one of my goals on this podcast is to try to use these conversations to help normalize the experience of trauma so that people don't feel so alone in their experience. And so that when we encounter someone who has maybe a trauma story, or trauma history or maybe is struggling in that moment, we can hold space for them a little bit and maybe extend a little grace for what they are experiencing. And my guest today is a beautiful example of that and of how you he's using his own experience to help others. Jason Sapp is a retired Army sergeant and Iraq or combat veteran, and now a certified professional life coach and author, Jason guides people to more holistic alternative resources to wellness…

They say that if you're not growing, you may as well be dying. As harsh as that sounds it may be true. Especially when it comes to continuing education in the wellness space. Health, fitness, wellness, nutrition, medicine, mindset; all of those fields are constantly changing. We learn new things every day about the body that we live in and it takes time for that new understanding to filter out into the general population. Fitness and wellness professionals are a big part of how that information gets out. But only if we make an effort to go and collect it, curate it and then translate it to our peeps. And in that process we can influence the health and wellbeing of our people in powerful ways while still staying within our scope of practice. One of the ways we can do that is through continuing education.

in the fitness industry, of course, we want to have a really fantastic depth and breadth of knowledge to present to our students. And in the quest for that, it's often really easy to kind of fall into this trap of just collecting certification after certification without any real plan, or idea about what it is that we really want to get out of those certifications… sometimes what ends up happening is that we keep collecting certification after certification. And we get lots and lots of letters after our name and it can be very confusing to not just our clients but to ourselves about who we are, what it is we do what we want to offer for real and so I wanted to introduce you today to one of my teachers and good friends in the yoga industry. And we're going to discuss curating certifications a little bit more with Cara Uranga of Drishti Yoga teacher training…

We all want to feel safe. But when you come up against some kind of violation, any kind of violation like a hacker stealing your entire Instagram content library for the last three years, that was three years of content that was stolen from me. That is a violation. It's a surface violation. If I pull back a little bit or withdraw from the anger and the irritation, the frustration of dealing with this, I can look at it and say this is really just scratching the surface of who you are. And I truly believe that…

There is NO trick to unlocking resilience. No one skill or tool or practice will guarantee that you will never be overwhelmed by stress or trauma. We can’t trick our body’s survival system. And I don’t think we want to even though people try all the time.

There are 3 things that make something feel stressful or traumatic to your nervous system. And you can apply these to situations, relationships, memories, thoughts or injuries, pretty much any experience you’ve had long or short term, present, past or future. Isolation, uncertainty and lack of control. It could be any one of those things or any combination of them.

The good news is that knowing those three components of stress and trauma, we can customize our own behavior to build the kind of unshakeable resilience that so many people are looking for.

One of the reasons why leadership is so important for them to develop their own resilience is they as a leader probably have more influence on that dynamic between between team members than anybody else. The phrase that I often use is leaders set the tone. So that's in a couple of ways. They set an example. And they set a almost like a status quo of what's kind of the norm. So if you've got a leader who is very stressed, direct directly or indirectly in some of the way that he's going to be affecting the rest of the team.