Going back to my journey that replicated. Coming back to where I was. I'm not 300 pounds but I actually went up to 250 pounds. I'm at my mom's house, helping her out, helping to deal with the cancer, coming visiting a lot. My ankle is fractured in a few places. I'm at a place where I'm not really caring about what I'm eating. My job, I'm taking on more stress, I'm taking more responsibilities. The beauty about that, what I want you to take away from that is, when you have things that stress you out or if you take on big task, try to understand what are you learning from this, and that's the one thing that helped me change it around. I start to understand why am I thinking about this? Why did I gained 50 pounds? Why am I dealing with my mom with these issues? Why am I at my home in South Central and also filling this uncomfortableness of not feeling safe? The beauty from what I understood from that was that, I'm allowed to be able to see these things to help others. As I spent more time in that area, I was able to mentor more students, mentor more people who are going through the same thing. My surfing mentor, he said as he developed cancer, he slowed down too, he told me that there might be a Giovanni out there that hasn't found his first way. That was something that stuck with me and made me to want to help to share my story and help others. Because what if I was a person that didn't find this first wave? What if I didn't find that surfing and that was that something that changed my life. Is another Giovanni out there? That's another reason why it can be a motivation to break habits and also to be verbal about your habits too, because it might be something that the person sitting right next to you in this classroom is going through, and you wouldn't know it unless you guys had a conversation about it, and you found out patterns to break it. Now we'll get into the specifics of what I did to change and decreases stress. I want you guys to write something down. There's two things. The first thing is pattern interrupters. Pattern interrupters. The second thing I want you to write down are pattern builders. Dealing with the issues I dealt with 300 pounds depressed and overweight, there were a lot of patterns that weren't healthy, whether it was me with my friends, gang begging on the streets, eating unhealthy food in a food desert. What did I do to break that? A lot of people have asked me, you went from 300 pounds to 160 pounds in two years, what was a big motivation? What did you do? The one biggest thing I'll tell them is that I didn't gain a new diet, I gained the purpose. That was the biggest thing that helped me make the change. My mentor talked about losing 50 pounds in continuing with surfing. I wanted to not gain a small lifestyle change, I gained the life. That's something that I had to remember when again these 50 pounds, and I started to transition into a different route. With pattern interrupters, this actually the interesting thing because I've never talked to a group of people about this before, but this is something I actually started doing. If you find yourself in an unhealthy habit, there's one thing that people do when they're talking about psychology and mental health, is you create a pattern interrupter in your mind, and that wakes you up and that shocks you into going a different route. Say for example, if I'm working with some of the kids I work with a South Central that deal with mental issues, and for example, they're having a disorder where they're lashing out at everyone and they are being disrespectful or not understanding what they're doing, we try to build with them pattern interrupters, so they have a code in their mind. It's almost like a algorithm. If you think about computer, so with the algorithm or a code, you can say the name of this algorithm is called CO, and that means if this, then that. The thing you tell your mind is, if CO, so if I'm acting out CO, if that, then I'm going to do this. If I see myself acting out, I'm going to transition to think about others. That's the algorithm you can tell yourself to bring yourself back to be able to move with acceptable behavior. How you can do this with pattern builders. It's funny that she brought up the conversation about the bike riding. I'm going to take a quick tangent, but as I injured myself with my ankle, I had big goals for myself, I was planning to run the LA Marathon. Still that's coming up later this year. The only thing I could do for cardio in the gym was go on the exercise bike, that's all I could do for two months. Two months later, I met your professor on a bike ride, and it's funny because she thought that I was doing it and killing it. I was tired. I may have looked like I was doing my best, but it was a real struggle for me to get that mountain. The one take-away I got from that, because other people said I was really going fast too was when you get into a stressful situation, really understand what comes from it. Because my ankle was fractured, all I could do was go on exercise bike, I couldn't run anymore, I couldn't surf. I could use that as cardio, so for two months I was doing only that as cardio. What happened two months later? I went on a bike ride with your professor and a few other executives for companies that I might want to work with in the future, and I thought to myself, if I didn't do the exercise bike for two months, I probably wouldn't be able to keep up with the whole group. I probably would have been at the end of the mountain not being able to keep up with everyone, but because of this injury and because of me having to get on the exercise bike which I didn't want to do, I prepared myself to be able to keep up with the rest of the group and pass your professor as well. But the reason why I say that that's important takeaway, is because I could have looked at me being injured as a bad thing, as a stressful thing. Instead of looking at that stress and harboring it, I thought about what the positive outcome of what that was. The result of that is working with that