A Human Story Of Building

Alexandria 0:00

The street light above you, the road underneath you, the building you're sitting in, the phone in your hand, the computer you're watching on. Every single one of those things began as an idea in a human mind. And then someone had to do the hard work of making it real. Before electricity, humans used fire. Before roads, humans carved paths through wilderness. Before space shuttles, humans looked out the sky and refused to believe it was the ceiling. We sent human beings to the moon, not robots, but people. People with fear and doubt and heartbeats who had to train their bodies and minds to do something no human had ever done before. And this isn't an American story. This is a human story. Every civilization on this earth has survived things that should have ended them, built things that shouldn't have been possible, pushed through what everyone else said was the limit. And if another human being did it, built it, survived it, thought of it, created it, then the capacity for it lives in you too. That's not motivation, that's biology. Welcome to Renovating the Soul. I'm your host, Alexandria Robinson, and this is a podcast about the real unglamorous work of becoming. The work that actually requires something from you. Hard questions, honest answers, and the willingness to look at the foundation you were handed and decide what you want to build on it. That's what we do here. So wherever you're coming from today, I'm glad you're in it with me. Let's get into today's conversation. Welcome to another episode of Renovating the Soul. I am your host, Alexandria Robinson, and I am so glad that you could be with me today. If you've been here, if you've maybe even listened to one episode of the podcast, you might have heard me say something about hard work. It is one of my mantras, one of my tropes, one of the things that I would shout from the rooftops. And while I've hinted at it in multiple episodes, I haven't had a dedicated episode to that idea. And that's what this episode is today. Pumped for y'all to hear this, pumped to have this conversation with y'all. So let's

Hard Versus Impossible Versus Uncomfortable

Alexandria 2:19

get into it. We're gonna open up the episode defining our terms as we like to do here on Renovating the Soul. We're doing this so that we can all be on the same page with what I'm meaning when I use the word hard or what I mean by other terms that I may use throughout the episodes. The definition of hard is requiring a great deal of endurance or effort or done with a great deal of force or strength. But here's what's happened sometimes. Something that I see we've done. We've confused hard with impossible. We've treated difficult as a signal to stop rather than a signal that something is being built. The definition of impossible is felt to be incapable of being done, attained, or fulfilled. And I I love words so much because the word felt is so specific. It's felt to be incapable, but that doesn't mean that it is, right? Sometimes when you feel like something is happening doesn't mean that that's true, but that's what impossible does. You're incapable or something's incapable of being done, attained, or fulfilled. And more importantly, there is a distinction or a difference between hard and uncomfortable. Uncomfortable is causing discomfort or annoyance. When you see that person in the room that you haven't talked to in a long time, right? Or you're uncomfortable if something is upsetting your stomach and makes you feel uneasy and it makes you wiggle sometime or squirm or it makes your heart beat a little faster. But there's a difference between hard that we just talked about, which is working, enduring. And if you just think about it, right, a rock is hard. You're if you're doing this to the rock, it's not gonna smash, right? Now something may eventually be able to smash it, but it's not gonna smash without some type of force, some type of endurance being done. And that's different than just being uncomfortable or being annoyed or being uneasy. So sometimes, and everything is not everyone, right? So hear me gently with what I'm about to say is that there is a difference between hard versus uncomfortable. But that doesn't mean that the things I'm about to list are not hard for someone. But I'm just gonna give some examples of what it would look like to distinguish distinguish hard from other things. So waking up early is not hard, it's inconvenient. Having that conversation is not hard, it's uncomfortable. Finishing what you started when you don't feel like it is not hard, it requires discipline. Again, hard means requiring endurance and effort. It's not just resistance to something you'd rather avoid. And hard work doesn't have to be dramatic to count, right? It's the book you decided to read, the class you took to go further, the decision to move to a new city, not knowing what it would unlock. Simple decisions that don't feel significant in the moment are still decisions to move forward rather than stay still and they accumulate. That's how our lives get built.

