Just Between Coaches – Episode 156
Why Anti-Fragile Coaches Create Lasting Impact (Christian Ray Flores)
Christian Ray Flores: So if you avoid suffering at all costs, you will never be antifragile. If you lean into suffering, you will become a completely different person long term. Now, the problem is that many of us were sheltered from suffering in many, many ways. So we stay either resilient or fragile and we just don’t go there.
Melinda Cohan: Life throws curveballs. The world changes faster than we can predict. And how do we as coaches help our clients not just survive, but thrive in an environment of constant upheaval? Today, we’re diving into grit and anti fragility, or resilience if you will, the traits vital for success in our rapidly evolving world.
I’m Melinda Cohan and you’re listening to Just Between Coaches. I run a business called the Coaches Console and we’re proud to have helped tens of thousands of coaches create profitable and thriving businesses. This is a podcast where we answer burning questions that newer coaches would love to ask a more experienced coach. In this episode, we’ll explore what it means to build grit and how to develop anti fragility, the ability to thrive amid the chaos and uncertainty. And our guest is someone uniquely qualified to discuss this.
Christian Ray Flores is a visionary entrepreneur, philanthropist and high performance coach. His extraordinary journey from a child refugee in Chile to a pop star in Russia and Ukraine, leading philanthropic projects, planting churches and founding entrepreneurial ventures in the US. With his deep understanding of resilience and adaptability, he’s here to share strategies that can help both you and your clients build an unshakeable foundation no matter what the world throws your way. Welcome, Christian.
Christian: Thank you for having me.
Melinda: I am excited to have you on the show. And before we dive into the topic, can you tell our listeners a little bit more about your extraordinary journey?
Christian: The reason why I love speaking about resilience and antifragility is because, you know, I had this sort of very uncommon sense set of negative circumstances that make me like the poster child of what on earth just happened. Right. So I was born in Moscow, Russia. I don’t look Russian because my dad is Chilean. They moved to Chile when I was a baby. We ended up in the midst of a massive military coup. My father was in a concentration camp. They just imprisoned, killed and tortured thousands of people.
And he was lucky enough to get out alive. We were refugees in this facility for a little bit. We’re exiled who went to Germany. We went back to the Soviet Union at the time because my mom was so shell shocked. She just wanted to be home. Right. But you know, it was not a good space. A lot of poverty let’s put it that way, right? And then my father gets this contract to be an expat in Africa, Mozambique right after independence from Portugal. And I grew up there, but there was a civil war going on there, like a year in, you know, so I saw a lot of that and food shortages and, you know, ration cards. And it’s just very, very eclectic sort of existence, but also very exciting at the same time.
And then after my parents divorce, I moved back to Russia, back to the Soviet Union. One bedroom apartment. I slept in the kitchen. All those things shaped me in a variety of ways. And that’s sort of the power of this concept of antifragility, because all of that served me in the long run. I developed an ability to really relate to multiple cultures because of my childhood. I spoke four languages and I was very musical. That’s sort of part of the legacy of all that stuff, right? And I just happened to be in the right place, the right time and do the right thing. And I became one of the top pop stars in Russia for about a decade, helped elect the president.
At the peak of that career, some flat sides caught up with me, and I had a number one hit at the same time as I was clinically depressed. And that’s when I found my first coach, and he was this Canadian missionary who took me under his wing, rounded me up, let’s put it that way. I was extraordinarily good at some areas and really bad in some other areas. And that was sort of my first taste of, oh, one human being can help another and literally redirect the very trajectory of your life. And that was sort of the seed that eventually made me who I am as a coach, among other things.
Melinda: Now you talk about that phrase, antifragility. We’ve had a lot of guests on the show that talk about resilience. Talk to us about the difference and the distinction between those, because I think there’s a powerful distinction there.
Christian: There is, yes.
Melinda: That makes a big difference. Let’s get that out to our listeners as well.
Christian: The term antifragility was coined by Nassim Taleb. He’s an author, financier, et cetera. And, you know, he pointed out something very obvious that I think we miss at a larger scale. Let’s talk about fragility, right? Fragility is things happen to you and you. And you sort of shrink, diminish or decline. The stable middle ground is resilience, right? Is you get hit by things and you still keep going, right? You deal with it. You roll with the punches. You navigate life and maintaining your normal state in the face of adversity.
