Here is the full transcript of fitness nutrition specialist Sydney Cummings’ talk titled “Resilience: How to Emerge from your Tragedies Stronger”, at TEDxUCDavis 2021 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
When Tragedy Strikes Unexpectedly
SYDNEY CUMMINGS: Imagine, you’ve just finished up a long day of work at the studio that you’re recording your brand new free workouts every single day for the entire world and it’s finally time to lock up and go home. You lock the key in the door and you turn to go down to your car when you see four men walking up the street. As you walk down to your car, you hear one of them whisper, don’t move. You turn back over your shoulder to look and see what that was and you see that one of the four men is now pointing a gun at you. Turn back to your fiance who actually didn’t hear the speaking and say, get in the car, they have guns. Get in the car and right before you sit down, you look back and you see now that two of the four men have guns pointed at you.
As we were sitting down, we heard the shots fired, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, eight shots. We drove out of the parking lot and as Dustin called the 911 operator, I realized that my hands are wet. As I crawl out of the passenger side floorboard, I look at my hands and as the street light passes over the car and lights up the inside, I see that they’re now covered in my own blood. I realize I’ve been shot.
I believe that my life and your life have both been defined by overcoming obstacles. I want to talk to you today about how as a fitness professional and someone who’s experienced a lot in the short life that I’ve lived, about how we can turn this adversity into our superpower resilience.
Finding Strength in Adversity
I’ve been known to be an eternal optimist and always positive, but this is not as a result of me being naive or oblivious or unsure about what’s around me. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. I’ve experienced my fair share of life altering tragedies and today I want to talk to you about two of them specifically, not to make you feel sad for me or to feel sorry for me, but more importantly to make you see yourself in me. I want to show you what’s possible when life throws things at you that you never expect and how we can come out stronger together.
Now I want you to think for a minute before we get started. If I asked you, have you experienced something terrible? You would likely be able to say yes, right? Now if I asked you, looking back at this thing, were you able to move forward from it knowing you handled it in the best way that you could? You felt confident about you growing stronger from that tragedy? And most importantly, if life were to throw another tragedy at you today, would you be prepared to say, I’m going to grow stronger from this tragedy? I want to talk to you today about how we can work on answering yes to that last question.
Losing My Brother
In June of 2017, I got a call from my mom early on a Sunday morning, which I knew was not normal. She informed me that my brother had been in an ATV accident and would likely need brain surgery. Now my brother had just gotten married, he had just had a kid and he was always accident prone so I just knew he was going to be okay and maybe my mom was being a bit dramatic. Unfortunately, I was wrong.
The next couple weeks, our family slept in the hospital waiting room and listened to doctors tell us we’re doing everything we can. It was a roller coaster ride of infection and he’s sustaining his stable status. There was never any positive projection for any quality of life. We learned that my brother’s severe brain damage had left him with 3% brain function. He would never get better and he would never wake up. We would have to make the decision to let him go.
In a coincidental twist of timing, I had been reached out by a gym in Charleston, West Virginia, which was my brother and I’s hometown prior to Zach’s accident. They had asked me to write a story about a time when I had decided not to give up. Initially I wrote my story about moving to Charlotte and not knowing anyone and chasing a dream where I was in the fitness industry, but I had no support and everyone made fun of me and called it a pipe dream and never supported me in that mission.
Then my brother had his accident and I decided to trash that story and write about how I knew that my brother would never give up in his rehab journey. I visited the gym to take a picture there while I submitted my article and told them about my brother’s accident and they gave me a t-shirt. It was a blue t-shirt with red writing across the chest that said, never give up. They told me to give it to my brother because they thought he might need some motivation in his rehab journey back to his strength.
My brother died the next day.
I will forever believe that that was his message to me, never give up. That message surrounded the most painful thing I have still ever experienced and simultaneously what I decided would be my start of leaving a legacy, of being a living example of resilience. I decided right then to turn all of my pain into my purpose, never give up.
Turning Pain Into Purpose
The choice I made after losing my brother would in fact change the trajectory of my life.
I decided to start thinking about the legacy that I was leaving and would it be one that I was proud of. I was a personal trainer and I technically had a full schedule of clients, which I had worked three years in a city where I knew nobody to try and achieve. I would offer free boot camps in the park. I was training at five different gyms when I worked here, when I first moved here and now I had my own personal training in an apartment complex gym where I was fully booked out of clients, which was something to be proud of, but I had no room to grow. I couldn’t scale. I couldn’t offer more than what I already had because I had no more time.
I decided then that I was tired of being complacent and I was tired of being stagnant and I knew something had to change. When I decided to funnel this pain and take my pain into my purpose, I took my in-person personal training company to a digital platform with my fiance Dustin, who was a CPA by trade, but also a photographer and videographer by talent, which we didn’t know until he decided to rent a camera and Google some camera settings when he proposed to me. He calls it cheap. I call it destiny.
He decided to take that picture and as we took that picture and posted it on my Instagram and continued to help me market my fitness career with his photography, we learned that he was really sought out and really incredible at what he was doing. He was really getting some big names for freelancing jobs, all while still being a full-time CPA. We decided then and there to start combining our passions and our talents and start creating our legacy.
Creating a Daily Fitness Legacy
How would we do this? How would we make sure that we stood out in a very saturated fitness industry? The digital world was so crowded and we needed to do something that was not already being done. We took inspiration from a daily YouTube vlogger, Casey Neistat, and decided to be the daily fitness vlogger and post a brand new workout video every single day on YouTube. We decided this and we ran with it.
