much less can we actually do more with at any given point? And she thinks she's handling the stress well.

Something pops up, which is that her son starts having behavioral problems. He's having tantrums

at home, tantrums at school. His teachers are concerned about him.
And to her great regret,

she and her husband started talking about the situation. And she said, this doesn't seem like it's a huge pressing challenge.
Let's see what the school can do for him. Let's see what we can do for him.
And let's reassess, right? Let's reassess in a month or six weeks. They learned shortly after that her son was being bullied by a girl in his grade named Greta.
And Emily thought that she was fine through all of this. She did notice, well, so she amped up her self-care.
Just like I said, she even gave up all added sugar, including her beloved gummy bears. She was crying in her car on her way to work a little bit more than she would admit.
She was exercising less,

she was drinking more, but she was fine, right? It's that like, how are you doing? I'm fine. So she was doing everything right in the resilience playbook until one day she broke under the weight of a feather.
She was taking her son Clark, the one who was being bullied to school, to kindergarten drop-off, and he seemed very anxious. And she looked down at him and he said, mama, that's her.
That's Greta. That's the girl who's bullying me.
And she basically blacked out at that point. She marched up to this little girl and her mom, started yelling at the little girl, yelling at the mom.
And it ended with what is now comical, but was then illustrative of just how far, how little her coping resources were giving her. They got into a tug of war over a set of school supplies.
And the reason I think that story is something that we can all relate to is we are, life today basically looks like this, at least for stressed out strivers, who's the audience for this book. A higher than before level of stress, right? A higher baseline of stress than five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, punctuated by unexpected crises, right, that we don't see coming.
And so what happens, and we saw this with Emily, is we think we're fine when, whether we know it or not, we might be one crisis away from breaking. And that crisis doesn't have to be something dramatic.
It can be, I'll give you just a very quick example. I was scanning the last round of revisions in my printer for my publisher, like a couple months ago, and the scanner stopped working.
And I literally did one of those dramatic, throw the papers all over the room and slowly slide down the wall, crying and wondering why my life was so terrible. That's what it looks like.
They've been there, done that. We've all had that dramatic sliding down the wall crying movie moment, right? And so I think there's just something in that for all of us.
And we're experiencing that in all parts of our life. I agree.
I remember at the time I was a C-level at Dell and I was so freaking stressed out. I had crap going on at work.
I had crap going on in my home life. And I just reached this point like no one cared how I was doing.
And I'm one of these people who historically does a very good job of keeping my pull under pressure.

And I had this direct report who just kept doing boneheaded things time and time again, getting us deeper into crap with the business segments that we were supporting. And I remember another one of them hit us in this staff meeting and I freaking just went off on them.
And to this day, I feel so bad about it.

But underneath it, I had just this level of pressure and tension that had just been built up that I think it was just waiting for a release. And unfortunately I unloaded it on him.
The thing I learned from that is I've never done it again, but boy, did I lose my cool in that moment. And you are not alone.
I heard an almost identical story from a CEO that I was coaching maybe six months ago. He kept telling me he was fine and fine through this major organizational transformation that he was leading.
And he called me one day and he said, so today, for no real reason, when something really small

happened that didn't go the way I wanted it to in our team meeting, I started yelling at everyone.

So I guess I'm not fine. Right? And that's the thing is like, we're fine until the moment that

we're not fine. Absolutely.
It's how it happens. And that's one of the reasons I loved in your

and it's a striking analogy for how resilience isn't always enough, how something that worked in the past can fail when conditions change. And in the modern world, as you're describing, we're facing our own quote unquote epidemic seven from digital overload to gosh, we're seeing worldwide geopolitical instability.
I was just listening to NPR before our interviews started,

and wow, what are some of the outdated resilience strategies people rely on, and why are they no longer effective? Sure. I think maybe a good way to think about this are do's and don'ts.
One of the biggest mistakes that people make that's a don't is using past strategies to cope with completely new problems.

And you brought up the budworm outbreak of the 1970s in Canada and Maine as an example.

It's a hard story to break into sound bites, but it's fascinating.