Antifragility is you grow, improve, not in spite of the circumstances, but because of the circumstances. So the hardship, the obstacles, the unexpected negative surprises are literally making you better and more successful. And that’s antifragility. And the cool thing about it is that it’s accessible to all of us. We actually are born antifragile in so many different ways. We just sort of forget that we are that. Sometimes we just believe narratives that are, you know, negative narratives, and they’re just not true about us. So we don’t deploy our antifragility often enough.
Melinda: It’s the awareness of that distinction. I’m thinking of some of my clients. The way you defined fragility, they’ve been shrinking, playing smaller. Life happens. They almost adopt a victim energy sometimes, if you will. And to leap from fragility to antifragility can seem like a big leap. Do people need to stop at resilience first, build resilience before they can appreciate anti fragility, or is it just an understanding?
Christian: I think it’s really a reframing. That’s what it is. You know, I don’t think it’s a massive leap at all, actually. I think it’s integrating this new reality. You don’t learn antifragility. You are antifragile. You just don’t integrate that into your consciousness.
Melinda: Now, you said we were born with it. How do we forget that? How do we lose sight of that? What are the things that contribute to that? That is helpful to know in the reframing of this.
Christian: I think that’s a mystery. Honestly, to me, a lot of it has to do with how you respond to the environment. And your environment, for example, could be usually formed in early childhood, could be not a very nurturing family. You know, you don’t have a parent or parents who tell you, hey, you can do this, you know, who believe in you, who say, okay, get up, shake it off, let’s move. Maybe you’re in an environment where everybody’s like that, everybody’s a victim. So you go, okay, this is how we roll.
To me, that is probably the source of it. But the cool thing is that all of that can change, right? By getting coaching, understanding where you are, developing practices to rewire your. Your neural pathways, your understanding, and actually experience a different reality. And you can demonstrate antifragility to anybody without them going, it’s easy for you to say you’re that guy or that girl. No, absolutely not. I can demonstrate antifragility to every single person in the audience, like right now. You want to do that?
Melinda: Let’s do it.
Christian: Okay.
Melinda: And actually, what I’d love is take a scenario and demonstrate what resilience is like.
Christian: Sure.
Melinda: And then taking that same scenario, demonstrate antifragility and that reframe.
Christian: Absolutely. The most foundational antifragile being is your physical body. You know, your physical body is antifragile by design. Now, you might not activate that. You stay on the couch, you don’t move, and eat sugars and carbs, and your body gets weaker. And so you start believing you’re weak and you need the sugars and carbs. Every time you go for a run and it doesn’t feel good, and you just stop and you stay weak, stay fragile. Actually, as a matter of fact, with age, you will become more fragile.
Resilience is you are forced to walk, you know, the proverbial grandfather tale of walking three miles to school and back both ways, uphill in the snow. Something happens and you just keep doing it. You get used to it. Resilient. Because, okay, this is my lot. These are the cards that have been dealt. You stay in a stable state. Right. I would argue that even that in the long run, if you look at the at the curve of your life, is a fragile move because things change. Your ability to metabolize changes. Your ability to, you know, your ability to rest and then get back up and do things changes.
The antifragile version is you go to the gym three, four times a week. You eat clean even though you. I mean, I want to respond to stress, for example, by being in a fetal position, binge on Netflix and get a gallon of ice cream. Makes me feel better in the moment. What I can choose to do that is antifragile is to walk two, three miles a day, stay away from sugars and carbs, get more veggies, fruit, healthy proteins, go to the gym, push myself just a little bit beyond what is pleasant. What will my body do? My body will grow muscles become more flexible. My neural pathways will respond better to hardship in the long run and develop a high capability to navigate stress, obstacles, even unjust things. That’s antifragility.
Melinda: Yeah, I love that example. And for the coaches listening in, when working with clients, a simple exercise, when a client brings up a situation, have them take on each of the three perspectives.
Christian: That’s right.
