For Those Who Walk Alone – Unbreakable Motivation From David Goggins
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Maybe I'll read some greeting cards. Next time use Amazon Pharmacy. We deliver. And here's to being anything but average. Amazon Pharmacy. Healthcare just got less painful. Let's say that there's someone listening who resonates with what you're talking about. You know, they've been through trauma. They've been through hard times. But they keep breaking promises to themselves. And they're struggling to get off the couch. And they're having a pity party. How can they stop feeling sorry for themselves? That's a difficult one.

Because you have to want it. You have to want to be better. And it starts off with you have to have pride in yourself. You have to have pride in yourself. You have to have... There's something about you, whether it's your last name, whether it's just the smallest thing. You have to be proud of yourself. If you have no pride in yourself, I can't give it to you. Because you're always going to compromise. You're always going to fold. Always. I'm very proud of myself. That's why when people said...

you know where you can do better than can't hurt me. Roger that, we'll see. It's that pride that wakes you up. Now I'm not talking about bad pride. The attention to detail for the human being I want to do. I call this thing, like I want to be the standard. I want to be that guy. Like every place I went in the military, there was this ethos about how this place is, how we're going to live, how we're going to represent ourselves.

And I walked around and I saw that most people didn't live up to that ethos. Like if you go to whatever, whatever company, they had this mission statement on how we want to run our company. I made one for myself on how I want to be. And that is why if people can make up a mission statement, an ethos in which they want to live by,

And every morning you wake up, you hold yourself accountable to that mission. Not a company, it's your own. Make up your own mission statement. What do you want to be in life? And once you do that, now you can work with somebody to get better. You can work with yourself to get better. But until you know what you want to stand for, you will always just be sitting down. You'll never stand for anything. Although my childhood stuttering was alarming, I wasn't completely undone by trauma.

I was distracted by toxic stress. My pain kept me from living a complete and happy life in grade school, and it continued to haunt me into young adulthood. Yet through it all, I retained enough self-awareness to realize how bad things were and remember each and every corner I cut. Strange as it sounds, I was one of the lucky ones.

For some victims, their trauma is so devastating that they lose all their self-respect and self-awareness. They are torn down to the studs. Foundational aspects of their character pounded to dust. Part of what saved me from sliding all the way to rock bottom was what I saw in my mother. As much as she tried to hide it, she was the portrait of devastation.

which is why I've been able to study the work of the prisoner's mind all my life. She'd been a young woman when she met Trunas. He dazzled her until she was spellbound.

Then, with every slap to the face, every hateful, disrespectful comment, each time he cheated on her, he siphoned more of her life force away until she lost contact with the attractive, intelligent, dignified, strong woman she used to be. It didn't happen overnight. It rarely does. In abusive relationships, it's almost always gradual, which is why it burns so deep

until one day you wake up owned by the person who is destroying you. In nature, destruction always gives way to creation. And my mother didn't sit in her rubble for long once we arrived in Indiana. An urge to build again is in each of us. And she had it too. However, when you are rebuilding the self, it must be done consciously. She'd lost all her confidence and emotional coherence

because she never completely liberated herself from my father. As a result, she didn't know what she was building and the bricks she laid became her prison cell. Subconsciously, she built a tower of mental and emotional isolation. And by the time I was eight years old, she was an empty shell. She hustled and strived, but very little registered with her emotionally.

We live parallel lives. I couldn't even reach her. The irony is you build those walls to protect yourself. You think they will make you hard and less vulnerable, but they isolate you in solitary confinement with your darkest thoughts and ugliest memories. You convince yourself that somehow you deserve to be there due to the bad life decisions you made.

You believe that you are not worthy of more or something better and that the damage can't be undone. You are filled with endless shame. When you look in the mirror, you don't see yourself for who you are. And what keeps you locked up in your prison is that false narrative that you continually feed yourself and the false reflection you can't escape because it is part of you. By the time I was in high school,

My mom was an independent, successful woman who had survived domestic violence and landed a six-figure job at a top-tire liberal arts university. Those were the straight facts. Everyone around us saw the same thing, but in the mirror, she saw a worthless and undeserving person. While working as a college dean during my junior year of high school, she volunteered as a teacher in a prison.