And essentially what happened was this was the biggest spruce budworm outbreak that had ever been seen. What happened before, it was the seventh outbreak that they tracked.
And it was every number of years, the budworms would come. There would be no human intervention because back then they didn't have chemicals like DDT.
And it would go on for sometimes up to 10 years. And the forest would reclaim its resilience at some point.
And in epidemic seven, which again was in the seventies, they had by this time discovered in other types of outbreaks, this chemical called DDT. And I could not, if my life depended on it, pronounce the full name, although I did for my audio book.
So people can listen to that. But the acronym is DDT.
And because they had used this chemical for everything else, right, because they had this hammer and everything was a nail, they decided what better way to fight the spruce budworm outbreak than to spray millions of acres of trees with DDT. Unfortunately, that made the epidemic worse.
And there's a lot of technical stuff I won't go into about why that was, but I think it's such a good metaphor of when we're facing an entirely new problem, going back to our old coping strategies that worked maybe when our life was a little bit normal, it's a big don't. And I think along that same line, another don't is to make resilience your only coping strategy.
We know that resilience has limits. We know that some people have more resilience than others through no fault

of their own. What I think the right way to use resilience as, the do's, are first of all,

sometimes there are these sudden, huge, massive crises that we have to just get through, right? And sometimes just getting through is a miraculous achievement. But again, if we use that every single time something bad happens to us, we're going to run out of resilience.
And so the last do I would share is to really think about your resilience as an exhaustible resource. An example, this is one of the things that helps me.
I think it's a resilience practice. I love adult coloring books.
I'm an introvert and I have a whole adult coloring book about introverts. But if that helps me in after I've had a stressful day at work.

and then the next day I have a family crisis and I use the adult coloring book

and you know where I'm going with this, right?

If you continue to use this blindly

without thinking about your strategy,

you're assuming that resilience is going to continue as long as you need it to continue to help you. And so I know there's a lot there.
This is a pretty rich topic, but I think the biggest take-home is to not use old solutions to solve brand new and chronic problems. You're absolutely right.
And as you look at the world today, we absolutely need new solutions to the problems that are impacting us because climate change didn't come out of nowhere. And the way we've solved crises in the past isn't working.
So we need a new way to come at it, which is a systematic approach, as Seth Godin has laid out, that we need to get on board with. So in chapter three, you introduced this concept of resilience sealing.
And this is after you go through the three myths. And I could ask you six questions about this chapter alone, but one of them that I really

loved is you use this metaphor in the chapter comparing resilience to a rubber band that

stretches until it finally snaps. And I love this because in my own book, I had this chapter on

becoming a prospective harnesser. And I used the story of my friend, Chris Cassidy, who at the time

was training to become a seal at Bud's. And he told me that the way he got through Bud's

Thank you. And I used the story of my friend, Chris Cassidy, who at the time was training to become a seal at Bud's.
And he told me that the way he got through Bud's was using this analogy. He said, hard times end, challenges end, and you need to look at your resilience like it's a rubber band.
And sometimes it contracts and sometimes it expands. And what you need to look for is when it expands, not to let it break.
And so he used that as a way to get through the micro moments of incredible pain so that he could reach that point where it would constrict again and he would get a break and be able to recover. So can you step into this and help the listener understand? I'm going to take maybe an unpopular opinion.
I'm popular in the fact that I'm a people pleaser and I hate disagreeing, but I feel professionally obligated to. That analogy is great, but we have to follow it to its logical conclusion.
In Shatterproof, I use this analogy and I use the example of imagine you're back in high school and you're sitting in a class and your teacher is droning on about something that you neither understand nor care about. And you fiddle in your bag and you find a rubber band and you start stretching it and letting it go back, stretching it and letting it go back, kind of a makeshift fidget spinner, right? And over the semester, that rubber band becomes your constant companion.
Every time you're stressed, you're pushing it open, you're putting it back. What happens to a rubber band over time if you keep doing that? It breaks, right? It will snap.
And when it comes to this idea of hitting our resilience ceiling, most of us don't even know we have a resilience ceiling until we're bouncing off of it. In the same way that you're stretching your reliable rubber bands, right? It's always served you well.
But by the way, your stress keeps coming. So that's another sort of polite disagreement I'd have with that analogy, which is it assumes we live in a world where you can let the rubber band go back to normal for a long enough period of time.
And so from my perspective, I actually think the analogy is really good to show the benefits of resilience. But what we miss is that it also shows us that resilience is an exhaustible resource.
And I will tell you this from personal experience and from so many people that I've interviewed and studied is it runs out at the worst possible time and the time we least expect it. Maybe just a step back, because I agree with what you're saying.
I use this as part of a chapter where I was explaining the power of perspective shifts, meaning so often we get into either or thinking. And when we do that, it causes us to get into this whiplash.
But when we start allowing ourselves to get into more both and thinking, and I went into the behavior science about it, we start finding an equilibrium to it. And then after this, I introduce the topic of how do you reach the optimal state of anxiety? And I used it to play into that as well.
So I completely agree with you. If you keep stretching it back and forth overall, you're going to wear the thing out and you're going to wear yourself out.