Melinda: Just to help our clients say, okay, situation, XYZ. It can be whatever about relationship or business or family or Health, it doesn’t matter. But whatever the client brings us, we can ask them to say, okay, if you were in a state of fragility, what would that look like? Or in a state of resilience, if antifragility was a reality, what would that look like? So that they can then have mindfulness.
Christian: Exactly.
Melinda: And make conscious choices.
Christian: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. When we start seeing that reality as a possibility, the only way you learn is by doing, you know? And all of us have obstacles. Suffering is a constant in the human experience. So if you avoid suffering at all costs, you will never be antifragile. If you lean into suffering, you will become a completely different person long term. Now, the problem is that many of us were sheltered from suffering in many, many ways. So we stay either resilient or fragile, and we just don’t go there. The thought experiment is, how do you consciously create what I call constructive suffering, A suffering that will build you up, you welcome it, seek it out.
There’s a proportion you can pursue that will do that. There’s a line that you cross beyond which that doesn’t grow you. Right. And I think most people. You know, what I find, as somebody with my colorful backstory, is I try to explain to people what you see me do in spite of the things that I’ve experienced. There’s nothing extraordinary about it. It’s just I was thrown into it and had no choice. I discovered I can deal with a whole lot of instability and suffering just fine. And that developed into extraordinary abilities that are actually not extraordinary. They’re absolutely ordinary. People just don’t experience those.
Melinda: Now, when you say constructive suffering, the other word that came to my mind was intentional.
Christian: Exactly.
Melinda: Now, the other thing that popped up was we gotta be careful with the ego here, because the ego could step in. And now we’re tipping into martyr. And it’s like, look at me and look what I’m doing. And that’s not what we’re talking about.
Christian: No, it’s not.
Melinda: But we’re talking about that level of consciousness and intention having that constructive suffering so that we’re using it and leveraging the situation to grow and evolve and better ourselves.
Christian: That’s right. I mean, anything can be turned into something that doesn’t help you.
Melinda: Yeah. I want to bring that to our attention so we don’t tip the scales too much. You mentioned coaching is one way somebody can navigate and reframe this. How is identifying your why? Right. It’s an exercise I have with new business owners. Like their why is their anchor or beacon.
Christian: Ah, I like that.
Melinda: And so how can their why help them in this area of antifragility?
Christian: Let me make sure I understand the question. You mean why as someone pursuing coaching specifically, or just entrepreneurial?
Melinda: It could be anything. It could be an entrepreneur. Why are they pursuing their own business? It could be in a relationship. What’s your why with the relationship? It could be a career or your health. But the big why behind whatever it is that a client is pursuing.
Christian: Okay, that makes sense. Let me just use one thing so that I can describe it in more detail. Let’s say entrepreneurship is sort of the context here, right? And which is kind of cool because it might serve even some of the coaches listening right now, right. Because that’s an entrepreneurial journey as well. You want to help people, what do you do? Am I qualified? Am I going to mess people up? Are people going to listen to me? All of those things that are very typical when you start something new.
I would say this, having a daily contemplative practice that allows you to think of long term arches and evaluate them is huge. The reason for that is we are as human beings optimized for survival, not for thriving. Right. You know, you get up in the morning, there’s always more things to do than you can do. The urgent always displaces the important. The question you ask is related to the important. An ongoing awareness of the important, of long term nuances and I would say whispers of the soul, deep desires, not survival things. It could be a coach or entrepreneur, anybody. You wake up and the first thing you do is not contemplate, not make sense of. That’s it, you’re done.
The urgent will kick in and that’s it. You’re just, you know, hamster on a hamster wheel. So developing that practice is huge. I can give you pearls of wisdom that might be helpful, but if you don’t have that practice, it’s completely useless. If you can maybe believe for a moment, right, that you’re here for a higher reason. You have an assignment. I’m going into a spiritual realm here, right. So bear with me. You have an assignment. And that assignment’s actually, it’s not necessarily this set in stone, like you need to be a fireman assignment, but it’s who you will be uniquely in every season of your life because there’s more than one.
