EP #112: Turning Adversity Into Your Advantage with Doug Bopst, Host of the Adversity Advantage Podcast

(gentle music) Welcome back to another episode of Everyday Endor Funds, a mental health podcast focused on the importance of finding joy and happiness in daily living. I'm your host, Stella Staphanopoulos, and this week is all about learning how to turn adversity into advantage. Now, you may be thinking, how could I ever see this negative experience in my life? That was traumatic to some extent. How could I ever see that as being something positive or to my advantage? This also might be on a lot of people's minds right now, given the state of the world, and granted, I cannot say, given what's going on right now, that everything happens for a reason. There's no way to justify the acts of violence that are happening right now. And I'm not even getting attempt to try to rationalize any of what's going on in current events right now. What I will say though, is that as I'm recording this, I do think that when we're trying to make meaning from life's difficulties and hardships, there's something to be said about just having faith that things are happening in a way that will somehow benefit you in your life, depending on how you react and respond to it. And there's no better person to bring onto the podcast this week than Doug Boepst, who has had a lot of experiences with hardship growing up, he dives into this in the episode and he really explains some of his own traumatic experiences in life and how he kind of got down the wrong path, which eventually put him in prison, and then how he was able to turn himself from being a felon to being super involved in fitness and how he turned his life around. And now he has this really incredible podcast called The Adversity Advantage. And he shares exactly that, you know, how you can turn hard situations in life to your advantage and how you can approach challenges with the lens of compassion and how to really sit in your emotions in a way that's productive and will enable you to continue to persist and move on in life because at the end of the day, life is not stopping for anyone, no matter how unfair, unjust, horrible things can be, things can seem. So these topics are personally really interesting to me and I think incredibly timely. We recorded this months ago, but the fact that I'm releasing this interview now, it rings true whenever. So I'm really excited for you all to tune in to the podcast. But before we get into the episode, speaking of hardship and putting yourself or being exposed to challenging situations, one of the hardest things that I think we can do to our bodies is put it under physical stress. And one wellness practice I've recently gotten to really enjoy is cold exposure. When you're physically putting your body under stress, you have to learn to train your mind to signal to the body, everything's gonna be okay, just learn to breathe through it. And I'm excited to be partnering with Lauren Schram. This weekend in Brooklyn for an ice bath event, we're also doing a panel with Thai Richards who is the founder of Region Release, a lifestyle brand, a running community. We're gonna be talking about the joy in building community and fitness. So if you're interested in joining, link to registers in my bio, whoever's listening, if you're based in the New York area, I hope to see you there. And without further ado, let's get into the episode. Hi, Doug, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. It's so great to see you today. Stella, thank you so much for having me. When we connected a few months back, I was just blown away by your story and everything that you do now, how you've been able to build such an incredible career. And I really resonate with the work that you're doing. I find it so inspirational. And something that you talk a lot about as a podcast host and just being a motivational speaker, your entire brand is this concept of turning your adversity into your advantage. And I think this topic is something we could go on and on about for hours, but can you talk a little bit first about how you were able to do this throughout your entire life? Like you've such an incredible story. So walk us through some of those difficult experiences that you've had where you've had to learn how to turn this sense of adversity and struggle into something that's more towards your advantage and productive for your life. Well, I think looking back the one thing that I think it's important for people to remember is that once you accept the fact that adversity will happen in your life, I think things, they don't get easy, but they get easier when dealing with them because you don't feel so alone, you don't feel like there's something wrong with you, you accept that just life can be hard and that on the other side of hardships, maybe it's not immediately, but down the road, you look back and you're like, wow, like my biggest levels of self-confidence and strength and self-esteem came from those hard times and not the hard time specifically, but your ability to persevere, your ability to learn, grow, and just be able to have these lessons that you're not only learning yourself, but able to pay it forward to others, right? And the second thing I'll say before I talk about my own personal experiences is that, I don't think that when you're going through adversity, that that situation in itself, again, just to kind of piggyback on what I said earlier, you don't use adversity to your advantage by just going through hard times. And what I mean by that is that when somebody, let's just say somebody gets divorced, it's not like that divorce is what's gonna make them a stronger person, right? It's the lessons that come from it. It's maybe you've got refocused on your goals, you've got refocused on the type of person you wanna become, you've got refocused on the type of partner you wanna be