exercise bike and it allowed me to keep up with everybody else, and that was something that I didn't even see in my future moving forward. A couple of different pattern builders would be safe. For example, if I work out now, I have a pattern algorithm that I work out in my mind. Let's see. One of them is called REN. If I find myself on the exercise bike, and I'm losing my focus, and I think about something, I see somebody walking, I see a basketball game and I'm not focused on doing my best, I tell myself REN. REN is a code for not accepting anything less than going hard. In that moment, I changed that pattern and that habit that was going to be a weak one and not really doing my best to only accepting something for these two minutes that I'm on the exercise bike, I'm going to do my best and I'm not going to accept anything less. The pattern builders and the pattern interrupters, what you do is you find yourself building a few different mental algorithms for yourself and utilizing them not just in school, but also in the gym, with your family or even for stress and mental health. If you ask me, this is actually the first time I've ever shared this with anyone publicly. I've done talks with people and I've never shared how I physically lost the weight. But this exactly, and I'm telling you what's the reason why I did that. But before, when I was 300 pounds, I did it in a different way. At the time I had an abusive basketball coach. He would belittle me, curse me out, and actually not let me play in some games, and call me fat and everything like that. What I did instead of take that as a stressful moment, and harbor it, and internalize it, is after after basketball practice, when I went home after I did my homework, I did push ups. I worked out, and it was the third workout that I did for the day. Every time I got tired, my pattern interrupter to quit was my coach's face. Instead of using a code for the algorithm back then, which I didn't know that I was doing this unconsciously, I used the image of his face as my code to interrupt that pattern to break the habit of faking on the workout. I say that to say some of these codes that you break with different patterns, they don't have to be words, they can also be images of something that you love if you're religious, it can be that too. Does anyone have any questions? Perfect. The next thing that I wanted to share with you guys is that, dealing with stress, you have to really think about the big picture. Big pictures are subjective to your lives and what you want to do. Oftentimes we're caught up in the moment and say, for example, when I was living in South Central with 300 pounds, I wasn't really living for the next day. I wasn't really living for tomorrow or surviving for right now. How are my light is going to stay on? How am I going to eat? Where am I going to go to feel safe? At those times, you lose sight of what you're going to do tomorrow or you lose sight of living for your family and things like that. That's one thing that helped me out as well and I hope that that's something that you guys carry into bigger patterns and also living healthy lifestyles. More important not just only in this class, but also in life in general. You guys have any questions? I was going to just say, the incident you had when you fractured your ankle, you realized after the fact like the positive outcomes. I was wondering during that incident, you didn't know that you are going to be mountain biking or being in that good scenarios. When you're in that hardship or a stressful situation, what did you do to make that positive change to still go on that exercise bike? That's a good question. You're asking how did I make that change while I was on the bike or just before getting on the bike? My question is, how did you motivate yourself once you fractured your ankle to make that positive change? Because after the fact it was obvious that it happened for that reason so you can keep up with everybody and go with that group of executives that you're planning to work with, potentially, but before seeing that there was something positive, how did you do it during that time of hardship? That's a good question. Everybody has got his question or you want me to repeat it? Perfect. In understanding when you deal with stressful situations about, say for example, you're going to go meet somebody who could be your potential boss or you might want to bike ride that might change your life because you're meeting someone who might put you on a path through professional success. There was a lot of stress in there. I wasn't sure if my ankle is going to make it up the mountain, but one thing that kept me going in that route was one of the codes. That code was for me to think about other people that I'm helping in my space. I got a call from one of the youth that I worked with. He's 19, his name is Elijah and it's funny because during the holidays it's such a joyous time. During the holidays in South Central is actually a time where you experience the largest mental health breakouts in the hood because you see it's cheerful everywhere else but this is a place where people don't have money to give the kids Christmas presents. You see everybody so happy on television and everything but you wonder, why is that not my circumstance? There's a lot of different issues and one of the kids I worked with, his name is Elijah, he called me over the holidays and he asked me, he said, " What is it about you that makes you so special? Like why do you always win all these awards and go all over the country and do this, and I told him I struggled just like you, I just don't quit. That was the one thing that I wanted to convey to him. It's not that when you go through these classes or you have a struggle, say for example, with my struggle was doing the mountain biking thing, in that moment you have to realize it's not this current struggle that defines where you're going to go. You have to really arrange who you are and not to be able to let the current circumstance hinder you. Thank you.