So you can be very happy to be a fireman today and be completely unhappy in five years doing the same exact thing. And you’re not fulfilled anymore. Why? The world changes. You change. Having A coach, a community that can speak into your reality, that know you well, know the ins and outs of you. That is sort of how you do it. Okay, now to the practical. The practical is this. Go back into your childhood, early youth, and try to really gauge what made you feel fully alive. And it’s never this one thing, like math makes me feel fully alive. Therefore, I will be a statistician, for example. There’s so much more nuance, and that’s why nuance is everything, right? For me, I changed four countries by age seven, and I speak four languages.
At first, it’s a massive shrinking because you’re, like, just trying to make sense of the world. Cultures, languages, people, you know, how am I supposed to fit into this thing, right? And what happens next is you go because you want to fit in, you want to read people, understand you, understand what they mean. Body language, tonality, tradition, family, expectations, all of that. So for me, eventually, I can see it now so clearly that I have a supernatural sense of culture and what makes a human being tick. And I love it. You know, I just love it. You know, early on, I was not even officially a coach, but people will come to me, sort of find me in different spaces, and they like, hey, can I pick your brain? Can you help me?
And these were people like Olympic athletes and fashion designers and artists, entrepreneurs, and I would engage with them. There was no official role, right? And what it is, it’s that you were born for this kind of thread. But if you’re sort of running and gunning and living somebody else’s story, you will never recognize that you have a supernatural ability that was gifted to you in your early childhood and youth that you can nurture, develop. Obviously, you’ll have some things that you need to learn, always, right, to make it something that is significant for other people.
I’ll give you another example. It’s music. Never went to school. I had a tone, like I was 5, and I would sing around the house, and my parents would have visitors over, right? And they’re like, Christian, sing us a song. You know, like. And I would literally stand on a chair or something like that. They tell me, I don’t even remember some of this stuff, right? So you can see those little glimpses, right, of something that was gifted. And then we were in Mozambique and we had this little community of Chilean exiles there, like 150 families. They’re all expats, professionals running things, right? Hospitals, universities, like, they were engineers. There’s all professionals. But they’re all without a country. But they Were transplanted to Africa. That’s a weird situation.
So they form a little choir, children’s choir. And we had this sort of musical director, quote unquote. This is all volunteer stuff, like completely grassroots. And her name was Angelica and we called her Tiakeca. Right. And she was this guitar playing, sort of folksy person. And she would teach us all these songs from Colombia and Brazil, Argentina and Chile and we would sing. And whenever we’d have rehearsals, I felt like the world stopped and I was in this state of flow. I don’t know what that means, but I know how I feel, you know? And then there’s a massive pause. We book back to Russia. It’s like a completely new beginning. And, you know, I don’t even think about a music career. But I start doing breakdancing and it’s like a subculture.
And for some reason I get super into it. Like three, four hours a day into it, get really good. And then something completely different comes up. You know, a friend of mine goes, you know, you should be an entertainer. And I’m getting a master’s in Economics at the time. All of my friends are going into finance, banking and trade and whatever. Right. And the irrational thing to do is go into banking with this kind of background of mine or UN or something like that. But what makes me feel fully alive is dancing and singing. The odds of that succeeding are close to zero. Within a year, I have three record contracts, a bidding war to get me signed.
Within two years, I playing from small clubs to sports arenas. Within four years, I’m helping a president get elected because they like my song and use it as a, you know, as an anthem for election campaign. Does that make sense? These are sort of just illustrations, but you can apply that to your life, anybody else’s life.
Melinda: Yeah. And it’s part of finding that through line. Our big why helps us to keep that top of mind.
Christian: Yeah, yeah.
Melinda: So that we’re being intentional about this. And that’s what really. That’s a thing that I keep hearing over and over, is being intentional about this, not just going through life.
Christian: That’s right.
Melinda: I love what you said earlier about resilience. These are cards I’ve been dealt, so let me do the best I can with it. But it’s like finding that through line. Finding that why? And growing with it. Growing because of it.
Christian: Exactly. Yeah.
Melinda: Yeah.
Christian: You know, social instability seems to follow me. Right. So this guy was asking me all these questions and then he. He paused because he wanted to know more and more details. So I Gave him details about bombings and, you know, things like that, you know, and. And he goes, how are you not bitter? And that came out of him. And it was podcast interview, just like this one. And it was a really good question. The answer is, I’m grateful.