A lot of people told us we were crazy, that this didn’t make any sense, this mission was too big for just two people, that we would never fulfill our mission of giving free fitness every single day to people all over the world. But that voice kept coming back in and our pain kept pushing us to fulfill our purpose. Never give up. So we didn’t.
To say this was initially a struggle would be an understatement. It was a lot of fights with each other, a lot of fights for long hours, breakdowns, tears, frustration, and we just couldn’t figure out how to get it rolling at first, all while working 80 to 100 hours a week individually to be able to afford the media studio that we were renting out to record these workouts to put out for free to the world. After about a year of posting YouTube videos every single day…
We finally started to catch some traction. We felt like we were growing our worldwide audience, they were giving great feedback, and we were finally accepted into the YouTube Partner Program. Most importantly, lives were changing.
We recorded late one night on a Sunday evening in the middle of September and we decided to lock up and go home and start our edit for the evening. As we locked up, we turned to go down to our cars in the parking lot and we see four men walking up the street. We walk down and as we walk down the stairs, I hear that same whisper, “don’t move.” Dustin didn’t hear the whisper, but I remember clenching my backpack and turning around over my left shoulder and seeing one of the four men pointing a gun right at me.
I turned back to Dustin and said, “We have to get in the car, they have a gun.” So we both ran to the car to get in and right before I sat down, for some reason, I decided to look back again. Now I notice two men have guns pointed at us. We start to sit down and I hear eight shots fired.
Dustin managed to get us out of the parking lot and we were screaming and I was in the floorboard of the passenger side car. He called 911 and as I crawled out of the floor, I noticed that my right foot is really cold and my hands are really wet. And because it’s night time, the street lights are going over our car and about a block away from the studio, I open up my hands to see them covered in my own blood and I realized I’d been shot.
The operator tells Dustin to pull over into a parking lot because we were closer to an ambulance than a hospital. We pull over and she instructs Dustin on how to get out of the car, go find some towels in the back of the car to which he grabbed a yellow towel that he used to clean his car with and hold my foot up in the air to apply pressure to stop the bleeding. I saw my pink Nike Pegasus slowly turning red as he put pressure on the outside of my foot.
I remember being completely silent in the ambulance and not saying a word to the paramedics as I was so confused about why I wasn’t feeling any pain yet. The adrenaline was still going and I couldn’t feel anything and they actually awarded me the most calm gunshot victim they had ever worked with.
Another Test of Resilience
When we got to the hospital, we learned that the bullet had hit the branch of an artery in my foot and I had to go into emergency surgery to cauterize that artery and also heal my heel bone that had been shattered in the accident. I remember waking up from that surgery and realizing that I was alive and that Dustin was alive. We both still had our lives. We were still here.
I had that same decision to make again in that moment. Yes, it was painful, but I promised myself I was going to turn my pain into my purpose and I promised to never give up.
For months after my surgery, I was in a boot, I was wearing a wound vac, I was using a scooter to get around everywhere, and I was also cleaning and packing my own gunshot wound doctor’s orders twice a day. Three months after my shooting, I was cleared to put weight on my right foot and two weeks later I decided to come back to the YouTube stage and film workouts to start my comeback story.
The beauty in all of this tragedy is that because I was shot, I’m now actually a better personal trainer. When I decided to come back to YouTube, I started my journey with a community of tens of thousands of people supporting me in my comeback and virtually joining me in these workouts.
Up until that point, because I was a Division I athlete and a full scholarship track and field high jumper, I had never been able to relate to people who were very new in their fitness journey and very beginning coming back from an injury or starting their journey completely all over from something. Now I was able to show that.
Every single day since December 10, 2018, I have shown up on my channel and fought for my strength. Now over 1 million subscribers and over 115 million workouts completed later, I can’t imagine not showing up and not having a fulfilled life where I know it’s all because I didn’t give up.
Choosing Your Path Forward
What tragedy pain or exposure to failure are you still holding onto without allowing it to push you into the next chapter of your story? We all have a decision to make and we all have a path to choose when we navigate how to move forward from a tragedy.
What if now moving forward you were able to say, “I got through this thing and I can tell that I’m stronger because of it.” What if instead of saying “I’m a victim of this thing,” you can now say, “I look back and say all the ways I can display my resilience” and most importantly, if something were to happen to you again, what path are you going to choose? Are you going to choose the victim mentality or are you going to choose to not give up and allow it to push you into your best life?
In losing my brother, I honor him by living every single day to make sure I give access to fitness to people all over the world. I went from my apartment complex gym to now a new media studio that is over 20 times the size of what I used to be training in. With four full-time employees, and I can’t imagine if I would have skipped out on something like this, over 115 million workouts completed or opportunities that could have been missed.
Being a survivor of a gunshot, I am now able to say I am a stronger and mentally and physically healthier person. I feel my physical strength come through, I’m more confident, I feel alive and thankful for my life. I’m also a better personal trainer now because I can relate to people of all fitness levels knowing we’ve all been at the beginning at some point together.
Conclusion
Life will continue to take shots at us, but now you know it’s possible to go through your tragedies and come out stronger. Don’t think of things that you’ve gone through in the past as your baggage, unless to take it from a fitness perspective, you view that baggage as equipment that is challenging you and making you stronger.
You can look back and say, because I’ve carried this, I’m stronger today. In life, the choice will always be yours. Give in, or never give up.