Your Body Was Built To Adapt

Alexandria 5:17

Our bodies were literally designed for this. So let's I just love this so much. And we talked about in episode 13, the Broken Souls, Broken Bodies episode. And that episode it showed us that our bodies respond to what we carry emotionally and spiritually. But here's the other side of that truth is that those same bodies were built for extraordinary endurance. Your body adapts under pressure, muscles tear and they rebuild stronger. Bones that fracture and heal, they come back denser. Your immune system develops memory, lungs expand with training, the brain rewires itself through repeated effort. This is neuroplasticity. Your nervous system was designed to handle acute stress. And this is something that we talked about in functional health, in the functional health episode, um, is how our body responds to certain things. So our bodies can handle acute stress to flood our bodies with resources when we need them most and to pull back when the threat has when the threat has passed. But the problem is chronic stress, not challenge. There are so many natural things that are operating within our body that we need. Our emotions are signals, stress is a signal, anxiety, everything that is happening with our body can give us the signs and the endurance that we need if we're paying attention. So during pregnancy, the human body creates an entirely new organ from scratch, which is called the placenta, specifically to sustain another human life. It does not exist before conception, and the body builds it in weeks. The cervix, which is normally less than half an inch open, dilates to 10 full centimeters during labor. The pelvis shifts and expands. Hormones flood the body to allow ligaments to loosen so bones can move. For my women and my friends that have had a C-section, this is a major abdominal surgery. Surgeons cut through seven layers of tissue. Women recover from this while also caring for the newborn. And then here's what happens after our bodies, women's bodies, they produce customized nutrition. It shifts hormone levels daily and is biologically wired to function on disrupted sleep for months, even though we're exhausted and we don't want to hear that. But our bodies were made for this. Now, here's something that I want us to sit with. Most animals are born ready to walk, run, or swim within minutes or even hours. A horse stands within the hour, a wildebeest runs with the herd on day one, right? But human babies are born entirely dependent, unable to feed themselves, regulate their temperature, or even hold their own heads up. Why? Because the human brain is so large and complex that it cannot fully develop inside the womb. We are born early by nature's design, or say early by nature's design, so that the most sophisticated brain on the planet can keep growing outside the body in relationship with other humans. All of this, every bit of it, happens inside an ordinary human body, not a superhero, not a special case, but a regular person. And in this episode, I'm gonna be highlighting different people that I'm inspired by, stories that I've heard, but I want to highlight these people so that you and I can see cases of this beauty of hard work and defeating the odds and

Proof In History And Wilma Rudolph

Alexandria 8:47

endurance. So our first is gonna be Wilma Rudolph. Wilma was born prematurely and diagnosed with polio as a child. Doctors said she would never walk normally. She wore a metal brace on her left leg until age 12. And her mother would take her, they said that they would ride the train and they would take her to Maharry in uh Tennessee to get her uh physically checked. They would give her massages at home, and through years of relentless physical work, she not only walked without the brace, but became the first American woman to win three gold medals in a single Olympics in 1960. Wilma is just one case, but humans have always done amazing things. I mentioned some of these in the opening, but before the light switch, there was fire. Someone had to figure out how to create controlled flame, how to contain it, and how to use it for warmth, light, and cooking. Can you imagine the observation, the failure, the iteration that was required to do that? It was hard work. Before the road, there was wilderness. Before the bridge, there was a river that couldn't be crossed. Before the building, there was open ground. All of it required human hands, human minds, human endurance. I stop and I look at the stoplight. In Portland, they call it Bridge City. And the bridges are so amazingly designed. Like when you drive over them, you got you can't just help but stop and look up and wonder the ingenuity that went into it, the design, the intentionality, making sure that it was safe, you know, which I'm sure is like top of the list. But then to just you see the suspensions, you you see the material, like this is all done by humans. Then if you think, you know, globally, right? Because it's not just about being here in Portland or America, like I said, this is a human history. This is civilization after civilization. The pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China, the aqueducts of Rome, the underground railways of London, every single one of these was built by human beings doing things that they had never done before. And the moon. I mean, how amazing is that that in 1969 humans left this planet and landed on another celestial body. They trained their bodies to withstand conditions they had never experienced. They built technology that had never existed. They did it because someone decided this hard thing, this amazing thing, it's worth doing. And again, this isn't about being American or being exceptional. It's about being human. Every culture on this earth has a history of endurance, creativity, and survival that should make you stand up straighter and make you hold your head higher and be proud that you are a human. And if you ever feel like something is too hard for you specifically, I want you to look up. Seriously, I do it all the time. Look at the streetlight, look at the road, look at the building you work in, look at the house you live in, look at the street your children play in, look at the airplane. Oh my gosh. And remember that a human being, someone just like you, with doubts, with fears, with ideas, with dreams, with a heartbeat just like yours, they made that. And I think that sometimes our resistance to hard work or to working hard or however you want to say it comes from two lies that we've either been sold or told, or somehow we convinced ourselves