in a relationship with, you maybe decided to take better care of yourself, whatever the examples are, that's how you use that form of adversity to your advantage. So I wanna make sure that I make that clear because I think sometimes when I say use adversity to your advantage, people might be like, well, I just went through a horrible divorce, like how is this gonna be beneficial for me? And I wanna separate the fact that that kind of thing is really tough and challenging. I've never gone through anything like that, but from talking to people, I know it's one of the hardest things anyone will ever, ever go through in their entire life. And so going back to my story, I used adversity to my complete disadvantage growing up. What I mean by that is I had multiple adversities as a kid that included my own parents getting divorced. It included being bullied in school. It included having anxiety, depression, panic, all that stuff as a kid. It included not having any luck with women. It included not being good at sports, even though I love them. It included all these things. And as a kid, it's definitely tough to say, okay, I'm going to accept that this situation is going to make me stronger as an adult, right? 'Cause kids don't only think like that, 'cause back then, all I really wanted was to be accepted by my peer groups, to be accepted by girls in a romantic way. I wanted to fit in with people athletically. I wanted to just feel normal that there wasn't something wrong with me, because at the time, I did think there was something wrong with me, because as a man, when you're growing up, you're judged by who you're dating, your friend groups, your athletic ability, all these things. And not that there's anything wrong with that, I think, right? 'Cause I think that it is important to be attracted to your partner and to be in that relationship and to be happy in that sort of thing. And I think it is important to be healthy and to be strong and to take care of yourself from an athletic and movement perspective. I think it is important to have quality friends in that sort of thing. But the way that I think sometimes society, I guess, is shaped our identity as men, to look at that is kind of warped in a way, because I felt that, okay, if I'm not having success with women, if I'm not having success athletically, if I'm not healthy, if I'm not all these things that I'm a failure completely. And so in that storm of adversity, I chose to use substances to numb the pain, to get rid of the feelings that adversity brought me. And this is where I think a lot of people can make a mistake because of what I'm about to explain to you. So when I was 14, and a lot of us had already started to come together, I mean, all this stuff that I was just sharing that I experienced was already happening at this time. When I was 14, I took my first hit off a marijuana pipe and I felt this massive weight come off my back, this massive adversity weight where I could finally be at peace with myself. The pain was gone, the emotional pain was gone. I didn't have to worry about my family dynamic was, I didn't have to worry about whether girls like me or not. I didn't have to worry about how I was gonna get cut from the next sports team. I didn't have to worry about any of the problems that I had talked about. I had to door it before that point. And that became a very slippery slope for me because I now taught myself that A, I wasn't comfortable with who I truly was and B, that I needed something externally to make me feel outside of myself and be different than who I already was. And so that just led to me developing an unhealthy relationship with marijuana. That led to me selling it a little bit on the side to support my habit, that led to attention in my relationships with my family, that I'm getting kicked out of my mom's house and going to live with my dad full time 'cause at that time we had to put custody 50/50. And then that led to me going to a brand new school the next day and then again, continuing along with the same habits and behaviors, getting high every day, skipping class with my friends to just numb out, listen to music, that sort of thing, barely graduate. So you see where I'm going with this, like the adversities that I'm talking about, like happen years prior and before. I'm creating so much more adversity in my life by the way I chose to respond. Again, I want to reiterate. It's not because I knew any better as a kid, but it's just a reality of life. And so this led to me doing the same stuff at that school, barely graduating high school, then I ended up getting involved with selling pot to make money afterwards. And then as I'm like, I guess like 17, 18 years old, I start to drink coke, I get addicted to cocaine. That leads to crippling anxiety and panic and everything that goes along with that. So I'm selling pot now as a teenager who had just graduated high school, after graduating high school, doing coke, addicted to that. And then I get introduced to this thing called percusset, which ended up really, really bringing me to my knees. And somebody offered me a five milligram percusset and I took the percusset. And again, all of my life's problems had gone away all over again. And it wasn't just the problems that I had mentioned before. Now all the shame and the regret and the additional anxiety and depression and stress that had built based on my choices that had come from responding to that adversity on a healthy way. Now I was masking that. And then that five milligram percusset led to me doing oxy cotton, which sure people who are listening to this are familiar with. And I developed a really unhealthy habit to that, which nearly killed me. And it was off to the races. Like after the five milligram percusset, I was not doing like 10 milligrams of percusset, then it moved on to oxy where I was doing 20 milligrams of oxy, 40 milligrams, 80 all