Happy Sunday Everyone:
I’m back at it with my great pal, Chris Devin, with permission.
I can tell you I’ve learned more from Chris Devin than any other human on the planet the last 3 years. If you recall, Chris is battling multiple myeloma and has been for the past 6 years. Chris has been going through a 96-hour chemo treatment, it ended last night at 9:56 PM EST time. And if you’re scratching your head saying, “that’s not possible”, he just did it. Next week is a stem cell transplant. I give you this detail for context, he’s fighting hard. His mindset is pure warrior. Comments like “I take the road that I am given, when my body tells me to pull over and rest, I listen”, “I feel great today”, “we’re battling”, my personal favorite “I can’t fall off the floor, it’s getting better”.
What’s hard for me to articulate, and the point of Sunday Thoughts today, is about a conversation Chris and I had two weeks ago that will forever change my life, and my thought process. When this most recent plan was created (96 hours of chemo), he told me about it, and then he said “look Hunter, you’re in my inner circle, I need you to believe that I’m going to be good, I can’t have your support now, with me, and then have you turn around and tell Kim I’m not good”. He wasn’t calling me out personally vs. overall, but he made it clear, and I took it at as such, there is no room in his life for anyone to be around him that isn’t all in on their own belief and mindset. You ask anyone close to me, and they’ll tell you the comment is all I’m thinking about since he’s said it to me.
Questions that I’m asking myself, but I’ll ask you the same questions.
- How is your mindset for people fighting. Chris is looking for zero sympathy; he actually hates it. He’s looking for all in belief from his inner circle to believe hard, to pray hard, to hope hard, to allocate all of our energy toward a positive outcome, everything else is a waste of time and energy. Can we all contemplate how many times we’ve said, “you’re in my thoughts and prayers” and have done nothing with it. That’s terrible. I apologized to my men’s group last week for mailing in their prayer requests over the years and promised to never do it again (thanks to Chris). If you promise prayers, then pray hard, if you promise thoughts, think hard.
- How does being “real” help you? Being real, is a form of protection from failure by doing less than what we’re capable of. Being real is hedging our bets of possible failure by offering excuses/reasons in case something doesn’t work out like we want it to. It shows up in many forms. The opposite of being real, is having no fear of going all in on achieving anything we want, including beating cancer. As a very proud “realist” of almost 52 years, being a witness to Chris’s fight and his absolute fearless attitude and mindset of winning has been life changing for me. I looked at being real all these years as a badge of honor, I was wrong. Maybe in very specific occasions being real is good, but overall, it’s a dream killer. If you think of anyone who has accomplished a great deal in life, my guess is “being a realist” is not a word you’d use to describe them.
- Contemplate your inner circle. I know I’ve talked about the personal board of directors to the point of exhaustion, but never have I thought about it harder than I have these past 2 weeks. It’s been less about my personal board of directors vs. other people that have me on theirs (formally or informally) and how I’m truly showing up for them. What does it means to trust each other? I looked up “trust”, my favorite definition was “The meaning of TRUST is assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something”. Let that be the definition of the people in your inner circle but let it also serve for all of us as the benchmark of how we show up to those who’ve entrusted us for their well-being.
Chris Devin is a gift to me, and I know he is to anyone else reading this who knows him. In my life I’ve never been this close to someone fighting so hard for something so important and doing it with a level of strength I didn’t know existed. When you talk about iron sharpening iron, Chris is the iron that is sharpening any of us that are close to him and for that I am grateful!
LFG CHRIS!!!!!