Robert Pardi: How Journaling Helped Me Be More Calm, Mindful And Resilient

An Interview With Heidi Sander

Connection to the Present Moment. Mindfulness is misunderstood by many, yet it simply means our ability to be fully present. Author Jon Kabat-Zinn defines mindfulness as a means paying attention in a particular way: “on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally”. In other words, to be aware of where we are and what we’re doing. As you heard throughout my story, journaling raised my awareness. A direct outcome of my increased awareness was my being more engaged in the present moment. Becoming more mindful will support and strengthen your personal power.

As a part of this series, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Robert Pardi.

Robert is one of those rare individuals who embraces change and lives by a philosophy which he calls “possibility in action” — taking his desire for transformation and putting it into action daily. Born in NYC, Robert has also lived in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Rome and now lives in Abruzzo. He received his MBA from Columbia University and was quickly recruited by one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority in 1997. It was shortly after accepting the position that he and his wife were confronted with an extreme life event that shook the very foundation of all their hopes and dreams. Desiree, his wife, was diagnosed with late breast cancer right before her 31st birthday. Unfortunately, she succumbed to metastatic breast cancer 11 years after her diagnosis. Following her death, Robert re-assessed his life and decided to share the many lessons he learned by becoming a Certified Life Coach. In addition, he pursued a childhood dream to live in Italy and now lives in the same small Italian village his great grandfather immigrated from. Robert is the Author of Chasing Life — The remarkable true story of love, joy, and achievement against all odds. Additionally, he is a well-known compelling keynote speaker who has addressed key groups at institutions such as Columbia Presbyterian Weill Cornell, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Stony Brook University, and Leslie’s Week, and an adjunct professor.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! We really appreciate the courage it takes to publicly share your story of healing. Before we start, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your background and your childhood backstory?

My story starts by growing up in a dysfunctional relationship with my alcoholic father. A relationship, that despite its trials, taught me to be introspective, resilient, and gritty. These were all invaluable tools I leveraged and continue to leverage to confront uncertainty in life and harness change for growth.

Later in life, I was blessed to meet an incredible woman during my sophomore year of college. We married at what is now considered a very young age. She was 21, and I was 23.

Unfortunately, right before her 31st birthday she was diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer. The tools I learned as a child proved invaluable. Despite her diagnosis, numerous surgeries, and multiple treatments, we thrived. In fact, she became a prominent figure in the world of palliative care. I, doing all that was necessary to help her achieve her goals, morphed into her impromptu life coach and full-time caregiver towards the end of her 11-year journey with metastatic breast cancer.

After her passing, I returned to my finance job in Dubai. The problem was I could no longer connect to my old life. Something seemed to be lacking. It was while I was in Dubai that I looked inside at the widower. A word which had become my unrequested labeled. I had lost my identity, and after deep reflection through journaling, I realized that I had had a profound shift in my values and purpose.

Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about journaling. Have you been writing in your journal for a long time or was there a challenging situation that prompted you to start journal writing? If you feel comfortable sharing the situation with us, it could help other readers.

I appreciate you asking if I feel comfortable sharing. One of the many lessons I have learned over the years is that our experiences only have value if we share them with others for their own growth. Therefore, my answers are yes, yes, and yes.

My childhood was marred with uncertainty. Would my father be drunk and hit me? Would my father be drunk and slobber me with kisses? Would he be sober? This created in me a need to try and make sense out of the senseless. I turned to journaling. Not as I journal today, but back then I would write to escape. I would write to look for patterns for what was happening. I would write as a way to release silent tears. I never wanted to cry in front of my father. Yet, I felt unwanted, I felt unloved — simply put I felt it was wrong for me to be alive. I felt like everything was my fault and writing helped me let it all out.

I think it is fair to mention that before writing, I had an imaginary friend who I would talk to regularly about what was happening. His name was Filbert and our conversations allowed me to dissipate the fears. As time passed, my journal took the place of Filbert.

By the time I entered college, I was journaling almost every day. It became like air for me. I’d dare say it became necessary for survival. It allowed me to remain focused and have clarity during many challenges in my life.

Yet, it was my wife’s illness which resulted in her evolution and my truly awakening. My caregiving story is very unusual because my wife asked me to deal with all the medical information. She did not want to know specifics. For example, she did not know the size of her tumor, the number of lymph nodes involved as well as a plethora of other facts. It was journaling that kept me focused, grounded, and helped me understand important life lessons such as purpose, surrender, and impermanence.

How did journaling help you heal, mentally, emotionally and spiritually?