It wasn't enough for her to be in her own mental prison. She wanted to experience a real one. Especially if it meant she'd have less time to sit with herself and consider her life in any meaningful way. After just a few weeks of work at the penitentiary, her daily routine, which had been damn near sacred since we arrived in Indiana, was all over the place and I sensed something was off. How could I not? With the phone ringing every 15 minutes,

Weeks before I was to leave for Air Force boot camp, she finally explained what the hell was going on. She was engaged to a man who'd been in a maximum sorority prison for the last 10 years. It took more than a few minutes for that statement to register before I asked, "What was he in prison for?" She didn't answer right away. She had to collect her thoughts because there is no easy way of telling your son that your future husband is in prison for murdering a woman over drugs.

He didn't shoot her. This wasn't an attempted robbery gone wrong. This man straight up choked the life out of a woman over drugs. She went on to say that he was due to be released from prison the week after I left for boot camp and would be moving into our house. It is truly amazing what the mind can do when you fail to rebuild yourself consciously. My dad was a gangster and a crook. Her previous fiance had been murdered in his own garage.

and for an encore, she would marry a convicted murderer less than a week after his release from prison. My mom was looking for someone she could save because she did not have the strength to save herself, but the marriage did not go well. They would divorce within two years. He would relapse and eventually die of an overdose many years later. To put it into plain text,

When your self-worth goes away and you don't deal with or accept your demons, they will continue to own you and you will become a bottom feeder. I'm aware that most of the advice I give and stories I tell are built to help you push through impossible situations.

However, sometimes what you need is a hard stop. If you ever find yourself in an abusive scenario like my mother's or any sort of battle where you are losing your sense of self and verging on erasure, your best hope is to arrest the slide before you hit rock bottom. Hard stops allow military units and individual soldiers to reorg.

That includes reloading your empty magazines, taking inventory of your ammunition, and rearranging your gear so you have access to loaded weapons and anything else you may need in the hours ahead. You also must take a hard look at your battle plan and get a clear sense of what it is you're facing and where it will lead. I know firsthand how torturous it is to be continually stalked by a predator.

You lose all sense of normalcy. Reality becomes distorted. But I also know that moments of clarity do exist. My mom should have re-orged after trying to smack her in the face the first time, or the 12th time, or even the 50th time. While I know this is hard to do, it is something that we must do for ourselves. It is non-negotiable.

If she had, she might have noticed she was on a slippery slope that would lead to her utter destruction.

She may have seen that it was not normal or tolerable to watch her kids work all night skates day after day and then get beaten at home. In a toxic situation, you cannot keep moving blindly forward, hoping it will end. It won't, but you might. When you arrest the slide, you will be damaged but not completely broken. Your wound will likely become a distraction, but with intention and effort,

you can heal and take control of your life. When you come to at rock bottom, that's a different situation. And it won't be a clean or easy fix. When inmates are released, they generally aren't rehabilitated in a sustainable way. Most leave prison messed up and often need more help if they are to piece their lives back together. You'll need help too.

You'll need to find people who have survived or at least relate to what you've been through and can help you heal. Of course, it takes self-esteem and self-awareness to seek help and share your brutal story. And when you are confined by the walls you built,

Awareness and confidence are non-existent. At that point, your only choice is to get angry. We are too often told that anger is an unhealthy emotion. But when someone or something has stolen your soul and destroyed your life, anger is a natural response. I am not talking about irrational rage, which can be disastrous and lead you down an even darker hole.

I am talking about controlled anger, which is a natural source of energy that can wake you up and help you realize that what you went through wasn't right. I have cracked open anger several times. It has warmed me when I was freezing. It has turned my fear into bravery and it has given me fight when I had none. And it can do the same for you.

Anger will snap you out of the spell you're in until you are no longer willing to remain confined in your mental prison. You'll be scratching and clawing at the walls.

looking for cracks where the light leaks in. Your fingernails will be broken, the tips of your fingers bloody and raw, and you will continue to fight to expand those cracks because your anger will be purifying and the human mind loves progress. Keep at it and eventually those walls will tumble until you are free.

standing in a debris field one more time with your eyes wide open. That'll work because destruction always breeds creation. Have the courage and mental endurance to do whatever it takes to start knocking down those walls. You are the warden of your life. Don't forget you hold the keys.

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