How do you stay strong when life takes an unexpected turn and changes everything? A three-month-old monkey taught me a secret about willpower that changed my perspective. TRANSCRIPTION: I'm Karen Thrall, welcome to the Don't Lose podcast. Every week I'm recording this in a different location. In this episode I'm sitting on a park bench in Blaine, WA. Don't Lose is about everyday stories and the lessons we find in them. Let's get started. This episode is called Don't Lose Your Willpower. There are so many layers to willpower, so I'm going to stick to three things I learned from a story I experienced. First, a definition so we're all on the same page. Willpower is having a strong determination that allows you to do something difficult. There's a difference between willpower and motivation. Motivation isn't necessarily difficult. Willpower is. My question to you is, what is hard right now for you? Is it finances? Is it your job? Are you looking at your career going, how did I get here? This is not what I signed up for. Is it health? Is it a difficult relationship in the workplace or personally? What is hard? No matter how great life is, we all have something difficult where we need willpower. There's a story that took place in Rishikesh, India. I was visiting my daughter, and she said, do you want to meet Tulu? I was really excited to meet this little monkey named Tulu. When I met her, she was three months old. My daughter met her at two months, just after she'd been rescued, abandoned and left to die. She was frail, weak, and alone. And not only that, she had lost three of her limbs. All she had was one arm left with her hand. Her adopted dad had been nurturing her for the month before I met her. When we showed up, the first thing Madison said was, "Look how strong she is." With her willpower activated, she was getting stronger and stronger. I need to give you a little information I learned. Female monkeys are born into a troop and remain in that troop. While I was there, I saw countless monkeys, a dozen at a time, sometimes 20, 30, 50. Every day I saw troops of monkeys and moms with babies hanging on their underbellies. It was beautiful. All this was happening before I met Tulu. The reason I want you to know that is Tulu will never be part of a troop. She will never again cling to her mother's underbelly. She will never be a mom. She will never live in the jungle. She will never be part of her family. She will never swing tree to tree. That life's done. One of the things that diminishes our willpower is the past. What I was, not who I am today. When you want to find your willpower, it starts by accepting who you are today. Your life today, all of it. This is my reality. This is my life. From there, you start to regain your willpower. Tulu will never experience what was. She only has now. What I watched in her was a monkey learning how to be a monkey without any other monkeys. She was innately, naturally a monkey. This hardship did not take away who she is. A lot of times in hardships, we lose a bit of ourselves. She didn't. She explored more of who she was becoming. Her hardship invited more of who she is. She learned how to use two limbs to move around the floor. She'd scoot with one hand and her bum. Hand, bum. Hand, bum. She figured it out. She figured out how to climb a curtain using her hand and teeth until she got to the ledge so she could look out the window. Her adopted dad would hold out his finger and she'd grip it with her tiny little hand. He would swing her as if she was on a vine, back and forth, and I'd watch her body. Her body instantly started acting like a monkey's body. Free and flowing and carefree. She loved the sensation she instinctively knew was in her. It didn't look like what it was, but it was still there. She instinctively wanted to sit behind my daughter's head and look in her hair for bugs, dirt, food. All of that was her true self, even through the hardship. Her willpower gave her the ability to find herself. Number one, don't look in the past if you want to have willpower. Look at your moment right now and find your willpower to get through this difficult thing. Two, remember who you are. We experience loss all the time. We know what it is to grieve something or someone we don't have. Willpower helps us find ourselves again. To increase our willpower, we stay in the moment, in the now. That's what gets our willpower stronger. As an executive coach, I often pull life lessons from stories in my past. At my age, I have a lot of them. But when I share stories and hardships that required willpower, I'm telling you the story after it's done. I've already experienced the strength from that story. That's not what I want to do in this podcast. I want to tell you a hardship I'm going through now, while I'm in it, where willpower scares me. My hardship might not seem like a big deal to you, but it is to me. This podcast is my hardship. It's provoking me to do something difficult. This year has been an incredible year of teaching me what it means to be seen. Someone in marketing works with me every four to six weeks, and throughout the year she's said, "Why don't you let people know who you are? All you do is show your professional persona. Why don't you share a bit about yourself?" Petrified. Terrified. Don't want to do it. While I was in Japan, I wrote down this phrase: Don't lose yourself. While I was there, I had this imagery of a birdcage. I'm in this birdcage and the door is wide open. I can get out anytime, but it's familiar and comfortable. In the corporate world, it's easy to lose yourself and get lost in the professional persona. It happens subtly, bit by bit. Then one day you wake up and go, how did I get here? That's this year for me. I remember meeting two colleagues at a big corporation. We were in their cafeteria for coffee. It was so perfect. So superficial. We said all the right things and I left feeling really sad because I felt fake. Somehow I've created this belief system that my value is in my professional persona, and I've been blocking off myself, thinking that who I am might disqualify me. This podcast is my willpower. It's the strong determination to do something very difficult, and that is to allow myself to be seen. That's one of my hardships right now, and it is hard, more than you can imagine. But I'm determined to do this difficult thing. What is yours? What is difficult for you? The last thing Tulu taught me was a secret I'd never considered before. Throughout our time there, she did something over and over. She would climb up her adopted dad's arm, rest against his chest, and fall asleep. She would cuddle. She would be. Then she'd climb back down again. And it dawned on me that the secret of willpower is that you are never in isolation. Ever. And you know you're not in isolation when you allow yourself to be loved in the hardship, as you are, right now. Be loved in the hardship as you are right now, so that you will have the strong determination to do that difficult thing. Thank you so much for listening today. I'll see you next week with another story and another little bit of inspiration. Please follow me on Instagram and YouTube. My tag is @karenthrallinc and you can find me on any of your favorite podcast channels. See you next week. Thank you for your support! My three favorite ways to stay connected are: 1. Sign up to my newsletter (LINK) 2. Follow on Instagram (LINK) 3. Subscribe to my YouTube channel (LINK)
