Turning Pain into Purpose: Lessons in Resilience

And there's certain limitations that I have from the shooting. And I asked my doctor, I was like, Do you think I can run a marathon, you know, in the next four months, or whatever it was? And he looked at me, and he said, there's absolutely no chance. Like you, you, I don't even know how you walked in here, normally, is what he said to me. And I looked at it was okay, well, like, it's funny, you say that because I ran a half marathon that same morning, like, just in my training process, I ran like, 21 and a half kilometers, or whatever it is, right? And he just looked at me, like, I speak in a different language. He's like, I guess we'll run some more tests then. And like, there was no answer. He couldn't figure out how it happened.

Welcome to the ReLaunch podcast, and today is going to be a day that literally changes how you view the simplest things that you do when you hear the story that we're bringing to you today, it's going to cause you to have those internal fears that can Come up, but I want you to listen through the episode, and you're going to hear again those silver linings that come from all of the relaunches that we are. Some may call it a curse. Some may call it being blessed. You know what I'm going to call it. These are lessons that shape who we are today, and today I have Brandon Peacock, and Brandon's story is literally nothing short of remarkable. In June of 2020, he had a massive relaunch that literally changed the trajectory of his life. And for me, when I got to meet this gentleman, it was like wow, his journey. He found purpose in in things that he had happen. He created a new outlook of where his life was going. He was able to literally not feel the Oh, my God, my life is over, but my life is just beginning. And when you look at where things can go from there, he has now become a lulu mon ambassador and running, running crazy in different ways, and I'm going to leave it there, because I don't want to give up what's happened here. He founded so many amazing things, charities, and it gives us all hope. And he is here today to share his journey, his insights, and honestly, this is this is one of those shows that you're going to get not just a little spark of inspiration, of hope, but you're going to get a massive injection of it. This is when things really come full circle for so many of us, where we can say, You know what, I'm I'm going to go, I'm going to be, I'm going to actually be like Brandon peacock. So Brandon, welcome to the relaunch podcast. It is. It's so fun when I get to wake up and I have somebody like you on the show. So thanks for being here. I

appreciate it. It's a it's a lot of pressure, but I'll try my best to live up to the high expectations here. Let's,

let's walk this path together. Okay, all right, so where? So where I want to start is that day, if we could kind of go back in time. What happened that caused your life to change?

Yeah, so June 29 2020 in the middle of the covid pandemic. I live here in Canada, so we were fully under lockdowns. We weren't able to leave our houses for anything outside of groceries, really. That was it. Unless you were an essential worker working at the hospital, you were on full lockdown. And the week of the 29th of June, we had a one week window where we were able to go and go do things that we needed to do, right, like maintenance work. So I went to go to my barber shop for a haircut to clean myself up for my corporate consulting job that I was working at the time and my virtual calls. And as I was walking into that barber shop, I got caught in the middle of a drive by shooting. It was gang related. I just happened to be a bystander who was walking in to get my hair cut, and I got hit three times. So I got hit once in the left knee, which actually wasn't too big of a deal. It was like a ricochet bullet. It was like a really bad paper cut, is the best way to explain it. The second bullet hit me in the left side of my chest, so it actually entered at the lower left part of my shoulder blade and exited at the top left of my collarbone. So it managed to break like four or five of my ribs, like all. All of my ribs were basically broken, but it missed my heart and it missed my lungs. Um, it's slightly bruised my lung, but all in all, you know, if it was just that bullet that hit me, I would have been like the greatest walking miracle in history of the world.

So how far away? How far away was, how far away was the bullet hole for millimeters?

Yeah, millimeters, like you could, you could kind of see here. It's hard to see now, because this is the exit wound, but it's right around here. Is where it would have exited and where it came in was right around there. So the

fact pointing right above the heart, and it's coming right, like mid shoulder, I mean, millimeters is what you said. That is like, I'm just exactly I have goosebumps from everything you're saying. But that's not that. It wasn't you got hit a third time.

