Growing Through Grit with Lacey Aguero

Episode #45

Growing Through Grit with Lacey Aguero

Today, I’m welcoming back badass military veteran and my First Surgical Assist, Lacey Aguero. As we discussed a few weeks ago, Lacey knows a thing or two about grit. So, this week we’re taking things a level deeper, discussing how to use your challenges in a more productive way and start growing through the grit.

How can you embody the kind of mindset that Lacey brings to everything she does? We’ve all been through hard times, some of us more than others. But Lacey’s mindset is the result of tragedy, trials, and tribulations, so tune in this week to learn how to make sure the challenges of life don’t bring you down, and how to grow through each experience life throws at you.

Tune in this week to learn how to start growing through grit. Lacey shares how she allows life’s difficulties to break her open instead of break her down, and how you can take your trauma and deeply feel it so you can use grit as a tool for growth.

WHAT YOU’LL DISCOVER

Why not owning your grit is denying your experiences.
How life’s challenges break some people down, but not others.
What it means for your challenges to break you open instead of break you down.
The difference between living through something versus living in something.
How to acknowledge the difficult situations you’ve been in and start truly feeling them.

FEATURED ON THE SHOW

Lacey Aguero: LinkedIn
Ep #42: Grit and Grace with Lacey Aguero

TRANSCRIPT

Lacey: You're in one hand dealt all these realities of just how ugly and how dangerous life can be. But in same hand, you can also see the beauty and the simplicity of okay, I'm not alone in this. I'm not the only person here that has to go through this. I obviously don't feel this way by myself. Everyone feels this way at some point.

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast with Dr. Susan Crockett. You're listening to episode number 45, Growing Through The Grit, an interview with licensed first surgical assist and badass military veteran Lacey Aguero.

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast that encourages you to become your best virtuosa self. Each week Dr. Susan Crockett goes where the scalpel can't reach, exploring conversations about how to be, heal, love, give, grow, pray, and attune. For the first time ever, she's bringing the personal one on one teaching that she shares with individual patients to you on this broader platform. A weekly source of inspiration and encouragement designed to empower you.

By evolving ourselves as individuals. We influence and transform the world around us. Please help me welcome board certified OB-GYN specializing in minimally invasive GYN surgery, internationally in the top 1% of all GYN robotic surgeons, a certified life coach, and US News top doctor, your host Susan A. Crockett, MD.

Dr. Crockett: I am so excited to welcome back Lacey Augero for the second interview, Lacey.

Lacey: Thanks for having me back. I'm really glad to be here.

Dr. Crockett: So you know when you were here the first time, I did all your fancy introductions. So let's not do the whole formal thing, but just tell folks a little bit about yourself.

Lacey: I am a veteran, and I work in the operating room with some really great surgeons. I get to assist them.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah. Hashtag, she’s my first surgical assist.

Lacey: I work in surgery all day long. I have three beautiful daughters. Life's busy for me right now. It's pretty hectic, but I'm enjoying it.

Dr. Crockett: You're right in the middle of all that.

Lacey: I am. 
Dr. Crockett: Yeah.

Lacey: I am.

Dr. Crockett: Well, I appreciate you taking the time to come back and talk to our audience. I think the way this came about was really interesting because we had a conversation about your first episode, and had some feedback on that. Then realized that there was a deeper level to go to. So Lacey’s coming back again today by popular demand to talk about growing through the grit. So that's the title of today's talk, growing through grit.

Lacey: Yes. So on our last episode, you had asked me a question that left me thinking and reeling over it for the days to follow. You had asked me how does someone get my mindset?

Dr. Crockett: Yeah, right.

Lacey: I don't think I've ever been asked that question before. So I'm kind of like well how, how did I get my mindset?

Dr. Crockett: It is interesting because not everybody who goes through all the stuff you've been through comes out that way. So yeah, what’d you figure out?

Lacey: So thinking about it, it got me thinking okay well, looking back on past experiences, why do I resonate with grit and grace because I did have a lot of grit? To not own that, I think, would be to deny myself my experiences. So focusing on it and thinking about it, I really got to thinking like someone with my mindset, I got it through, unfortunately, a lot of tragedy, trials, tribulations, the grit of everything.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah, the hard times.

Lacey: Yeah.

Dr. Crockett: So we can all empathize with that. We've all been through hard times, some of us more than others, some of us harder times than others. But you know what I've noticed in my practice is sometimes when people go through really hard things, it breaks them down.

Lacey: It does.

Dr. Crockett: But it didn't.