the way up until I was doing hundreds of milligrams up my nose every single day, just to support my habit, could barely get out of bed without snorling few hundred milligrams. And my life was in shambles. My life was in a very dark place. And fortunately, I ended up getting arrested on Syncodemi of 2008, which ended up becoming the greatest thing that could ever happen to me. Even though at that time I thought that my life was over, you know, got arrested after I was riding around with my friends and do a drug deal, cop pulled me over during a, I think it was like a DUI checkpoint or something, noticed that I had a busted headlight. One thing led to the next, he searched my car, pulled me out of the car and found like a half a pound of pot and a couple thousand dollars in cash in the car. And then I went to jail and then I was charged with a felony possession with the 10th distribute marijuana, got bailed out the next day and then eventually ended up going to court several months later. And then the judge convicted me of the felony, sentenced me to five years in jail, suspended everything but 90 days, give me five years probation, two or an hours community service, all kinds of fines of drug classes. But he looked at me and he's like, Doug, if you complete everything without messing up, I'll take the felony conviction off your record and I'll give you a deal. And at the time I was 20 years old and I was like, there's no way this is a deal. Like how is this helping me at all? I'm going to jail. Like how is this really benefiting me? And so I ended up taking a deal and then a few weeks later, I reported to jail like a week after my 21st birthday and jail was really where I taught myself to use adversity to my advantage and transform my life. Yeah, I mean, what an incredible story. First of all, thank you for being so open and you mentioned how it was kind of like a blessing that you got arrested. You mentioned that it was a good thing that that happened to you 'cause that was the pivotal moment I think in your life where that switch happened and you weren't able to really practice this idea of actually turning your adversity into your advantage whereas previously in your life you kept creating more disadvantage to all these experiences that you were having. And to go back to what you would mention earlier about kind of how to do this, I thought that was a really interesting concept around like thinking about the actual experience, the adversity as something that actually just sucks, like a divorce, not great. Just the act of getting a divorce isn't something that maybe will be in your advantage. However, like you mentioned, it's the way in which you respond to something rather than react to it that will actually create that sense of advantage in your life or disadvantage, depending on how you choose to behave and how you choose to grow and move forward. So I think that's actually a really key piece of insight that you share because regardless of any challenging life experience that anyone listening out there is going through, this idea of thinking about how you respond versus react and how you actually move through a difficult experience is incredibly empowering because it puts the choice in your hands and it gives you the agency to create the life that you want to live amidst the reality in which we all live in, which is that life is incredibly uncertain and we can't control anything. So I think that's just a really, really good point that you make. And now we're getting to this point in your story where you're convicted, you're in prison and another thing that you really advocate as well with your brand and your podcast is this idea of going from being a felon to transforming into this life of fitness. So can you talk a little bit about how fitness played a really important role in your life and perhaps overcoming a lot of the adversity that was kind of like self inflicted at that point when you were going through this cycle of addiction and experiencing all these issues with drugs and abusing drugs and just going kind of through this dark spiral in your life. - Yeah, so after I got to jail, I had a detox cold turkey for weeks from the oxycat, which was horrible. And then my soon to be cellmate was sitting there playing scrabble and he essentially was like, "Hey, you're gonna start working out with me when you get through this detox." And I looked at him and I was just like, there's no way a guy like me who could have been a model for Pillsbury is going to exercise, let alone exercise in front of a bunch of grown men when I was highly insecure. And not too long after that, I saw him work out and then we were like in the cell having a conversation and this kind of goes back to what you were just saying that a lot of it was self inflicted where he was asking me about my story and he was like, "You know why are you in jail? Why'd you get addicted to drugs?" And I started to blame like my parents. I started to blame the girls. I started to blame people. I started to blame the situations and all these things. And I got to keep it PG. He looked at me and he was just like, "You know, quit being a victim." And I kind of was stopped in my tracks 'cause I was expecting him to coddle me and pat me on the back and say, "You know, it's gonna be okay." Like the world is against you but he was like, "You're blaming everybody else for your problems "but yourself." He said, "There's plenty of people that go through "what you went through that aren't in jail right, Doug?" And I was like, "Yup." And he said, "You have two choices here. "It could be a man and look yourself in the mirror "and say you got yourself here." And it's up to you to change. Nobody's coming to rescue you. Or you can go be a victim, go cry in the corner and say, "Well, it was me and blame everybody else "for your problems." He's like, "Most people will do that." And while