This is such a great question because healing is at the core of journaling. The more I journaled, the more self-awareness I attained. I realized it is how we see the world which determines how we will live in the world. If we think of our perspective as a kaleidoscope, journaling helped me grasp the meaning of the different colors and when it was necessary to turn the dial. This is at the heart of living consciously.

We are the stories we tell ourselves. Our identity is directly related to those stories. The question is are we playing the role we want in that story? Who wrote the story we have been living? In other words, who is holding the pen?

Journaling allowed me to answer those questions. It allowed me to uncover expectations and challenge my assumptions and beliefs. It allowed me to see if they were true or if I was living something out of habit. Many of the beliefs and assumptions we carry with us were learned or better, we absorbed during childhood. They then became habitual because our brain needs habits to function efficiently. It was through journaling that I was able to disrupt habitual patterns, question limiting beliefs, understand fears, and remove the unnecessary.

During my wife’s 11-year journey with metastatic breast cancer, journaling allowed me to overcome fears of loss, find purpose, connect to joy in the present moment, and learn to surrender. I would like to offer a sidebar as well. If you noticed, I use the word journey when talking about my wife’s illness, not battle. This is a conscious choice which came directly from my journaling. My journaling helped me find strength in vulnerability which, in turn, allowed my wife and I to communicate deeply and fully. We were able to understand everything is part of the journey of life. That does not mean we were passive, but it meant we made a conscious choice to not live on a battlefield.

I healed mentally, emotionally, and spiritually by rewriting my narrative, by becoming active in directing the story of my life. I became the main character, the one aligned with my values. Journaling connected me to my internal power. Some call this power intuition, divine energy, or God. Regardless of the definition, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that journaling put me in touch with knowledge that was blocked by generational programming or what we now call “Culturescape.”

Did journaling help you find more self-compassion and gratitude? Can you share a story about that?

That is the beauty of journaling. Journaling creates a safe space to explore your thoughts, efforts, and actions. I found that the more I learned about myself and supported myself through conscious choices, the more self-compassion and gratitude I felt. In fact, the biggest lesson I learned through journaling was if I am happy with who I am, I must be grateful for everything in my life because it made me who I am. If I am not happy who I am, I need to take action to change what I can and let go of what I can’t change.

When my wife’s cancer recurred, I was floored. I really hadn’t expected it to return and had no idea how to accept the word terminal. I literally fell apart, just when my wife needed me more than ever. I beat myself up for that. Yet, it was journaling that allowed me to dismantle expectations, forgive myself and share my overwhelm with my wife. I discovered the value in surrender, the clarity in impermanence, and that it was impossible for me to be superman or God. All I could do was to focus on the moment and do my best for her. And it was by focusing on the moment that I understood gratitude. That each moment was precious, and it is only when one values the ordinary moments that one lives and extraordinary life. That every moment we had together, regardless of adversity, was something to be grateful for.

What kind of content goes into your journal? For example, do you free-write, write poems, doodle?

Most of my journaling is free writing, but there is a method to my madness. I do not know if you have ever read Conversations with God. I was gifted the book right by an incredible friend after my wife was first diagnosed. It became, in a way, the template of how my journaling was to evolve. My journaling is based on questions.

As I mentioned earlier, we are our stories. Our identity is based on our stories and most of that tends to happen on autopilot. Journaling allows me to test my ideas and beliefs for validity and usefulness. It allows me to pay attention to how I am showing up in the world. Am I reacting or responding? It allows me to see other realities by asking the first question we learn as children: “Why?”

It is such a powerful question, yet, as we age, we stop asking why and we make assumptions. We habitually seek and enter accordance with that which what makes sense to us. Our ego, or we can call it our little self, will defend the construct we have created. Hence resulting in our ability to create self-fulfilling prophecies or experience the priming effect. The question of “why” changes all of that. “Why” shines a bright light and once we have seen contrast, we can’t un-forget it.

In fact, there is a root cause analysis technique in business called the “Five Whys”. The primary goal of this is to uncover the root cause of a problem by successively asking the question “Why?”. Makes you think about how intelligent we truly are as children, right?

When I journal, I also use something I call the Compass of Curiosity to understand if I am “beaming” on the positive or negative side when engaging in life. B.E.A.M stands for Beliefs, Experiences, Actions and Mindset. I raise questions about my behavior during the day. I ask myself the following questions:

1. What could I have done differently to have avoided the negative side of the compass?
2. What practices could I put into place tomorrow?
3. What do I want to be proud of tomorrow?