Lacey: It didn't break me down. No. So when you think about it, I would always, I learned at a very early age trauma, tragedy, these trials, they were not exclusive to me. Everyone was experiencing some form, some version of their own tragedy. Some are more significant than others, but we're experiencing them, nonetheless. I would always have this thought like hey, am I going to let this break me down? Or am I going to try to let it break me open? What can I take away from this? What's the positive I can get from this?

Dr. Crockett: Break it down versus break you open? I think that is really the key point because tell me a little bit more about what you mean by breaking you open.

Lacey: Taking that experience and not letting it define who I was as a person. So using it to grow or using it as a stepping stone to get to the next station in life that I wanted to be at.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah, so that kind of reminds me of when I went through this this divorce that I just went through. It was almost a three year divorce process.

Lacey: Wow, there years?

Dr. Crockett: It was three years. I was required to produce almost 5,000 pages of documentation to satisfy.

Lacey: That’s taxing. That’s gotta be taxing, right?

Dr. Crockett: His attorney. It was ridiculous. Most of it was like old financial records. So going back 10 years, I had to go through every single financial document, every credit card, every business transaction, everything. For me looking at money, I'm very avoidant. I've talked about this some in some other episodes that that had been my mindset.

But having to work through the process of that particular conflict and being in that battle mode and having to do the parts where I had to get really focused and live through what otherwise could have been a really traumatic event, it really catapulted me up into the next level of transcending into the next level of who I wanted to be, the next virtuosa self.

Lacey: Right. So it was a three year long process. I mean, there was really no way for you to avoid it.

Dr. Crockett: It was completely unavoidable.

Lacey: Which is what we tend to do with most of our tragedies and trials, right? In society, we're taught to avoid it.

Dr. Crockett: God, let me avoid this, you know. Don't break me open.

Lacey: So you kind of had to sit with it, right. It was all laid out there for you. Yep. That's kind of where I wanted to focus in on in. It takes a lot of accountability to acknowledge the situations you've been put in and really try to feel them. You think by avoiding it, that you've somehow dealt with it, and you carry about your life. But the reality of the situation is we're going to be faced with it at some point in the future.

Dr. Crockett: Right. It will come back up.

Lacey: It's going to come back up, and you'll know that if you actually.

Dr. Crockett: So many of us don't really know how to deal with those types of emotions. So in life coach training, when I went through certification, that was a huge part of what we learned in becoming certified. When you and I were talking about this, it kind of reminded me of that. So you were talking about how to process. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Lacey: For the processing of it, like I want to take my military experience and really kind of home in on that. We're taught to focus on the mission at hand. We're taught to, there was one objective. You see through the exposure of your deployments and through collaborating and getting to know the soldier to the left of you and the soldier to the right of you.

You're in one hand dealt all these realities of just how ugly and how dangerous life can be. But in same hand, you can also see the beauty and the simplicity of okay, I'm not alone in this. I'm not the only person here that has to go through this. I obviously don't feel this way by myself. Everyone feels this way at some point.

Dr. Crockett: So it allows you to extend compassion to those that are in the field with you.

Lacey: Yes. So taking that realization, the sooner you can come to the realization that you're not the only one who's going through this. Somebody else out there is going through something very similar. It will allow you to sit and process that feeling.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah. So in the life coach training that we did, we're always taught that that avoidant type of thing for dealing with how you're feeling, or your emotions is like trying to hold a beach ball underwater. Like stuffing it down, and you can't see it. But it's just so much effort. Then eventually it pops up.

Lacey: It pops up. The minute you think you've got it and under control and release it, it comes right back up.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah, but the trick is okay, so what's the alternative? Because so many people, whether it's COVID, or loss, or death, or whatever trauma it is that people are dealing with, so many people don't know how to process it. So what's the alternative to stuffing it down and holding it underwater?

Lacey: Really sitting and feeling that moment for what it is. I don't think that we stop and take the time to process things. We are a fast paced society. We want things yesterday. We want to move on. We really should start trying to teach ways of it's okay to just feel. You're not supposed to figure it out. You're not supposed to have an answer for it. Just feel it. I think the more you feel it, and the longer you can sit with it.

Dr. Crockett: It passes.

Lacey: It passes.

Dr. Crockett: Right. So getting really still and paying attention to what's moving in your body, the vibrations, or the feeling of whatever that emotion is. Because it's a nervous system thing, response, and practicing just letting it go through you and pass through you.

Lacey: Yeah, we're not taught how to sit still. In fact, here recently in my journey with healing, I'm a mom of three.

Dr. Crockett: Beautiful.

Lacey: Yes, beautiful girls. The last thing I do is sit. When I catch myself sitting and trying to reflect and focus on my thoughts in that moment or how I felt in that moment, it's extremely uncomfortable. We're not taught how to sit with it.

Dr. Crockett: Our brains go everywhere.

Lacey: They go everywhere but where we need them to go.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah.