The Two Lies That Shrink You

Alexandria 12:13

of. And the first one is about direction that if something is meant for you, it will feel natural. That your purpose is a specific destination assigned to you before you were born, and your job is to find it. So what happens is you wait, you chase alignment, you look for signs or messages, or you're a quote girly like me. And meanwhile, nothing gets built. But purpose isn't found before the work, it's revealed through it. Ooh, that's a hard lesson that I had to learn. And I wish someone had told me that years ago, that you start where you're planted, you move, you expose yourself to new ideas, new places, and new things that you didn't know you could do, even if you haven't figured out that you could do it yet. You just try and things follow. The feeling of passion almost always comes after the hard work, not before it. I spent so many years chasing purpose, purposely royal as a brand that I had, still a blog that I have up. I spent so many years with this idea saying, I gotta find my purpose, I gotta find my purpose, I gotta find my purpose. That what it actually started to do was keep me from doing things. It kept me from trying, it kept me journaling and more so sitting around waiting for it to be revealed than I did just going to do something, just figuring it out, or even just choosing, or even just choosing what I wanted it to, what and what I wanted to do. The second uh lie that we've been told is about capacity, that the people who have built remarkable things were just gifted. They were just born with it. And if you weren't born with it, then the ceiling is lower for you. But most of the people we call geniuses weren't born exceptional. They simply worked harder, longer, and more consistently than other people around them. Their drive was different, maybe because their beliefs was different, but they weren't necessarily born any different than you or I. Heartbeat, lungs, even people who were born without limbs or born with deficiencies, they still find a way to not let anything hold them back. So it's not about being born equally, whether it's your physical body or whether it's your upbringing. It's just about what are you willing to do with what you have. Einstein reportedly said that he wasn't more intelligent than others. He simply stayed with problems longer. We like to call people natural-born geniuses and geniuses and all of these things, but then we don't realize that that puts a limit and almost becomes an excuse for us not to go after something because I wasn't born with it. But I've already listed that you're a human. So if you're here, you can do amazing things too. So the real question isn't whether you're called or whether you're gifted, it's whether you're willing to move before you feel ready and to work when nobody's watching without recognition.

Sarah Blakely And Starting Small

Alexandria 15:03

One of my favorite stories that I just would say she inspires me the most is Sarah Blakely. Love that girl so much. She went from selling fax machines door to door in the Florida heat uh to cutting up her the feet off of her pantyholes one day, and then realizing that nobody had solved the problem that she was facing. She's like, nobody's doing this. Like I want the pantyholes, but I don't need them to go all the way down. And she realized as as a lot of inventions happened, go looking for it. She didn't find it, so she solved it herself. With $5,000 in her savings, no fashion experience and no connections. She wrote her own patent. She drove to Meals to find someone willing to make a prototype and she walked into stores alone. After the product was made, she walked into stores alone. She started quietly. I love when she tells this story, where she would go in the store and she would move her products closer to the register. You know, secretly she's doing this. She's moving her products closer to the register so that um people would be aware because they were putting her product behind other popular brands. And so she's saying, no one's going to be able to see it if you guys don't put it where, you know, someone can see it. And because she was a new brand, she's like, I gotta get out there. But that drive and determination and the belief that she had and what she did and the hard work that she put into doing it caused her to go into those stores and start moving stuff around. And then when she was in the stores, she would talk to women about the product without ever revealing it was hers. And that was just a strategy she used, but I love when she tells that story. And now Spanks has become this billion-dollar company without spending a single dollar on advertising. Now that may have changed, but you know, at one point that was the case. I love stories like Sarah's and Wilma's and other stories. I love hearing people's stories because it's such a good reminder, not just of what someone else was able to do, but what we're able to do if we use what we have and if we just start where we are.