it wasn't what I wanted to hear, it was what I needed to hear because like you said and like I touched on it at the beginning, a lot of my adversity was self-inflicted. And I chose to respond to the circumstances in the way that I did. And I felt fairly, I guess motivated for the first time to like try to choose something different. And so I decided to give this exercise thing a try. And again, I was the kid who was very insecure, always wanted to do what I could to fit in with other people, always worried about what people thought of me. And I was thought of, and my mind is a loser because of the fact that I didn't have a girlfriend growing up because I didn't get picked for sports teams. I didn't get the admiration that I thought I maybe had somehow deserved. And so when I got down into a push-up, I was like, I know I'm probably not gonna be able to do one. Like what are people gonna say when I can't? And sure as heck, I collapsed when I tried to do a push-up for my feet. And then I was like, you know, of course, I'm like, "Ah, I can't believe it." Like maybe next time, right? And then I tried to do it for my knees, couldn't do it collapse. And then I just looked at my cellmate and he gave me some form of tough love in that moment when I asked him why I couldn't do it. And then I walked up and down the steps to try to like rest a little bit. Like it was a coffin and puffing 'cause at the time I was also smoking cigarettes. And before I went to jail, I should say I was also smoking cigarettes. And so he just started me super small when it came to fitness. Like my first thing that was a goal of ours was to be able to just hold myself up from a push-up position without falling. So he worked on that. And then it was doing a single push-up from my knees. Was able to do that. Then it was doing two and three. And as I was doing this, I was building self-confidence. Which I honestly didn't know until like later on after that because it wasn't like, man, I feel so much more confident now and this is my confidence is building. It was more like, I'm so proud of myself that I did this thing that I never thought I could do. So let's try something else. Like what's next, what's next, what's next. And I don't know if that's dopamine. I don't know if that's just the endorphins. I know this shows about endorphins. I don't know if it's just again a confidence thing, but that kept me going. And I was able to eventually do a set of 10 push-ups from my knees. And because the goal was that by the time I left jail, my 90-day sentence, I wanted to be able to do a real set of 10 push-ups from my feet, like real push-ups without stopping and be able to run a mile. And my cellmates motivation and encouragement, like training me in there every single day, I was able to do those push-ups and run that mile. And I can't emphasize enough how important those moments were for me. Because it taught me to deal with my mental health in a way that was productive. It taught me that even though life can get scary and uncertain, and there's anger and sadness, it doesn't mean that I have to make those feelings go away immediately. It doesn't mean I have to lash out or act out. And I built so many lifelong skills and habits that are so useful for me today that include what I just mentioned, like reattaching behavior to emotion for me and knowing that I didn't have to always, I didn't have to numb out whenever I felt an uncomfortable emotion. It taught me the importance of discipline and just showing up for myself every single day, even though I didn't at times believe in myself, even though it was hard. It taught me the importance of getting comfortable, being uncomfortable. It taught me the importance of just focusing on me. Like if I had worried about what other people were going to think of me when I was doing my little workouts in there during my sentence as far as other inmates and stuff, I probably would have quit. Because in my mind, I'd built this story. especially at the beginning that everybody was gonna laugh at me and look at me in a certain way when I couldn't do things, but what I found is the opposite actually happened because they saw this kid who came in who I mean to quote them, I looked like a zombie because I was so out of it through this detox and just I guess adjusting to the nature of being in jail to now they see me working on myself and getting in there, getting down on the ground and doing the work and showing up and smiling a bit more laughing and they start to see these transformations they actually started to like root for me and and also help in holding me accountable and so yeah, I mean those few months in there were unexpectedly life changing. I mean I feel like you're reading my mind because as you started to talk about the habits that you developed every day when you were working towards these goals that were centered around fitness while you were in jail and how that impacted your mental health, building yourself confidence, building yourself a steam, building yourself worth. Isn't it so fascinating to see how our fitness journey and exercise and working towards something physically can have a profound impact on our mental wellbeing and more so how we approach tough situations in life. I saw that direct relationship just as you were explaining earlier and to your point that you had made previously around this cycle of being in addiction you were essentially just trying to run away from your problems by doing this thing as you describe is just numbing away from that pain that self-inflicted pain. I mean being so afraid of what other people thought of you and it really does go to show how when we try to run away from things that feel uncomfortable or it's a sense of discomfort or it makes us feel uneasy. They find a way to come back into our lives and oftentimes worse and more heavier. I find that really interesting and it's just