I got hit a third time, and that was where all of my problems started to happen. So the third bullet that hit me, it severed the femoral artery in my right leg. So it hit me right in the quad. And because the arteries of your right leg is one of the it's the second worst spot that you can get hit, right? So what a lot of people don't know is it's actually more deadly to get hit in the femoral artery by a bullet than it is to get hit in the head. Now, your quality of life that you survive is going to be very different from the two different injuries, right? But because you bleed out so quickly, the only way to stop a bullet from the femoral artery from killing you, is to get a tourniquet on your leg immediately, right? So after I was hit with all three bullets, I was able, I was lucky enough, in the process, to shield a woman from being shot. Um, so lucky is a weird word to use there.

She was actually the target. No,

no, so she wasn't so what ended up happening is, as I was walking into the barber shop, because it was covid, they don't want anybody touching the door handles, and they were super strict with everything, so she was holding the door open for for me. Her husband owns the barber shop, and the target of the shooting happened to own a store that was attached to the barber shop. So she was holding the door open for me. I'm about 1012, feet from the door, walking up, and he's sitting on the bench about five feet from the door, so he sees two cars pull up. He knows that they're after him. He sprints through the door that's being opened for me, and then I was able to, kind of like, hesitate and grab the woman who was holding the door open for me, launched the two of us into the shop, and I I'm like, six to 190 pounds, so I'm a little bit bigger than she was, and I was able to shield her with my body, and I took the three bullets, um, kind of for her, and then she was able to immediately return the favor for me. Um, as I was laying on the ground inside the shop, bleeding out, she began compressing my wounds. Particularly she compressed the right leg wound that was bleeding pretty bad, and then I was compressing my chest. That

was the fat, was the artery, and we have, or like those, those arteries, you can die, like, within minutes, because it just bleeds out so fast,

exactly. So I was told that by like the doctors that I saw that night, what ended up happening was there was a police officer on scene in four minutes, and he got a tourniquet in my leg, on my leg in that four minute window, and he was able to stop the bleeding enough for me to make it to the hospital. But I was told, had it been four minutes and 30 seconds that he showed up and got the tourniquet on my leg, it could have been a very different story for me. So that extra 30 seconds quite literally saved my life in the response time. And then when I was able to make it to the hospital, they told my parents that there was about a 5050 shot that I was going to survive the night because of the massive blood loss, and they prepared them for me to wake up as an amputee. So they said there was about a 10 10% chance I would keep my right leg due to the blood pooling. What they did is they did a double fasciotomy, and then they did an eight hour femoral bypass surgery, but very fortunately, I was in that 10% who was lucky enough to keep both my leg and my life. So it worked out in my favor, all things considered. So

before you continue, I got to go back to you're going out to get your hair cut, right? It's just like it what comes to you when you think about it right now in terms, and I said it in the intro, it's like things can happen anywhere, anytime. How, when you're walking and you're about to, like, get through that door, and all of a sudden, did you feel that first bullet, and then you kind of dove on the woman, like, what? Because you're, you're, you are truly a hero, right? You saved that woman's life, and in doing so, took the three bullets, what? What made you just be like, I, you know, I'm diving on her like, because you're, you're a very large person. You're six, two, as you said, 190 what? How did that like? What would happen to you?

It's interesting, because I think for me. Is more fight or flight than anything else, right? And I've actually, I didn't know that I shielded her until she told me. So I guess there's video footage of everything, and we talked the first way

there is video footage of all of this.

There's video there's like four angles. Now I don't have access to it, but I've seen it, and anyways, it was one of the things that she reached out and kind of shared with me. And that's in those moments, what I do remember is I remember very clearly turning around, noticing there was a threat, right? Like seeing the shooters kind of propped up outside of the car. And then I guess instinctively my reaction, because she kind of froze a little bit at the door, was to stop, like, give her the opportunity, and then get the two of us in there. So I'd love to say that I've been waiting this moment my whole life, and it was, you know, my opportunity to to shield a woman from gunfire. But the reality of the situation is, it was just a fight or flight reaction from me to use my body to shield her. You know, I wasn't going to just throw her to the side and leave her out there in the middle of gunfire, right? So it was just as instinctual as it could be, and I didn't really feel the bullets when they hit me too much, which is another interesting thing, and I've spoken to a lot of gunshot survivors, and the experiences do vary, for sure, but for me, I didn't realize I'd been shot until I was in the barber shop. I actually kept running on the leg that took a bullet to the femoral artery for probably about 10 steps before passing to the ground. So I don't remember the exact feeling of being hit. It wasn't nearly as painful as you would anticipate it to be, though, because you have so much adrenaline going in a moment like that. So

now take me to the hospital, and as you said, that your parents had been told, Hey, most likely, 90% chance you're going to have to lose your leg, it's going to be amputated, and you wake up from this, from this traumatic experience, and what happened?