Excuses That Keep You Stuck

Alexandria 17:06

I've already kind of touched on, you know, two of the lies that we can get caught up in, but I I want us to also look at some of the defenses that we use because there are excuses that sound reasonable, but keep us in the same stagnant place. One of them is alignment. This doesn't align with me anymore. Alignment specifically has become one of the cleanest ways to quit mid-hard, right? You just it starts to get hard, doesn't align with me anymore. You ever heard someone quit a job and say, Why'd you quit? Oh, it wasn't aligning with me anymore. Why'd you break up and it wasn't aligning me with anymore? Like, okay, okay, right? But it gives us this excuse to quit mid-hard without accountability. Quitting because something got hard and calling it misalignment is worth looking at, honestly. The second one is the waiting on God defense. My Lord Jesus, I could do a whole episode on this. Maybe one day I will. I have to pray about it. I have to see. And I say this because I don't mind discernment, I don't mind prayer, I don't mind your faith, but there's a difference between I'm waiting on God, I haven't heard from me yet, and I that means I shouldn't say there's a difference, I should say using God in this way, or waiting on God, or prayer, or whatever it is as an excuse, it blocks you from moving. I hear I hear this all the time. I'm slowing down on this one because I want to be sensitive, but I hear this all the time, and and I've heard it all my life, and I was it. You know, someone brings an opportunity my way. Sometimes I know I don't want to do that. But I gotta wait for God. Gotta hear from God. And I don't know what I'm supposed to be hearing. I don't know what it was. Was he supposed to open the clouds and say, Yes, my child, do it. I don't think that's what he put us here for. I think we're here to figure it out on our own because that's how we learn and grow. If I'm waiting for God to pass out decisions like candy, then I don't need to take any responsibility for it because then what happens is let's say you do something, right? And it doesn't work out. I think the best example I can give y'all is get in a in a relationship with somebody and then it doesn't work out. And what's the one thing that you'll hear someone say, Oh, I didn't wait on the Lord, or, you know, oh, I didn't pray on it, and so I jumped in. No, you made a bad decision, made a bad judgment call. No, you rushed it, right? Like there are other reasons besides it, but when you use God as your defense and both saying, I have to wait on him, you can also flip it and use him or or it, whatever religion it is, as the excuse for why you did do it when really you need to be held accountable for your own actions because that's the only way you're gonna learn and grow. If God is there, God is God. Okay, He's He's done the thing, He, He, He's up there, but you have your own life. You have to learn, you have to grow. It's not His lesson to learn, it's your lesson to learn. So waiting and working are not opposites. I I would I would I would have you sit with this if you feel like this is you, and I would ask you, why can't God meet you in the motion? Why do you have to wait? The next one I see a lot with the new generation, and it's that wealth equals corruption. The belief that anyone with more than you got it through greed or evil is a very convenient story, but it's also a ceiling. It makes ambition morally suspect and hard work pointless. Some people have more because they worked harder and longer or they're started earlier. And this is not to deny that people are handed, uh not handed, but like, yeah, I would say handed, a different blueprint. This is not to say that some people are born with better structure and families and things in place. It's not to say that. But I literally saw a post of someone, it was a motivational post, and it was a beautiful house, gorgeous house. You don't know who owns this house. Nobody knows who owns this house. It's not a famous person's house. It's just a nice big house. And this, the, the uh, I don't remember the exact quote, but essentially what she was trying to say was, you know, you can either play small or you can keep working hard and this be kind of what you have one day. And I loved it because I'm like, yeah, that's a gorgeous house. Even if it's not about the mansion and the cars and the money, you want to be set. I don't want my kids to have to struggle. That's just the reality that I have. I don't want them to have to struggle. I want to be able to provide for them when they're adults. I want to be able to pay their weddings. I want to be debt free myself from these student loans that the government no longer is gonna pay for. Okay. So I want to be in a good place and in a good position. When I looked at the comments, All of the comments, and I kid y'all not that at least the ones at the top were like, yeah, but that person did some shady stuff for that. Yeah, but they lied. Yeah, but they cheated. And I just thought, man, you guys don't realize that when that is your mentality, not only are you discrediting the hard work of other people, that is very real, because again, you don't know these people. You don't know their lives, you don't know what they've done, but then you also, again, give yourself an excuse for why you can't go after things because, oh, I'm not corrupt, I'm not evil, so I can never have that. Who says that that's the prerequisite for wealth? I hope that makes sense. It's a very limiting mindset, right? You don't have to defend every wealthy person, and that's not what this is about. But you have to stop letting that assumption become your excuse because again, it's a ceiling. I would say also on that, that this is that's a great point for you to check your jealousy, check your projection, because most times we want to be like that person or we want what they have, but we don't feel like it can ever happen. And sometimes, yeah, you're not gonna be them, but that doesn't mean you can't do good with what you have. That doesn't mean that you can't grow and flourish and have your own portion. Hope that's landing right. The next one is the comfort trap. Y'all, okay. We're 2026, right? We have remote work, which is unheard of if you're a 90s or before if you grew up like we did, it's a nine to five, you're in the building. But now we have remote work, we have you can get your food delivered. I just think about that and I'm just like, oh my gosh, I get my groceries delivered. When you really think about that, that is just a crazy idea from the way that we grew up. You used to have to go to Hollywood video and Blockbuster to rent a movie, to put in your VHS. And then you had to drive and drop it back off. I mean, it's so crazy how the times have changed, right? But we have delivery food, you know, services, grocery services, move movies, streaming. Who would have thought that streaming would be a thing, you know, and you know, not cable television. I mean, I remember the days when it was cable versus satellite dish, when the dish was all the rave. It's just crazy how much things have changed. But my point in saying this is that we have so many tools, like every tool imaginable, right? We haven't even gotten to AI and robots and all the things that's happening, the cars that drive themselves. I mean, my goodness, right? But we are still blaming others for our lack. People have built civilizations, they've raised families, and they've written masterworks with almost nothing. The abundance that we have is supposed to be feel, but for many of us, it's become a cushion. The much that we have, the abundance that we have, all of these things that we have, I feel like they're holding us back, some of us back, more than it's actually propelling us. I've been seeing this conversation come up a lot even with our social lives, that because we have social media, many of us are not interacting. We don't know how to even interact. I I would say probably not the millennials. I'm gonna stick up for y'all, okay? Y'all don't be mad at me. But I've heard this about the new generation. I've heard from my younger cousins when they go out, they don't even dance at the clubs anymore. I'm like, well, what do y'all do? I guess they just stand there. I don't know what they do, but we used to just dance. There was no pictures, it was no Instagram, it was no TikTok, it was no nothing. And so that's what I mean by, you know, having all of the abundance that we have is amazing. I think it's great. I think we should be moving forward with it, but at the same time, it shouldn't be a crutch or a cushion to keep us from moving forward and still building something on our own because it can be done.