something I picked up on as you were sharing. And you also talked a little bit about just some of the lessons that you've gained from that experience, the importance of discipline, the importance of sitting in a sense of discomfort and being okay with that. As you've now achieved so much in your life and as a podcast host and as someone who constantly is thinking about these topics and getting to speak with other thought leaders and researchers, how has your philosophy expanded on learning to move through difficult moments in life? Because it sounds like that time in jail was super transformative and committing to fitness was kind of like the gateway towards finding a path of more enlightenment for you. But as you've transitioned out of that because you are no longer in jail and you've transformed your life in so many different ways, how has that period and time of your life impacted your perspective on moving through hard things? I've been super blessed to be able to talk to some of the like top experts on like stress management, anxiety management, different forms of adversity. And my perspective is definitely expanded on all of that and it really expanded there before too because when I got out of jail in the years that followed like fitness was my main like coping mechanism. So whenever I was stressed or anxious, I would go for a run and go to the gym, whatever it was. But then that became I don't want to say I didn't ever became addicted to exercise, but it became unhealthy because I started to base myself worth on what I looked like or my level of fitness. Like I started to base my entire identity on that. And so when I found myself unhappy in life at times or I found myself still kind of miserable or dealing with a lot of the resentment for my childhood, I would just get leaner. Like all right, well, I'm 7% body fat. Let's get to 6. I'll be happy. Let's get to 5. Let's do a faster 5K or whatever. That led to a really dark place in my life. And I don't want to go down that rabbit hole because that's a whole separate conversation. But what I'm saying by this is that that forced me to expand my palate when it came to how I'd personally dealt with adversity. And obviously I think fitness is a great tool and it is always going to be a staple in my life. But it also taught me the value of therapy. It taught me the value of spirituality and believing in God. It taught me the value of like having a great support system and talking to my peers. It taught me the value of meditation, even though I'm still not the best at it. And so it allowed me to expand my role of dex of different forms of adversity. And one of the things that I've really learned, just from the podcast, but I guess as I've talked to all these experts and stuff in general, is that sometimes the best way to deal with adversity is to do nothing. It's just to sit through it. Because like I said, I was always the guy that wanted to get through pain. Get rid of pain as fast as possible. I would even do that with fitness, like I said, when I would get stressed or anxious or whatever, I would just go, "Want to run away, not run away, but run." But then it was like I was kind of doing the same thing I was doing with drugs just in a healthier way, obviously. And so one of the biggest things that I've had to learn is sometimes when I'm going through hard times, just to sit and be like, "All right, why is this hard for me? What's going on? What can I do about it? What am I learning from this? Just being able to sit through the uncomfortable nature of adversity." That's been one thing. I think the other thing too is in life in general when you find something that works for you, you get super excited about it and you feel that that's the only way. And so I was like this hardcore advocate for fitness, fitness, fitness, fitness, fitness for everything. And like I said, fitness is very important, but I learn especially through the podcast that there's different forms of coping strategies that work for different people. Sometimes slowing it down with your fitness can be one of the best things possible. I mean, walking is so effective, I believe, when you're going through adversity because it allows you to change your state. But also when you walk, you can either throw in a podcast, you can throw in a book, you can put on some chill music. You can, I mean, if you're in a more depressive state, you can throw on some motivational stuff, whatever works for you. But you can also, and again, this is one of the things that's been really challenging for me, is just to walk with nothing. Then you're able to, these thoughts that you're kind of hiding from in some way are kind of just rampant now, right? And you have to take some time to kind of process that. And you begin to like sift out what's real and what's not and you can, it can be really instrumental in processing certain emotions. And the last thing I'll say, so there's the first thing is spending more time just doing nothing. Second thing is not saying that everybody needs to do some kind of hard work out when they're going through adversity, but and sometimes it's even best to slow it down. And the third thing is that really understanding, and this is the most important part, understanding that the situation is tough. Like I said at the beginning, but also doing your absolute best to somehow as hard as it is during hard times develop this mindset or attitude, where you understand and believe that even though the situation is hard during this time when you come out of on the other side of it, assuming you do the right thing, I guess you should say, you're going to develop an immense amount of strength and courage and wisdom through that situation. I think when people can somehow have that in the back of their mind, it keeps their eyes moving forward to know that something's going to come from this. It's like having faith, trusting that