Melinda: Yeah. Well, that was. The word I just wrote down, was gratitude. And I was going to ask you, what is the role of gratitude in this journey and experience? Talk more about that.
Christian: Well, I think if you develop a practice where you make sense of things and you really must do it every day, then you have this muscle almost of making sense of things, connecting dots, recognizing patterns. Right. Once you do that, the worst things that happen to you, you can connect them to something extraordinary in you today. I mean, there’s been studies about this. I forget the name of the gentleman, which is a bummer, because I would love to give you his book. He used to be one of the top guys at Google.
He’s an Egyptian guy, and I forget his name. But he did this exercise where he would basically help people process their biggest, deepest trauma. And I would say, okay, write out all of the stuff that happened. And then he sort of walked them through an exercise where they would really recount it, really feel it, and then help him start connecting what came out of it. And then at the end of the exercise, he would say, okay, knowing now that you’ve made these connections, what would you change? The vast majority, I want to say 95%, maybe more, would say, I would change nothing. Yeah, right.
Melinda: Yeah. I went through this exercise yesterday with a situation. The process was finding at least five things you’re grateful for, for situation, XYZ, whatever it is. And usually the first two or three are pretty quick, but it’s those last ones that really are transformative.
Christian: Yeah.
Melinda: And then identifying, you know, a list of 10 things, lessons learned because you had this experience and you had this situation that you encountered. And again, those first two or three are quick, but the latter ones get to the root of it. And then the last question is always, if you had to do it again, what would you do differently? Almost inevitably, everybody’s like, no.
Christian: Exactly.
Melinda: And I’ve done that with some of the deepest traumas. And I use gratitude to help not to not feel the devastation or those darker, heavier emotions. But I use gratitude to feel it fully so I can process it. Body, mind, spirit, emotion, intellect.
Christian: And then on a micro level, you can do the same thing. So I do it every. Every morning. I journal, and I have a gratitude list every morning. And it’s almost actually frustrating. In the sense that I’ve done this for so long and I’m a grateful guy, just in general, I go, shouldn’t that be sort of hardwired already? And it’s not. Because the brain, the different part of you, engages with the idea if you write it down and you sit down and think about it, because it goes from just a general, vague emotion to specific, that has some structure to it. So, I mean, it’s really amazing.
Almost every morning I’ll go, okay, what am I grateful for? And to bullet points. A phrase, a sentence, a paragraph, whatever. I think of, let’s say, five things, and I mean specific things in the last maybe 48 hours, 72 hours in my mind, that’s what I have. I’m like, oh, I know what it is. And because I’m writing it, the list is almost always more than double. Almost always. And then you sit there and then an emotion emerges that is more than double. Now you can live with that emotion for the day, right?
Melinda: Yeah.
Christian: So these are practices that are just extraordinary. So simple. Anybody can do it.
Melinda: And that’s where, you know, when our clients, when they’re experiencing setbacks, obstacles, stumbling blocks, things that are perceived to be in our way, so often many approach, like push through, force through. But with some practices we’re talking about, it’s like, wait, let me just kind of go around this, glean from it, move forward because of it, not trying to ignore it or get rid of it. The more that we do that push through approach, that’s where that resilience is. You’re just trying to make do with what is and get by with what is.
And that’s where burnout comes in. That’s where resentment starts to show up. But this approach, this antifragility steeped in gratitude, allows us to glean from every situation. It doesn’t have to be dark emotions. I do the same process with awesome experiences that can be done both ways. Do you find that true with the clients you work with as well?
Christian: I think so, absolutely. I would even add this. People that are more advanced and have been on the journey for decades. Right. You can develop gratitude in advance in the midst of the sky is falling kind of thing. Because, you know, already, you’ve experienced that cycle of evaluating, reframing, taking something out of it so many times that even though in the moment part of you is going, this is horrible, you know, the primal part of you, you can still get yourself onto a place of peace, clarity, and anticipated gratitude, regardless of the outcome.
Melinda: Yeah.