Exactly.

So Tasha, I want to move forward in the next section of the book. You outline three major

shatterproof mindset shifts that people must take to move beyond just coping. And you say the first

is moving from discounting hard things to actively embracing them. The second is shifting from coping to the courage to change.
And the third is breaking free of the limiting beliefs that keep us stuck. Can you maybe go through which one you think people have most trouble with? It's interesting.
I don't know if I can pick one. I want to just slightly revise the third mind shift.
It's actually going from bouncing back to growing forward. I might choose that one because I think it summarizes this process of becoming shatterproof almost better than anything else can.
And you think about how do we deal with our daily stresses and challenges in the course of the lives that we lead? We wake up every day. We never get through our to-do list.
There are more people demanding things of us than we can possibly satisfy. And we get by.
And that doesn't mean that we don't have wonderful moments and great connections and can have a life that we find generally fulfilling. But I think that sort of, again, that elevated baseline of stress punctuated by unexpected crises leads so many of us to have this mentality.
And I'll be honest, I'm in a time in my life right now with this book launch where I'm slipping back into bouncing back. I'm saying, I just have to get through this day, right? It's okay if I just survive today.
I'm not even going to set the bar at thriving. But don't we all deserve more than to get by every day and to survive and say, well, at least I made it through the day.
I feel so strongly about that because I think with the amount of change and challenge that we're all facing, many of us have unintentionally lowered the bar and just said, like, last night I finished my newsletter at God knows what time in the morning, probably when people were waking up for work. And I said, good job, self.
You made it through another day. And becoming shatterproof is a daily choice, right? It's not time consuming.
It's not complicated. But I actually had a moment this morning where I actually had to sit down and say, okay, self, you have to model this behavior.
And it doesn't mean that you can't fall back because we're humans and it happens. But the bar that I think we should all have is no matter what's going on in our lives, no matter what challenges, no matter what we're facing, is that there is always a way to grow through them, to become better, stronger, wiser, happier, to find more joy and peace and purpose.
And the tool that I'd give your listeners and your watchers comes from one of my mentors and another person that I dedicated the book to, Alan Mulally. And what Alan says is his hypothesis after carefully studying manuscript and book, is that the first step to become shatterproof is what he calls a better way mindset.
And all that is, it's the simplest thing in the world. We just have to choose is to believe that a better way exists, even if we don't know what it is yet.
And so I think this idea of, I will no longer settle for barely surviving. I know there's a better way.
And I know regardless of whether or not you pick up shatterproof, right? Maybe there are other tools that are helpful, but I think we just need to stop settling in a world that's keeps demanding more of us. I couldn't agree more.
And thank you for sharing that. And I have always wanted to meet Alan.
One of my peers at Dell used to work for him when she was at Ford. I think he was at Ford, correct? Yes.
So the core part of your book is you go through these three, these four steps to becoming shatterproof. Step one is to probe your pain.
Step two is to trace your triggers. Step three is to spot your shadows.

And step four is to pick your pivots.

And I wanted to ask you about the first one.

You quote in the book, you can't gain control of the situation and find solutions until you face your pain head on.

You have to accept the reality of your life and understand that it's okay and that it's

not going to be what you planned.

On the other hand, you have to say, I'm going to kick the situation in that you know what.

Thank you. and understand that it's okay and that it's not going to be what you planned.
On the other hand, you have to say, I'm going to kick the situation in a you know what. My question for you is, Jan's story illustrates the moment she shifted from enduring pain to harnessing it as a tool for change.
Why is it so crucial for listeners and watchers of this episode to acknowledge their suffering instead of suppressing it? Okay. That's a great question.
I'm reminded of a Lord Byron quote that is in the book. He says, adversity is the first path towards truth.
And what I argue pretty strongly as a self-awareness nerd and according to Marshall Goldsmith, the number one self-awareness coach in the world, I believe that there is no truth without awareness. And that awareness has to start with us.
And so in adversity, the path to truth is not to push through our pain, to pretend we're fine, to tell ourselves when we're awake at two o'clock in the morning, staring at the alarm clock, and we know we're not fine, but we're saying like, you've got this. Other people have it worse than you.
By doing that, what we are missing are crucial signals to unlocking a better life. And again, like you said, it might not be the life we planned.
Sometimes things happen that we can't go back, right? It's a death or a divorce or we lose a job. But in probing our pain, what we start to learn, and the science supports this, is that pain is a signal that something is not quite right in your life or in your world.
And when we deny it, we are literally shutting the door on the opportunity to understand what that is and to find that first path to truth and adversity. Thank you for that, Tasha.
And I'm writing my own second book right now. And what you were just describing is a section that I've just been slaving over for the past couple of weeks, because I'm trying to tell what