Yeah, I felt like I just won the lottery, right? I remember the first thing I did, actually, the first thing I did, funny enough was I kind of like flirted with my nurse a little bit, I guess I was, and it was the last, it was the same nurse who was there the night that I got shot, and I remember flirting with her before going under. And then I woke up and did the same thing. But after that, when I did realize that I was alive, that was good. And then I remember the first thing I did is I looked down at my leg and realized that I still had my leg attached to my body, and now it was pretty beat up, right? I had massive holes in both sides. It was super swollen. I was not in good condition by any means, but I felt like I'd won the lottery, right? Because in my mind, I was still here. I still had a chance, and all I needed was a 1% chance to be able to get back to the version of myself that I previously was. And in my mind, that was enough, you know, like I knew that I was going to be capable of winning the battle with the battle was just showing up and fighting every day. I just

okay that, but that's your, that is your, that is innate in you. You are a fighter. You had no doubt. But when the doctor told you your diagnosis, what exactly did he say?

Yeah, so I don't remember the exact words I was honestly, I was probably pretty foggy that first day, but they explained what the prognosis was and the surgery was. So they did a they did the double fascio me, like I said, which is they basically sliced like massive incisions in my right, like the bottom quadrant of my leg. And the reason they did that was to prevent the pooling of blood, which would have destroyed all the nerve function in the leg. And then they did a femoral bypass surgery where they took the saphenous vein out of my left leg and replaced the artery in my right leg. So I had a vein replacing the artery. And they basically told me, you know, that I was fortunate to be alive and kept my leg, but it was very unlikely I was going to be back to, let's say, like playing sports like I was before, and doing these high level things. You know, walking was the goal, really, if I could get to that point and walk independently, that would be considered a victory.

Was there ever a doubt that they thought there might be a chance you can't walk again?

There was never a doubt that I wouldn't be able to walk again. It was that I wouldn't be able to walk normally again. So I'd be able to, you know, walk down the street, let's say, with my family, but I wouldn't be able to go out for a long walk, let's say, right? I certainly wasn't guaranteed to be able to play sports, to do live the life that I previously was living, right? So I the

before you go on, before you go on, though, I want to ask you, prior to this event, had you always had this very much, the positive mindset, like I can do anything, had that always been like, ingrained in you?

Yeah. Yeah, I think it depends in the circumstance. So it's funny, because people see me as this super positive person, and I love going through like hardship. As weird as that sounds, I love the intense struggles of life now, there are certainly little things that irritate me on a day to day basis, that probably irritate me a little bit less now, but did, for sure, irritate me for a long time, but when my back was really up against the wall, I was able to remain pretty resilient for most of my life. I think I actually thrive in those situations. And it's a big testament to my upbringing. You know, my dad, if he taught me one thing, you know, it was that I could do anything that I set my mind to, and to never be a victim. It was probably the biggest lesson that I had growing up, and I

know that very interesting, never be a victim.

Yeah, it's funny, because it's it's very controversial. There's a lot of people who agree with that and disagree with that, but for me, it was the single most important lesson I ever learned when it came to my recovery, because I didn't see myself as a victim, right? Like, I actually remember. It's funny. Maybe it makes me seem like a jerk, but there's a victim support worker in the hospital whose job is to basically find you, you know, all of these resources and all of this stuff, and she coddles you a ton. And it's kind of like she's just trying to, you know, support you. But it was support through, like, I think over empathetic teaching, and I remember basically telling her, like, I'm not interested in what you're selling. I appreciate what you're doing, but like, Please don't come into my room again. And she was actually the last person had who had to give me clearance to leave the hospital. So like, I told off. My victim support worker told her I didn't want to steer, but I was a