Christian: That is the ultimate Level of maturity. I would say I was two or three minutes late today to log into this interview because I was speaking to a friend who called me because he’s about to enter a meeting that has $250 million on the table that can go one way or another. And our conversation was that of, we wish for the best, but we’re grateful for the outcome and for the benefit that comes out of either scenario. That’s our conversation, right?
Melinda: Yeah.
Christian: So he hangs up. And I bet you that his demeanor, his tone, his energy during the call is going to be very different, actually give them a better chance of a better outcome.
Melinda: And that’s why I like this topic. Because as coaches, for all the coaches that are listening in, it’s true for any of the entrepreneurs that are listening in, but predominantly, we have a lot of coaches as our listeners. And, you know, we’re tasked with holding the space, creating the container for our clients to navigate their life situations to reach a certain outcome. And so as we practice this ourself and adopt antifragility, it helps us to even be a better coach and create that container. Like you said, the demeanor that we have is very different than if we’re frantic and running around and we’re coming in sliding sideways. They’re like, okay, time for a coaching session. Let’s go.
Christian: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Melinda: It’s a very different energy in how we’re holding space for our clients. So it’s a great practice for us, and it’s something we can bring to our clients to help them navigate it. So that’s why I love this topic, because it serves both sides.
Christian: Yeah. If you are not antifragile, if you don’t have a reputation that you can deal with hard things, well, it lessens the value because your clients, at 100%, I guarantee, are facing intense things. And the more high achieving they are, the more intense those things are, the stakes are higher. Like that friend I was just referring to.
Melinda: Now, what are some practices or tried and true systems that you use with your clients to help them maintain momentum when it gets defined?
Christian: There’s a good case to be made for saying you’re not antifragile right now. Let’s downshift to resilience.
Melinda: Yeah.
Christian: You know, just for this week or two.
Melinda: Let’s get through this.
Christian: Keep it together. Keep it together. Yeah.
Melinda: And that is true. I’m thinking of a situation with one of my good friends. It was a very difficult time, and I was like, you know what? Today we’re just gonna remember to breathe yeah, that’s all we’re gonna do today.
Christian: That’s exactly.
Melinda: We’re just gonna remember to breathe. We’ll talk later, but right now, just eat, drink water and breathe.
Christian: That’s it. That’s how you do it. Yeah. I have a friend. Less than a week ago, actually, it was like the bottom fell out, right? Like extreme. My appeal to him was breathe, sleep, go on walks, sunshine on your face, water. And whatever you do, let’s develop a system where you don’t repeat the destructive behavior. Whatever you do, don’t destroy. That’s your your aspiration for the next couple of weeks. Don’t destroy. Don’t go deeper in the hole. Right. And let’s. Let’s come up with strategies for that.
Melinda: Now, we were talking earlier about those contemplative practices, Right. And it often goes back to take a walk, get some sun on your face, remember to breathe. A lot of people in that fragility state think there’s no place for it, or in the resilient state, they think it’s not enough, but it really is. Those, and I put it in, in quotes, those simple practices that builds such a strong foundation for everything to be possible.
Christian: Yeah. And I would say simple, consistent and daily.
Melinda: Yeah, that’s it. Now, what haven’t I asked you about this topic of grit, antifragility, everything that we’ve been talking about that you think could make a real difference for our audience?
Christian: Okay, I can think of one thing. Apprenticeship. This is actually a really good term to introduce into the coaching world, because what coaches do, the people that are your client, they’re your apprentices. The term and the practice and even the culture of that has been forgotten in a hyper individualistic community. So, for example, generational wisdom doesn’t get passed down the way it used to for millennia. This is new for us as humans. In the last 200 years, that’s it. Human history has always been about not just the material stuff.
Right. It’s always been a world bigger because of faith, religion and spirituality. Now it’s shrunk if you don’t have those practices to what you can see and touch. It’s always been about wisdom and older people passing wisdom and younger people sitting at the feet of older people and learning in a very immersive way. So what’s the upside? The upside? We can try new things. We can just go anywhere. We don’t stay in the same village, city or state. We just change jobs all the time.