you just said through my own personal life story, and it's painful. And I'm trying to figure out how vulnerable to be.
And so I finally just decided to put it all on the table. I appreciate you bringing that up.
So the third portion of your book, you go into these shatterproof transformations and tools. And the first one is crafting confidence.
But I want to go into the last two because they really resonate with what we discuss here on the podcast. Not that confidence isn't one of them, but in the time we have, I want to go into this next one, which is crafting choice, because something I believe in is it's our agency.
It's our intentionality about the choices that we make that shape the life and the outcome that we end up producing. So you quote that the only thing that can beat fear is laughter.
And you bring up the story of Optorore, and you discovered that humor can dismantle fear and inspire action against oppression. And part of the reason I'm bringing this up is I was probably 20 feet away from one of Milosevic's, well, not one of, his top general when I was in aian.
And so I've lived this. You have this concept of bully jiu-jitsu, which when you're going through this, turned a dictator's strength into a weakness.
And I want you to go through that and how we can apply this same choice type of framework in our everyday lives when we're facing intimidating authority figures or seemingly insurmountable challenges. So thank you for bringing up the story.
It's about my dear friend, Sergei Popovich. If I oversimplify this, but also factually accurately explain and summarize what he did, as a college student, he started a movement that overthrew the murderous dictator Slobodan Milosevic.
And for those of you that aren't familiar with that story and that history, this was mostly in the 1980s and 1990s. Milosevic was starting wars with every neighboring country in the Balkans.
It ended with hundreds of thousands of people dead, millions of people displaced, and it resulted in the disintegration of the Yugoslav Federation. And so this was a bad, dangerous, tyrannical man.
And Sierdja and his friends, which started out literally as six people in a smoky apartment in Belgrade, six college students saying, all right, well, we know we can't beat this guy on force. It seems like a pretty bad idea to challenge a dictator with his own police force and army to competition of strength.
So what can we start doing to assert our choice, to show the people of Serbia that a different future is possible, and to use their words to delegitimize our oppressor. Serja, that's a much fancier name that Serja has than I do.
I just call it bully jujitsu. And what we know about jujitsu, if you've ever read about it or studied it, is that instead of using your strength against your opponent, you're actually using their strength against themselves.
So if they punch you, you might step to the side, right? And maybe they fall down. And so that basic concept is as follows.
And here's what they did. I'll give you an example.
They knew that the people of Serbia would be too scared to just to ask them, could you please rise up against this murderous dictator? So what they started doing were creating these very fun, funny, and low stakes opportunities for them to start asserting their choice. And my favorite one that I talk about, they called the smiling barrel.
And what What they did is they had one of their members, Duda, design. They went to a nearby construction site.
They found this big metal barrel and they had draw or paint, I think, an absurd looking caricature of Milosevic's face. And next to it, they wrote a sign that said, smash his face for just a dinar, which is the equivalent of 0.05 cents.
And so what they did is they took the barrel, they took a baseball bat on the sign to one of the busiest squares in Belgrade. And they parked themselves not too close because they didn't want to get caught, but close enough that in a nearby coffee shop that they could see what was happening.
And it was a very interesting experiment, right? Anyone who's a psychologist or psychology minded is fascinating. So at first people were walking by, they were confused.
They didn't know what to do. And then one young person, probably a college student, kind of walks past it and comes back.
He takes a coin out of his pocket and he puts it in a bucket where it would have to be. And he picks up the bat and the clang you can hear through for blocks and blocks.
And so people start to notice this. And the people who are walking by here, they're families.
They're young couples in love.

They're college students. This is like the most wholesome group of people that could be participating in this as possible.

And as soon as he did that, other people started to gain confidence.

And they started smashing his face for a dinar.

So what happened?

Someone called the police.

The police arrived, three policemen in a squad car, taking this so seriously, and they quickly assessed the situation.