victor here. This is what I stand for. And she had, and

that's it, right? And so she had to sign off. So she actually didn't sign off. She was the only person. But I just left, which is a whole different thing. I just, like, checked. So I called my parents, and I just said, Hey, listen, I've gotten clearance to go, come pick me up. And they showed up at the hospital, and they're like, we never gave him clearance to leave, but one of my the general surgeons, who was helping me on a day to day basis, gave me clearance so long as I worked with my physios. They made me walk down the hallway with with a walker and walk up two steps, and they said, If I could do that, I could leave. But they didn't think I was going to be able to be able to do that for a couple weeks, but the day that they told me to do that, I'm like, All right, let's do it right now. And I like, just will I remember, it was harder than any marathon I've ever run. It was the single hardest thing I've ever done in my life was walk 20 steps down the hall and up two stairs and back to my room. But that was my test for for leaving. So I was able to beat out the victim support worker and override her ruling, because it

is so interesting when we think about that. It's just over four years now, and you have done some of the most incredible accomplishments. Can you share with us a few of the things that, honestly, people probably never thought you were going to be able

to do. Yeah. I mean, the biggest thing for me, and I'll talk about my physical recovery after but the biggest accomplishments in my life, in a weird way, have nothing to do really with me, right? So, like, my biggest accomplishment is starting to hit the ground running, which is my charity that helps other trauma survivors access quality resources to physiotherapy and psychotherapy, as well as like other medical costs. And I look at a kid like Gavin, who I've worked with. He's gunshot survivor, shot in the spine, totally never walk again due to paralysis, and he's starting to make these strides that the doctors never thought were possible, right? And we were covering for him to get into physio three to five days a week at a top tier neuro physio specialist, I've mentored him very closely, one on one, and held him accountable throughout his recovery and pushed him harder than maybe he would have been able to push himself. And seeing him make these strides he is, for example, he was able to walk with a walker and his spasms like two months ago, right? Which was never supposed to be in the cards for him. He's now walking with braces and crutches, which, again, was never supposed to be in the cards for him. So he's making all of this progress because of this little charity that I built, when in reality, there's these massive systems in place that are supposed to be helping him, that are providing him the same sort of care. So my biggest accomplishment. Here's

the thing I do want to I do want to ask you, what do you think with your charity and with what you were able to accomplish, what this boy is trying to accomplish now, what's the difference between being able to actually have these miracles happen, and the ones and the people out there that it's never going to happen for them, what's the difference? What are you when you say, I've been meeting with him, what are you doing for him? How are you helping him?

Yeah, so I'll give you a two part answer, because I think there's only so much that I can do. Right? So it's the same as like, let's say, an insurance provider or public health care, I give these kids additional resources that these other outlets don't give them, right? So when it comes to spinal cord injuries, in particular, if you're not making immediate progress in your recovery journey, you lose your physiotherapy care, right? So the goal of you know what your insurance provider would cover is to help you adjust to life in a wheelchair, and then get you off of insurance because they don't want to keep paying for you, right? But the reality is, the recovery from these sort of situations is a long term gain, right? It could be 510, 20 years for you to make any sort of relevant progress, but if you're not making immediate progress, they cut you off. So I provide more care to these kids. And like I look for, like, 0.01% wins, right? Like, we slowly start to compile those. And it goes further. But the second biggest thing, you know, it comes down to the kids that I work with, right? And I am very particular with the kids that my charity and, you know, young adults that my charity supports, particularly because I want people who are going to show up every day and believe in themselves, right? And when you go through a situation like this and people are writing you off, it's really hard to continue to show up and fight and believe in yourself. But the kids that I work with, what I tell them is, you might not ever walk again, right? I don't know. I am not a doctor. I don't have that experience, but if you keep fighting every single day, and you show up for yourself, you're going to be happy with the person that you become along that journey, right? Like it's not about that end goal, it's about just pushing forward and and kind of blindly hoping that it's going to happen. And you know, I'd like to say that I take a lot of credit for for their recoveries, but, you know, I'm just the guy who provides them with the opportunity. I can't show up every day for them. I can't force them to do this work. So I think the biggest difference is the combination of, we believe in our people. We really, really, really believe in them, and we empower them to leverage the resources that we're providing them, which is really different, I think, than the other systems we have in place. So I think

that I can, Okay, keep going. No, please go. I

was just gonna say I think that I could maybe give them, like, a 20% greater likelihood of actually attaining the goals that they set out for themselves, if that just by providing them the support. But it's all on them at the end of the day, which is why I'm so particular with the individuals that we help, because I need to know at least from the start, they're gonna, they're gonna show up for themselves, or else, you know, we're a small organization. I can't afford to be, you know, burning money on people who don't actually care as deeply about their recovery as I care about their recovery.