What’s lost is a continuity of wisdom and an accumulation of wisdom. It’s all very abrupt. And there’s upsides to that. Right? And there’s downsides to that. Okay, back to apprenticeship. What is apprenticeship? You know, you could see old texts like the Book of Proverbs that talk about the wise men at the gates of the city. They just sit around and they’re accessible. They have discussions about everything, you know, commerce, marriage, you know, power, money, all those things. And that’s a ecosystem of wisdom that’s there.
And you can ignore it, but it’s embedded in the collective consciousness. I think the Jewish rabbinic tradition has this saying, may you be covered by the dust of your rabbi. What does that mean? The rabbi would be traveling and the rabbi would pick the best of the best. People would literally drop everything because the understanding was that wisdom is the golden ticket. It’s not employment, not a new job, not this shiny thing. Wisdom is the most valuable thing. It’s not about knowledge. It’s about applied knowledge. It’s about seeing the whole picture. Not just knowing how to play the game, but seeing the whole game. That’s wisdom.
And the only way to gain that is by following an apprenticing under somebody. In the ancient world, you walk down dusty roads in your sandals, and the eager apprentice is following so close, he’s covered by the dust of the rabbi, right? So apprenticeship, to me, it’s the ultimate accelerator of antifragility. And actually, as you probably have heard it and said it many times, every coach should have a coach for that particular reason. Apprenticeship, right? And I think if a coach can convince somebody who’s working with them that it’s not about me making you rich in a week, like, all of that is just garbage.
And also, it’s less valuable. Even if I was able to do that, which I can’t, the ultimate value is wisdom, is connecting dots that are, on the surface, completely disconnected, is navigating life in its entirety. That’s wisdom. So the best move I’ve made in my life is that first guy that I met that. I mean, there was not even coaches in that environment. He was a missionary, Canadian missionary. And he has this wisdom about him. And I was a hotshot, okay, 26 years old, influencing millions of people, a celebrity. And I had this deep, deep understanding that if I learn to live on a higher level, all this is useless and it will make me miserable.
On top of that, my sort of smart move was to go, I suck at life. Basically, that’s the defining thought. From the outside, no one would think that of me. People are jealous, want my life. And I’m looking at my life going, I suck at life. I’m in the top.01% of artists in my space, but I suck at life. I just don’t know how to do this. And then in the presence of this guy, his name is Andy. He has what I don’t have. I turn to him and I go, how can I get what you have? That’s what I said over dinner. And he’s like, I’ll teach you if you do what I say. And I’m like, all right, let’s go for it. Smartest thing I’ve done. I said, this is the guy. And I’m gonna say, do everything.
This guy tells me everything to the degree where my staff, you know, my management, they were, like, super suspicious of this guy. Cause it was like, whoa, he has control over our boy. You know, the goose with the golden eggs. And there was nothing to do with that. It was not control. It was me. I said, I will be your apprentice, and I will do things I don’t want to do, but I trust you with my life. Will you tell me how to get there? And he did. And I’m here because of him.
Melinda: I love it. So let’s summarize a few things that we’ve talked about today. I love all the different ways that we got into the distinction between fragility, resilience, antifragility, and just really moving beyond. I think in our industry, resilience is a big word, and I love how you’re taking it to the next step and the next degree. I love the nuances that we got into about how to reframe and resilience, rewire it. Whether it’s through coaching or through identifying that big why, knowing your priorities. We talked about that awesome conversation with gratitude and how you brought in constructional suffering to leverage it and what you just shared about being an apprentice. And so, Christian, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with our listeners.
Christian: It’s truly my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Melinda: Thank you for listening to this episode of Just Between Coaches. And a big thank you to Christian for this conversation. You can find out more about him and his work at Xponential.Life. X P O N E N T I A L dot life. You can also check out his weekly newsletter at christianrayflores.com. You’ll find the links in the show notes. Again, Christian, thank you so much for coming to the show.
Christian: My pleasure.
Melinda: Just Between Coaches is part of the Mirasee FM podcast network, which includes To Lead Is Human and Neuroscience of Coaching. If today’s episode gave you fresh ideas for your business or spark questions about grit and resilience and antifragility, we’d love to hear about it. Leave us a starred review or share your biggest takeaway on YouTube at Mirasee FM or on your favorite podcast player. I’m Melinda Cohan. Thanks for listening and I hope to see you time next Next time.