Melody Hobson And Outworking The Room

Alexandria 25:52

Our next spotlight is gonna be Melody Hobson. Melody, ooh, I love her, okay? Because she is she carries herself with a grace that is just unmatched. When you watch her talk, when you watch the way she moves, she's just so elegant, so fluent in the way that she speaks, and just so confident with who she is. It is she is just such a beautiful woman, like when you when you watch her, and you can uh you know put her name into YouTube and and see some of her interviews that she's done recently. But Melody, she grew up in Chicago with a single mother. She uh described getting eviction notices and utility shutoffs. And she has said openly on the interviews that I've seen of her that her drive in finance, that's the field that she works in, came directly from her fear of poverty. She took the thing that scared her most and walked straight into it as her life's work. She got to Princeton on Pell Grants, loans, and financial aid, and then she interned at an investment firm and then she never left. She uh recently, I would say, uh, can't I don't know how many years it's been, so I'll just leave it at recently. She became the co-CEO of Aerial Investments and the first black woman to chair an S P 500 company. And this wasn't because the industry made room for her, because she'll tell those stories when you listen to her. It's not that she didn't have to work through, you know, being a woman in a in a financial field and in a male-dominated field, not at all. But it's because she outworked the room. Her drive, her integrity, her willingness to keep going. Yeah. The fire that she has, she'll tell her tell you herself was lit by that scarcity. And I love her honesty and being honest and saying that the way I grew up is what fuels me. It's what keeps her going. Even now, after all the success she has, it's why she keeps going. And if you want to add this in there, she's married to George Lucas. But she's amazing in and of herself that you don't even have to mention George Lucas to to you know add that on her. No, she has her own resume, but Melody is absolutely amazing, so you should definitely look her