They said, wait a minute. Okay, so the first thing they wanted to do was find the rebels who had designed this terrible threat against their dictator, and they were nowhere to be found.
So there were only two choices left. The first other choice was they could arrest these families with children, these young,

wonderful- There were only two choices left. The first other choice was they could arrest these families with children, these young, wonderful college students, which they knew they couldn't do because there would be a public outcry.
Or, wait for it, they could arrest the barrel. So Sirja and his friends knew this was going to happen in a Monty Python-esque moment they made sure that there were enough people milling about that had cameras and so they snapped all of these shots of these three serious intense tough policemen arresting a barrel with the caricature of Milosevic's face and putting it in the squad car.
What I love about this story is it's a lesson for all of us. And I'll just give you a really quick tool.
Obviously, most of us hopefully are not facing that situation, but maybe we're facing a boss who's a jerk. There's a tool that I talk about it an insight actually in my second book and not shatterproof but i call it the laugh track so the next time

your horrible boss says something to you that's so cruel that you want to cry

imagine a laugh track behind it right it's a sitcom and this is a ridiculous character that your character has to deal with. And it doesn't solve all problems, but it's a way of using their strength against them and delegitimizing your oppressor.
Natasha, thank you so much for sharing that story. And I wish we had another 20 minutes to keep going, but I know you've got a hard stop.
So for the listeners who want to learn more about you, where's the best place for them to go? I am fortunately or unfortunately ubiquitous on the internet. You can find me, my handles are Tasha Urick, E-U-R-I-C-H.
And if you want to learn more about the Shatterproof book and a bunch of resources that we have to help with that, you can go to shatterproof-book.com. Tasha, it was so incredible to have you today and congratulations on what I expect will be another New York Times bestseller.
Thank you so much. As my mom would say, from your lips to God's ears.
Let's hope. That's a wrap on an incredibly insightful conversation with Dr.
Tasha Yorick. Her groundbreaking work in Shatterproof reveals that resilience isn't just about enduring hardship.
It's about harnessing it to create lasting transformation. One of the biggest takeaways from today's episode is the importance of probing your pain.
Understanding that adversity we face isn't just something to survive, but a tool for growth. As Tasha emphasized, true resilience isn't about avoiding discomfort.
It's about leaning into it, processing it, and using it to propel ourselves forward. So as you reflect on today's conversation, ask yourself, where in your life have you been settling for survival instead of stepping into growth? What small intentional shifts can you make today to start building a more resilient mindset? And which of Tasha's insights resonated most? And how can you begin applying them in your own journey? Remember, transformation isn't about passively consuming information.
It's about taking action. If you're ready to go deeper, check out Shatterproof.
It's available now and links to her book, Tasha's work, and other resources are all in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Want to bring the power of intentionality to your organization? Beyond hosting PassionStruck, I speak to companies, teams, and events about unlocking potential, building resilience, and creating lasting impact.
If you're looking for a keynote speaker who can inspire action and drive transformation, visit johnrmiles.com slash speaking to learn more about how I can help your team thrive. And if today's episode spoke to you, I'd be incredibly grateful if you'd leave a five-star rating and review.
It's one of the best ways to help PassionStruck reach even more people who need these conversations. If you know someone who could benefit from today's discussion, share this episode with them.
Now, coming up next on PassionStruck, I'm joined by Stanford psychologist, Dr. Greg Walton,

author of the extraordinary new book, Ordinary Magic, the science of how we can achieve big change with small acts.

In our conversation, Greg reveals how small shifts in perception, which he calls wise

interventions, can create upward spirals of transformation.

Whether it's a mindset shift, a reframing of purpose, or the belief that you belong,

this episode will show you how seemingly small actions can lead to extraordinary change. Trust me, you won't want to miss it.
I think there's so much of our lives today that involves blame, that's pejorative, and it would be easy to look at a teacher, say, who's reacting in a punitive, hostile manner to a student and judge them and say that there's something wrong with them. But I think what's really important is to understand how and why these questions come up for all of us in circumstances, whether it's a question like, does my partner really love me when you're having a conflict conversation? Or whether it's a question like, is this kid just an F up as they come back to school from juvenile detention? That these are reasonable questions.
Like it doesn't help us to suppress them and push them away.

Finally, thank you for being part of Passion Struck.

This show is built on curiosity, transformation, and action.

And I'm honored to have you with me on this journey.

Remember, the fee for the show is simple.

If you found value, share it.

Let's keep growing this movement and living with intention, impact, and purpose.

Until next time, live life passion-struck.