So what, what process do you go through to make that decision? You're meeting somebody, you know, how do you how do you decide, yeah, I'm gonna be able to help you, or,

yeah, it's a good question. And I wish I had this, like, formalized, like, you know, 10 everyone

out there is trying to figure out, like, oh, do tell. Do tell, because we all could use this, like, you know,

but is, I think I've built up such a good understanding of what tools somebody needs to have to be able to be resilient in their recovery just by speaking with them, right and learning and like one of the things, for example, that I really use as a gage. And again, different thoughts. Maybe people don't like this, but if somebody's first inquiry that they speak with me is about money. I'm almost, I'm almost, I'm much less likely to support them. And I say that because I don't like there's a lot of people out there who are looking for a quick fix to their problems, but then there's people out there who are willing to put in the time and the effort. And I look at a kid like Isaiah, when he reached out to me, he didn't ask for $1 he didn't want funding from hit the ground running. He reached out and said, Isaiah is one of the kids we're working with now. He reached out and said, Look, man, this is what just happened to me. I need some friends who've been through this. I need people who understand it. I'm ready to work hard. I'm ready to do everything. I need I just need some guidance. I don't know where to go. And that was a kid that he actually like multiple times I'm like, I'm going to fundraise for you. And he's like, No, it's fine. I don't need your money. And I know he does need the money, but it's like he just cared so much about having a team around him and showing up and having a group that was, like, empowered with him, and those are the people I want to support, right? I knew that he wasn't just using me, but instead, he wanted to be his own catalyst for growth, right? And there's different people who are going through different things. I understand how much of a burden the financial side of this stuff is, right? I burned through all of my savings in my early 20s to focus on my rehab. It sucks. I wouldn't wish it on anybody, right? But at the end of the day, I really get a feel for the individuals that I work with, and I will tell people, know, if I feel like they're just taking advantage of the thing that I spent so much time and unpaid, you know, parts of my life trying to build, because you can't. You can. Empower people to become resilient, but you can't, I don't know, like you can't support people who don't want the help. So it's, it's not a perfect system, by any means, but I'll set up a call chat with people, and once I get a good understanding for for how I feel, they're going to show up for themselves, and how, you know how much I can actually make an impression on them to keep pushing, and then we'll go from there. But I am very hard on the individuals that I work with, and hard in a way that I love and want to see them recover. And I will be their biggest cheerleader when they need it, and their biggest advocate. But I will also be, you know, it's not a free ride easy thing to do. Either it's I will be their biggest critic, I guess, if they if they need that level of support as well.

You know, it's incredible what you're talking about with resilience. And I do, like kind of that test of if it's money, a lot of times people, even, you know, even business people, are like, Oh, if I don't make this amount, then I'm not successful. Yet, it's kind of that concept of the more that you can impact, the more you'll end up making. And so I like how you position that take us to when you started your journey on coming back and coming into your own form of resilience, right? We talk about the relaunch process, and step two is actually resilience. Like, how do you how did you tap into that kind of like, that, that reservoir within yourself, because it wasn't a quick it wasn't a quick recovery. Tell us more about that process.