Failure Without Shame And Real Rest

Alexandria 28:03

up. But like Melody and many others, you will get a no. You will fail. You will let yourself or someone else down. And that's not a sign that you were wrong to try. That's just what happens when you're moving, when you're living. I already told y'all that I got rejected over and over by those law schools, and I was almost using it as an excuse of like, well, this is why I don't try, and this is why I don't take risks. But that's not the mindset I should have. It's okay to admit out loud because it's very real for me. But on the other side of coming out of that, I realized, no, I needed this. I needed to see myself to be able to do the hard things. I need to allow myself the room to say it's okay to fail. It's okay to get the nose. It's okay to be rejected. It really is. And that as long as I keep doing something, even if it's just learning the lesson from it, not necessarily applying again, right? But whatever it is, it's just the goal is that I don't stay stagnant, that I don't stay in the same place, right? The goal isn't a life without failure. The goal is a life where failure doesn't stop you. It doesn't stop me, where the no is just information, where the setback is just a Tuesday. What stops most people isn't the hard work itself, it's the shame spiral that follows the setback. You fail and then spend six months in self-punishment instead of six months working. The failure was one moment, but the punishment becomes a season. And two days before I recorded this, I said to myself, and I wrote it in my notes after I said it, but I said to myself, if you punish yourself for where you are, you won't grow. And I said that because I had all these doubts and fears about doing this very podcast. And I was like, I can't do it. I was just letting all this stuff creep in. I'm not getting a lot of traction on social media, like very real things where I'm just like, oh my gosh. And I'm like, Well, I'm I'm looking at this podcast and I'm looking at that for inspiration. But then I'm ended up comparing myself. And I had to stop myself and say, if you do not give yourself grace for where you are, if you don't accept that it's not always gonna come out perfect on the podcast, you're not always gonna love what you said, you're not always gonna sound as polished as you wanted to. If you do not let yourself be that, be where you are, you will not grow. I will keep myself in a bubble and in a box. And I want you all to hear me. This is not an attack on rest. Rest is very real, it's necessary and it's biological, but there is a version of rest culture that has become a way to avoid the hard work that would build you. And we need to be honest about that. If you're always exhausted, always burned out, always needing to break before you've even started, then it's worth asking whether you're genuinely depleted or whether you're avoiding something uncomfortable. Because there is a difference between the rest that restores you and the rest that you use to stay comfortable. One builds you back up and the other keeps you exactly where you are. I also want to say that it's not hard forever. That rest can be the goal, that ease can be the goal. That's the beautiful thing about when you're working hard, when you're working hard, when you're working hard, when you're working hard, it's something that it's not hard all the time. It's just like when you start working out. You start exercising. If you've never exercised before, it's going to hurt. You're gonna strain, you're you know, you're you're gonna be mad, you're gonna be cut cursing the skies. Why am I doing this? Why does this matter? But over time, your body begins to adapt. You begin to adapt, your mentality begins to shift, and it becomes easier to go to the gym. It becomes easier to lift those weights. And then you push yourself and you keep doing something hard. But the beautiful thing that you have to realize is that it does not stay hard forever. And I want to speak directly to whoever has been looking at what they want to do and telling themselves they're not the type of person who can do hard things. Maybe someone told you that growing up. Maybe you've just watched yourself quit enough times that you started to believe it. But I want you to hear this the capacity is in you. Not because of positive thinking, but because of biology, because of history, because of every human being who has ever lived and endured and built something from nothing. You come from that lineage. It's literally in who we are as people. And I've talked a lot about these famous examples in those stories. They do matter, and I love the highlights that I've given you, and I hope you look those people