you will persevere through something difficult. We're often our biggest barriers, you know, ourselves creating, limiting belief. So I'm not going to get through this. So we're, oh, it's going to be so difficult. We kind of shy away from fear. How can we learn to embrace it rather and learn how to move through it? And I love the practices that you listed out. And to go back to what you mentioned about like this challenging relationship that you eventually did develop to exercise and fitness, it's something that I think I also kind of resonate with because when I started every day in Dorfens, this was when I was in high school and I was on a crew team. And we all know the legally blonde quote exercise brings you in Dorfens and Dorfens make you happy and there's so much research out there that really emphasize how fitness and working out releases these feel good chemicals in your body and it's good for you. And we can all agree on this like you also said because fitness was like foundational to your transformation. But something I experienced was kind of a burnout in exercise and I was starting to feel as if the only thing that I could get my endorphins from was from crew. And then when I decided to not row in college, it was this little identity crisis where I was like, well, I'm not rowing. And now I just don't know how to be healthy. How do I exercise to stay in shape? My whole mindset and mentality was shifting. I didn't really know how to proceed in a way that was healthy for me. And so part of the mission behind the podcast when I just started when I decided to transform this blog in 2013 into 2020 when I launched the podcast more into this platform, I started to realize that there are other things in life that are equally as valuable that will bring you that sense of joy. That is healthy for you. And I think it really mirrors exactly what you just said. There's meditation even learning to slow down, walking when times are tough. There's other ways where you can be more gentle with yourself or you can still get that kind of benefit. Have you experienced something similar in your own life just recognizing that there's other ways to feel a sense of happiness and contentment in life rather than maybe what you once previously thought was the only thing was going to work for you. Yeah, and it took a lot of work and it took a lot of falling flat on my face to understand that because again as a kid, being that I was like overweight and I had no luck with girls and I wasn't gifted athleticly. Even though I love sports, I saw my peers who were more athletic than me and I guess had a healthy level of body weight and body composition. They were having luck with women and they seemed happy and I was like, oh, maybe the key is for me just to be ripped and that'll solve all my problems. And while initially coming out of jail, my main focus was just to abstain from using drugs and keep my mental health and check. I quickly discovered once I saw saw some progress and I started to see the way that my body changed that I could just take this to the next level and then it wasn't my genetics weren't as bad as I thought and I could continue to exercise and try to get to this way of being healthy and fit and ripped and what I found was once I got there I still was having a lot of the same problems as I did as a kid and so I was like, dang, like this is awful because I felt like I felt like I lied to myself and I spent so much time pursuing this thing that didn't give me the thing that I thought it would, gave me a lot of other positive things but what I really wanted was to be happy and after going through a lot of therapy and just a lot of counseling and really doing a lot of inner work on my mindset and the way I thought of myself I realized that if I didn't validate myself internally none of this other stuff wouldn't matter. Money wouldn't matter how I looked and fitness wouldn't matter, like none of that stuff would matter because it was just going to be an unhealthy, more healthy drug for me to say, okay, I can just chase success to fill this internal void and be happy. I can look a certain way to fill an internal void and be happy and none of that wouldn't really matter if I didn't like who I was because I was just never going to get fit enough because it was that became a drug or I was never going to make enough money because that could become a drug or success or whatever. So I had to really work on like how I viewed myself as a person, how I was showing up for other people, what my purpose in life was, how I viewed for goodness, how I viewed gratitude, what I was doing to give back in the world, what my values were, all these things that I had a lot of control over and that had no monetary value in them, no external value, but it was really like who I was as a person and really reshaping my identity as a human being. And so once I was able to really do that and took a lot of work and really started to believe that I was a good person and that I wasn't this piece of crap that I had still kind of believed at that time because of how I behaved in my younger years. Things started to shift and started to change for me and I started to find joy in helping others. I started to find joy in not my profession necessarily in making money but joy in like the purpose of all that and like how I was able to transform a lot of my pain and turn it into something beautiful to help other people. And so hopefully that answers your question to where I started to, I had to like really look for other things that validated who I was as a person instead of using fitness and stuff like that to fill this void that I had been running from my whole life. Exactly. And do you also, I think, alluded to this idea of how our inner narratives shape our reality because when you're feeding yourself these thoughts, I'm not good enough, I'm not worthy of this and that. You're