No, yeah, it was. It was long and intense and it was multifaceted, right? I think one of the things that people look at in my recovery journey is they see just the physical side of recovery, but the psychological side in a situation like this is equally, if not more, important, right? So I was lucky to have a pretty good baseline where I didn't want to feel like a victim, and I also I understood that I had the ability to tell an exceptional story, and now it was just about writing it right, as cheesy as maybe that sounds. And on day two in the hospital, I opted out of all pain medication because I wanted to be present. I wanted to feel everything that I was going through, and it was a lot of physical pain, but I really worked on that psychological side from from like, the first moments I was, you know, awake after the shooting, right? So I started reading books, I started journaling, I started processing everything. And then as I got out of the hospital, I got into physiotherapy, and I was working out five hours a day, seven days a week. I was very lucky. I had a best friend who was a physiotherapist, and, like, I still, he's still my best friend. And user happens to be a physiotherapist, and he wasn't working at the time. I got shot because of the covid pandemic. So I was in the best way, you know, in the weirdest way, the best candidate to get shot as a bystander, right? I was young, healthy before Best Friends of physio, and what the beautiful part of having your best friend doing your rehab is, is they can push you a hell of a lot further than any other clinical physio is going to push you, because they know your limitations, and also they know that you're not going to pursue them. They know there's no liability there. They know they're not going to lose your business if they push you too hard. He pushed me so hard that physio was 100 times more painful and intense than getting shot. It wasn't even in the same stratosphere. I remember the first few days what he would do. I still had bullet fragment in my leg, and he would bend my leg back, push the shrapnel further into my leg to try to open up the like, the hamstring, or whatever it is, to, like, help straighten my leg out. And it was so painful. He'd put a pillow in front of my face and just be like, bite down and scream in the pillow. You know,

best friend, can do. We're gonna get you out there again. We're gonna have now. You did? You did? I think it was one year after you were shot. You did something pretty miraculous that people never thought you could have done. Can you share with us what you did?

Yeah, so I ran my first marathon 13 months after the shooting. I wish it was one year, which bothered me a little bit, but

okay, 1213, months, we've got to be a little bit, you know, give ourselves a little grace, yeah,

but yeah, 13 months after everything, after everything, started my recovery journey. I ran my first marathon, and that was really a testament to Frank, right? And the reason that idea actually started is because I went into a physiotherapy clinic that my insurance provider was covering, and they told I asked him, I said, I want to run a marathon within the year. And he told me, there's absolutely no chance you'll be able to do that. You'll be lucky if you can run period by February, and this was in June, like July, right at this point. So that's what seven like eight. That's like almost a year like, I mean, that's what eight months, or whatever it is, nine months. Is that they were saying I'd maybe be able to run, like, a kilometer, right? And I went and told my best friend that. And at the time, we actually hadn't started working together. I was just going to insurance Vizio, and he looked at me and said, That guy doesn't know you. He knows nothing. Yeah, we're going to make it happen. And it was just this blind hope, this blind optimism. And now we had a goal, and we started working our tails off. And I ran that marathon in about four hours, so not overly fast or anything like that, but I think still a pretty respectable time. And I'd

say it's very respectable. That's incredible. Oh my gosh, when I when I heard that first time you told me that, I just, you know, a lot of times we think about, like, the negatives around, oh, goal setting, but it's really you had something that you knew. I'm a big, firm believer in goals, putting them out there, because even if you could only finish half of that marathon, right, even if you didn't finish all you had something that you were so focused on that it didn't leave any room for it's not going to happen. You were going to do it. It's

funny, too. So I had, like, 10 months into everything I did what's called an ECG test, and they test how my nerves work in my right leg. And I remember I went into the doctor, and I was in the middle of marathon training, and he does the test, and the results were terrible. They were really bad. My nerves were not working well in that right leg, and I don't have big toe extension. There's certain limitations that I have from the shooting. And I asked my doctor, I was like, Do you think I can run a marathon, you know, in the next four months, or whatever it was. And he looked at me and he said, there's absolutely no chance. Like you, you, I don't even know how you walked in here, normally. Is what he said to me. And I looked at him, was okay, well, like, it's funny, you say that because I ran a half marathon that same morning, like, just in my training process, I ran like, 21 and a half kilometers, or whatever it is. And he just looked at me, like, I speak in a different language. He's like, I guess we'll run some more tests then. And like, there was no answer. He couldn't figure out how it happened. And I guess, like, what I learned from that is these medical professionals only know how to think in one way, right? And they're exceptional. They the medical industry saved my life. There's a lot of awesome, awesome, awesome people there. But if you take everything they say with 100% truth, you're leaving a lot on the table, right? And, you know, I was 23 young, healthy, driven, but they were treating me as if I was, you know, an 85 year old man who'd been through what I'd been through, right? So, so, yeah, but the journey was incredible, and it's, it's funny you talk about goal setting, because I I'm just, I just started training. I'm going to do an Ironman a year from today. So August, 2025 which is, let