Hard Work In The People You Know

Alexandria 32:27

up. But I also want to talk about the people in my actual life because sometimes the most powerful proof isn't someone you've never met. It's the person you grew up with or the person sitting across from you at the table or the person you watch struggle and keep going anyway. The first is my grandma. My grandma's almost 92 years old, and she gave birth to 13, 13, no twins, children. I don't, I still, yeah, don't know how she did it. All are alive except for my oldest, my uh for the oldest, my uncle Nate, and she raised them and she helped to raise us grandchildren. There's 40 plus of us first grandchildren, and she's seen us all through her home at one point and watched several of us at the same time and several of them. Um, she was, I believe, like the youngest secretary of her church organization. Before she got married and had kids, she was obese. Like the way that she could organize, the way that she she supported, the way that she's built her administrative details, just how concise she is. And she's lived through history that most people only read about. And she remembers it with clarity. Oh my gosh, that girl. We call her she's a walking history book. That's exactly what we say. And it really humbles all of us. She didn't do hard things once, she did them every single day for nine decades. Next for me would be my mother-in-law, Sherry. I am in awe of her resilience. I met her in 2005 and I watched what she carried and what she pushed through. I've learned her story over the years from, you know, just being together. We just all went on vacation together to San Diego and got to hear more of her story. And it really could be a book or a movie, but I won't tell it for her. She's gonna have to tell you to, you know, one day. But she took her experiences and her pain and everything that she had gone through, and she started working for a shelter to help women and children. And not only did she start working at that shelter, but she worked her way up to management. And it was not just about, you know, hard work, but the hard work transformed her. She's become somebody who I deeply admire, and I just can't wait for the world to hear how much she's really been through. Next is my friend Shawnee. Shawnee is the founder of the In Bloom conference, and she has been building it year by year with intention and heart. I believe five years she's been doing this conference. The challenges come and she keeps going anyway. And that's what it looks like to build something from vision when nobody can see it yet but you. She is so intentional, she's so creative, but her heart is just so for the people, and she knows what she wants. And I love that about Shani. She knows what she wants, and she's gonna get what she wants. And then last would be my little brother Jonathan. One of my little brothers, Jonathan, the one right under me, we're two years apart. My it's different being the older sibling, and I don't know what it's like to be the younger sibling, obviously, but I do know watching my kids that younger siblings have so much. Um there's like sometimes a different expectation that the younger siblings can't be the older sibling, or everyone's shining on the older sibling, and then the younger siblings get overlooked. And I can only imagine what that's felt like, you know, me being the only girl and the oldest, and then him being right behind me. But he went to massage therapy school, and it was random to us all, and there, you know, a lot of there were lots of doubts from others, but he did it and he was really good at it. And now he works at a chiropractic office, but he moved to California and he is working hard to build something while also doing the internal work. And that's what I'm most proud of him for. He's pushing through generational patterns, he's facing the thoughts that come up, and he's learning to choose differently. That combination of external building and internal rebuilding at the time at the same time is one of the hardest things a person can do, and he's doing it. And I can go on and on and on and on with examples, but the point is you don't have to look to history or to Hollywood to find proof that people can do hard things. Look at your people. They're doing it right now. Getting to do hard things means you are alive, you have capacity, and you have something worth building. Hard work is not punishment, it's proof that you are creating something real. And again, it's a blessing. It's a beautiful blessing that we have to be able to work hard. And when I say this is hard work, which is something I say often, I don't say it with resentment. I say it with pride because nothing worth having, no strong foundation, no transformed life, no healed soul was built overnight. You have to see the beauty in the hard work, the blessing of being able to work hard, which is a capacity that we hold not just within our physical bodies, but even within our souls as well. And you are already the proof if you think about it. You have already done hard things, things you didn't know you could do until you were in the middle of them and had to. The fact that you are here, still breathing, still trying, still showing up is evidence that you were built for this. You come from people who survived things that should have ended them. You carry that in your body, in your history, and in your blood. You can either keep telling yourself that life is too hard, or you can prove to yourself that you are harder

Building A Life For The Worst Day

Alexandria 37:32

to break. And our blueprint moment goes back to my experience with the federal government. Because when they build buildings, when the federal government does uh our builds or did our builds, for some of the most critical agencies, FBI, Social Security, they don't design for the best case scenario, they design for the worst. The question isn't whether the building will be comfortable, it's what still stands when something goes wrong. Blast resistant windows, reinforced rooms, bollards to protect the building from um and the people within the building from external damage. Every element is engineered assuming that at some point this building will face something it wasn't supposed to have to survive and it needs to hold anyway. Fire alarms, emergency exits, uh sprinklers, all of it is designed with those things in mind. That's what hard work builds in you. Not comfort, not ease, but load-bearing capacity. The people who have done hard things consistently aren't just more disciplined, they're structurally different. Or as people say, you know, I'm built different, right? When something hits them, more of them stays standing. The walls don't come down because they were built for exactly this. You looked around at the beginning of this, or maybe you thought about it, and I asked you to see what humans built. The street light, the road, the building, the phone in your hand. Every single one of those started as a decision, a decision that the hard thing was worth doing, or at least worth trying, without exactly knowing what was on the other side. Not everyone thought this is gonna, you know, rock in my career, or this is gonna be the thing that gets me there. They just tried, even without knowing what it was going to look

The Hard Thing Is Worth Doing

Alexandria 39:12

like. And now I'm asking you to look at something else. Look at your life, look at what you're carrying, what you're building, and what you're still standing in the middle of. That didn't build itself. You did that, and everything you haven't built yet is waiting on the same thing all of those things waited on. A human with the galls, with the audacity, with the strength, with the courage to say the hard thing is worth doing. I hope y'all enjoyed this episode. Until next time, let's keep doing the work to renovate the soul.