Lacey: So really honing in on feeling it and taking the time to just sit with it. That has ultimately led me to be able to get to my next conclusion of well, I feel it. I accept it. Now, what can I do about it?

Dr. Crockett: Or what can I do with it?

Lacey: Or what can I take from it? Yes.

Dr. Crockett: So, that's the difference between living through something and living in something.

Lacey: Exactly.

Dr. Crockett: Like the example of COVID when we see so many people that.

Lacey: So COVID, on every scale, for every individual, was traumatic for us as a society as a whole. So there's trauma that we can all relate to and quantify with it, right? So how do we deal with that? Did we deal with it? I don't think we did.

Dr. Crockett: Well, I know people who did. Then I see patients who haven't, right. I still see patients, see people riding around with masks in their cars.

Lacey: We do. Yes, we do.

Dr. Crockett: They're not all people coming from the operating room that just forgot to take it off.

Lacey: No, yeah. So how do you segue that and take it into the next step of life?

Dr. Crockett: I think as women, we really have an advantage. I see my male counterparts struggling a lot more with that. I think as women, we talk about it. We cry about it.

Lacey: I think we can multitask pretty well.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah, we go to a kickboxing class and kick the crap out of it. As the mother of boys, I have three boys and two step sons and one daughter. Yeah, as the mother of boys, lots of boys, sometimes they suffer because they're expected to always be a certain way. So talk with me a little bit about what you've seen with you and your husband, and how in your marriage, you've seen each of you deal with like the COVID or the military traumas differently.

Lacey: So recently here, my husband and I have really been focusing in on our healing, our individual healing, and our healing as a couple. I was active duty and can resonate with a lot of the feelings that he's feeling, but him being a male and coming back, he was very much of the mindset that he was a soldier. He took that, and he operated out here on the civilian side of things as he did when he was active duty.

Dr. Crockett: Well, you learn so many important skills, leadership skills and ways of being when you're in that type of a situation.

Lacey: Yes. It worked until it didn't. It's one of those situations where you see a lot of the men when they come back over, and women, they're used to being of one mindset. Now they're no longer in the environment where that mindset applies. Regulating that or accepting that it's okay to take that mindset and kind of shelf it for later use.

Dr. Crockett: Put it aside and to trust yourself that it'll come out when you need it.

Lacey: Yes, yeah. So we were having these deep talks about it. He's explaining to me like, it wasn't all for nothing, right? Like, how do I apply that in today's society? How do I apply that with our daughters? I'm like well, everything you learned is something that you get to teach our children. Now they don't have to experience these things that you did.

Dr. Crockett: It's valuable.

Lacey: It's very valuable. He's like okay, but where do I go from here? I'm like well, you're evolving. We're going to figure that out. I mean, if you're not changing, you're not growing. We're evolutionary creatures. That's what we do. So.

Dr. Crockett: Well, that's beautiful.

Lacey: Big conversations, big healing over here.

Dr. Crockett: Big growing. I always tell people it's important as you're growing to make way for well-being. So as we're growing, we're going through all of these traumas and shuffling them in our head and figuring out the next step in life and where we want to go. It's really easy, at least for me, I have that 4:00 a.m. middle of the night where my head is just like processing and thinking about the business or the next surgery or the worry about this or that.

I had the thought this week. I heard it somewhere. It's like what happened to just making room in your body for that well-being? What would you feel like if you just felt happy? What does that feel like? What is that wellbeing feel like? I made myself just set aside the busyness and the thought and just made my mind still and was like oh, peace.

Lacey: It's a beautiful thing when you're able to get to that point. If we could, as people, learn and make it acceptable to just sit and be appreciative for that moment, whether it be the tragic moment that you're in, that's okay. But to be able to reflect on it, and instead of focusing on that negative, maybe make it a positive.

Dr. Crockett: Yep. I agree.

Lacey: For sure.

Dr. Crockett: Thanks so much Lacey.

Lacey: Thanks for having me.

Dr. Crockett: So much wisdom in today’s talk. This was really much deeper than our first one.

Lacey: Hey, you had me thinking.

Dr. Crockett: I love that.

Lacey: Yeah, thanks.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah. Well, thanks for joining us today. If you liked our content, or you think that one of your friends might enjoy this conversation, please remember to like, or share it with other people because that's how we get to keep going and bring you more exciting conversations. Until next time, take care.

Lacey: Bye.

Dr. Crockett: Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming Virtuosa. To learn more, come visit us at DrCrockett.com, or find us on YouTube for the Dr. Crockett Show. If you found this episode helpful or think it might help someone else, please like, subscribe, and share. This is how we grow together. Thanks, and I'll see you next week. Love always, Sue.

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