me tell you, one of my absolute best friends. I mean, she is just incredible. I was her Sherpa at her Iron Man. I literally carried her stuff. I was up there. I was doing it. I have never seen anybody go through such. I mean, athletic like prowess on the you know, 10 times that it was so incredible to watch. So I'm sitting here like blown away by you. But we gotta, I have one other question before we wrap up, and that is a lot of times in my own coaching practice, I'll go ahead and say, not only do I want you to kind of Port yourself to the future and talk to that future version of you, but I also like to transport you back to a younger version. And let's say you're being transported right now to that morning before it happened. What advice would you give that Brandon,

yeah, never had, and I've never thought about that question. I if I was to go back to the morning and talk to the version of myself before I'd been shot, I would tell that version of myself to live my life in a way that if I was to die that same day, I'd be proud of the legacy that I left behind, right? And that's a theme that echoed so much throughout my entire recovery. It's why I switched my career entirely, right? I was a corporate consultant, you know? I thought that was the dream, right? You know, you get paid well to go out for drinks and do whatever, and, you know, business stuff, that's what you're that's what I was taught as a kid. Was the dream. And then after I got shot, I totally changed the way that I looked at the world, right? And I started my not for profit. I'm now, funny enough, I'm also consulting, but I'm consulting on my terms, doing it for not for profits, in a field that I love, in a demographic that I care about. And I guess what I'm saying is in the way that I live my life, I try to live it so that if I was to die tomorrow, I'd be proud of what my friends had to say about me at my funeral, right and before I was shot, I never would. Thought about my life in that way, and I would have just kept pushing those dreams and aspirations that I had off until they were probably too late and I wouldn't be able to chase them. So that's what I would go tell myself. And so what? What

an what a powerful message for all of us to think about and to really incorporate into our lives. My dad used to say that, if you were to die today, what do you want to make sure you've done? It's great. So at this point, if we want to support, hit the ground running. We want to support all that you're doing, for raising funds for trauma victims, where do we go

trauma survivors? But you go to W

I love that. Thank you for saying that you're right. Never again will I say that they're not victims, they're survivors. Very good. Thank you,

Emily for pointing that out the last little just on that, because I think it's so important, and it's the one piece of advice I always try to give people, is like you are only a victim to somebody or some situation if you allow yourself to be right. Like in my case with the shooting, it was if I died the night that I was shot. I was a victim of the shooters, right? But the morning after, when I had a fighting chance, and it was all in my control, and I was accountable to myself and no one else. It wasn't on them anymore. You know, it's all on you, and it's easy to use the people who changed your life as a scapegoat, but it's all accountability, right? And I think that's really important. That's what I tell all the kids that I work with. But if you want to support me in that practice and hit the ground running, our website is www dot htgr, charity.com. So like hit the ground running charity.com. We're fully tax deductible in Canada and the United States, both now and if you know somebody who could benefit from the work that we're doing. We're small and growing still. But if there's ways that I can help in my limited capacity, I think that's the purpose that I'm on the zerf for now. So and then if you want to check out my Instagram at peacock like the bird. Underscore, Brandon or htgr charity is our charity page,

Brandon, peacock, you are truly a hero. I mean, my heart is so big right now. Thank you for being on the show. We will have all of this information in the show notes. And I, I want to continue to follow your journey, your success. I know that there's, there's a true friendship here now, and I have no doubt that at your age, where you're going, your impact is going to forget about 10x this thing's going to go so big because of who you are, your resilience and the fact that you have drive. I mean, the fact that you did that marathon, you're going for an iron man now. God love you. I mean, I just, I'm high fiving you. I'm high tenning You. I'm doing everything. Big hugs to you. Thank you again for being here and everyone listening. Wow. I mean, Brandon's given us so many words of wisdom. Let's really think about it. Let's think about when you wake up in the morning, how are you approaching the day? Because you don't know. Nobody knows, and so, you know, I always like to say, live now, love now, it is time to relaunch. Now we'll see you next week. Everyone take care.