kind of priming yourself to behave in ways that align with how you think about yourself. And then those actions have these consequences because it's very cyclical. And so when you're able to kind of transform that and rather act from a place of more inner love, it's this catalyst or you have this domino effect where more good can arise and you can more effectively transform the pain that you would experience previously in your life into something that is more purposeful, that is in service of others, that is helping other people. And I do think it comes back to you because it does help yourself. It fills up your cup. And so it's really beautiful to hear you describe that and also see it in action with everything that you do, Doug. So it's incredibly inspiring as we kind of wrap up today. We touched a little bit about how you've been able to transform your perspective on happiness and health and well-being throughout the course of your life. But the final question that I want to ask you, Doug, is something that I ask every guest that comes onto the podcast. And my final question to you is what is something that brings you a bit of endorphins every day? Oh, that's a great question. I mean, I think it changes depending on where I'm at. I would say right now, it's really the podcast for me that keeps me excited, keeps me going. Having a podcast, it's easy to fall into the negative endorphin trap with that and looking at numbers, looking at people you want to get on the show and stuff like that. As far as letting that dictate how you feel about success of the pod. But I'm so mission driven and I started the podcast to genuinely help people use adversity to their advantage. So I'm just excited by the growth of the show and how it's continuing to help so many people and that I really find fulfillment, enjoy in that and hearing people like message me and reaching out and saying that they have enjoyed some of the content that I've shared and I'm looking forward to continuing to expand on that and seeing where that leads outside of that. I definitely want to get back in public speaking more because I feel like that's a gift of mine and something that I've loved doing in the past. And I guess just sometimes you get busy with stuff like the podcast and some of the other stuff that I have going on that you lose focus on that. But that really gives me a lot of joy. Specifically when I'm able to like talk to young adults and kids about my story and that's just about my story. But share a lot of the wisdom and insights that I've learned now that I could share that if I was talking to like my 15 year old self or my 16 year old self, what would I say? While a teenager again might not like accept everything that I have to say and be like, you know what? Like that sounds really difficult for me. Maybe it just reaches one person or maybe 10% of what I say resonates and makes sense and that moves them like one step closer to becoming a better version of myself. I mean that when I think about stuff like that, that really brings me a lot of joy, a lot of fulfillment and keeps me going because my metric of I guess fulfillment and success in what I'm doing. I mean, sure, obviously I think making money is important. I think anybody who says it's not as totally lying because we need money to survive and doing stuff like this takes time, right? Obviously that's not a main driver of what I do, but what I pay attention to is feedback from people and not that I care what people think of me. But if I'm helping people and I'm getting messages that my content is really resonating with people, I know I'm on the right track because that's my main goal with all of this, is to really create something that can provide everyday tools, everyday relatable situations to help people become better and use adversity to their advantage. I love that. What a fantastic answer. And I can also resonate with that feeling of joy and fulfillment through speaking with others, through getting to interview really dynamic people like yourself, also as a podcast host. It is definitely something that also brings me a lot of endorphins, but I totally, totally resonate with that point around kind of the negative things that come with doing a podcast. It's so easy to get sucked into the numbers and looking for external things to define that success or that feeling that the podcast is going to take off. And oftentimes looking for that outside of yourself is actually not really productive. Going back to what you're saying, it's about being mission driven. And I really love that because when you can be in service of others, I think that's one of the strongest ways to really feel a sense of happiness, enjoy and love within yourself. So I absolutely loved everything you had to share, Doug. Thank you so much for being a guest on the podcast. Work in my followers, connect with you, tune into your show and follow along all of the incredible content that you share. Well, thanks again for having me. If people want to connect with me, they can just go to my website, dugbobst.com. They can find me on social media. I'm on dugbobst on all platforms. Podcasts is on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, wherever you find your podcasts. And yeah, just a few. End up listening to the podcast or you end up like seeing some of my content on social media and it resonates with you. Just let me know. I love to hear feedback. So much. Thanks for listening to this episode of Everyday Endorphins. If you liked what you heard, make sure to like, rate and review this podcast on whichever platform you prefer. You can also follow along the Everyday Endorphins Instagram account to stay up to date with episodes, future events and all things related to mental health, wellbeing and happiness. And don't forget to keep spreading Endorphins and find things in life that bring you joy every day. Until next time.