When you are suddenly faced with a challenge you don’t know how to overcome it’s easy to go into overwhelm, or be overtaken by fear or grief.
Show notes
There are moments in life when challenges threaten to overwhelm you, when you are faced with what you see as your limits.
In these moments, you may wonder whether you’re up to the challenge at hand. It is tempting to fall into fear, despair, self-doubt or grief. In these moments you get to choose whether you will grow and open, or shrink and close.
While I wouldn’t wish these painful moments on anyone, they do invite us into a new relationship with life. They instigate a deepening of relationships with ourselves and others that doesn’t happen when life is easy.
Today’s Man Alive Podcast guest is a two time kidney transplant survivor. Gregory S. Works is the author of Triumph: Life on the Other Side of Trials, Transplants, Transition and Transformation. He is an example of a man who faced life-threatening challenges, more than once. He overcame them, rather than being overtaken by them.
In our conversation we discussed…
- How to avoid being overwhelmed when you are faced with challenging news
- Navigating shock
- Replacing panic with intentionality and a sense of urgency
- Why externalizing rather than internalizing could save your life
- How your end goal can help fear dissolve
Greg talks about how he created and executed a plan in the midst of a life-threatening challenge, with a baby on the way! He also talks about how gathering a village, and how his relationship with faith, helped him through the hardest times.
Links:
Connect with Greg
A two-time kidney transplant recipient, Gregory S. Works was exposed to kidney disease for over half of his life. It literally affected everyone in his immediate family. Based on his experience, Gregory has been able to counsel others on this disease, how to approach a transplant and dialysis, living post-transplant, and how faith can be a cornerstone of addressing this challenge. Gregory earned a BBA degree in Accounting from Howard University and an MBA with concentrations in Marketing, Finance & Organizational Behavior from the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.
Check out Honest Sex, a new book author Shana James.
Some say we are outgrowing marriage as a culture. However, the problem that author Shana James regularly sees as a relationship coach—and through her own divorce—is that many of us have not matured enough to create the emotionally-connected, sexually-satisfying relationships we long for.
Honest Sex teaches us what kind of honesty is effective for creating closeness, what sex actually is (rather than what we’ve been taught), and how to communicate desires and upsets to create more intimacy. By examining new ways to sustain connection with a partner, author Shana James illuminates a framework for relationships to start strong and get more intimate and exciting over time.
James is the creator and host of the Man Alive podcast and has a TEDx Talk, “What 1,000 Men’s Tears Reveal About the Crisis Between Men and Women.” As a relationship coach for 20 years, she humbly discovered the causes of disconnection and distrust in relationships, as well as how to build trust and keep passion alive. Her first book, Power and Pleasure: A Man’s Guide to Becoming a Confident and Satisfied Lover and Leader, supports men to be fulfilled in love and work. In this book, written for all genders, she uses her Master’s in psychology, DISC, and Positive Intelligence certifications to guide readers to create more honest and passionate romantic relationships.
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Previously Published on shanajamescoaching.com