I end my journaling with gratitude which I view somewhat differently. Gratitude, to me, is not about listing some nice things but understand the concept of loss. Why am I grateful for such and such? Meaning, what is the emotion that I would miss if that item/person/experience is no longer in my life?

How did you gain a different perspective on life and your emotions while writing in your journal? Can you please share a story about what you mean?

This is such an amazing question, and while I could give you a few examples, I think the most important concept that helped me gain a different perspective is that of impermanence. Again, I will return to the darkest time of my life, which surprisingly was not her death, but was when my wife was labeled terminal. When she was first diagnosed, hope reigned supreme. She was young, very fit, and wanted to pursue the most aggressive treatment possible. It seemed like a winning strategy. Yet not soon after her undergoing reconstructive surgery I was told that the cancer recurred in her liver. As I mentioned early, I was completely crushed by the news. Emotions ranged from anger to sadness to despair.

I remember picking up my journal soon after my wife reached out to pull me out of my melancholy. It was her angelic face over me while on my knees that woke me up. That night I started to write. I wrote feverishly. I asked why this was happening and how I could deal with it. I realized so much of my disappointment was due to the expectations I had of what I life was supposed to have been. My anger was tied to feeling life was unfair to my amazing wife who only wanted to help people. Then clarity shone through my words. None of us are meant to survive life. Everything changes. As sad as this sounds, we are born to die. It is what we do with the dash between the two dates. And it is impermanence that liberates us to live an amazing life.

Impermanence taught me how to surrender. There is only one outcome for all of us. It taught me how to value the present moment. That time is precious, and we need to treat it preciously. Time is our most valuable, non-renewable resource — are we going to waste it or use it? Exploring the concept of impermanence through my journaling revealed that constructive hope is not in hoping for a cure or miracle, because one day death comes to us all, but that constructive hope means hoping to make today the best it can be regardless of circumstances.

In my own journal writing, I ended up creating poems from some of the ideas and one of them won an award. Do you have plans with your journal content?

Actually, I have already done something with the ideas that come out of my journaling. I share them in a little podcast I created called Possibility In Action. The concept is to share nuggets of wisdom in 5 minutes or less. I get great joy out of recording the episodes which amplifies my own learnings.

A second exciting project is a book in the works. I have been, in a way, journaling with a friend for the last year through emails. We discuss and react to each other’s thoughts and opinions. We hope to publish some of our dialogue in 2022.

Fantastic. Here is our main question. In my journaling program, I have found that journaling can help people to become more calm, mindful and resilient. Based on your experience and research, can you please share with our readers “five ways that journaling can help you to be more calm, mindful and resilient”?

I love the way this question is framed because it is only through calmness and mindfulness that one can really access their resilience. Let me first explain that I believe we are all born resilient. It is not something for a select few. We have all had our back against the wall at one point where we said, “I can’t take one more thing.” and yet we did. That is resilience. The problem is the power of resilience comes from our accessing it at will, sort of like the force. And to access it, we need calmness and mindfulness.

I believe resilience is found at the intersection of Purpose, Perspective and Personal Power. Those are all direct outcomes of maintaining a journaling practice.

1. Awareness and Space.

Most people have heard the phrase “Know Thyself” which is the core tenant of journaling. It is the portal that opens one up to growth in all aspects of their life. Journaling creates space between you and your thoughts. You become the observer to those thoughts, not a slave to them. Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and author of A Man’s Search for Meaning said, “between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response and within our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

In turn, journaling broadens one’s perspective to see different sides of an issue and whether they are stuck in limiting beliefs. How can one grow if they do not know what beliefs they are carrying into their daily interactions? Think about someone that loses a job and says to themselves they will never find another job again. That “never”, that absolute, is limiting. Is it really a truth? Hence, awareness is by far the most important aspect of journaling. That awareness will help one gain control over their perspective, which is the first pillar of resilience. Increased command over one’s perspective will give them control over the narrative of their story.

2. Self-Mastery.

Personal power or agency are words used for the concept of self-mastery. This is the second pillar of resilience. According to Psychology Today, “Personal power is based on strength, confidence, and competence that individuals gradually acquire in the course of their development.”. I see Personal Power more as your ability to not be swept away from by emotions or caught up in drama. It is when one becomes an objective observer of their behaviors and can consciously choose how they respond, instead of reacting habitually. It leverages the space Viktor Frankl talks about. All choice leads to decisions and decisions lead to one’s destiny. Journaling provides a forum for us to nurture the observer and make conscious choices. The outcome is, again, more self-awareness which, according to Positive Psychology, is the ability to monitor our inner and external world.

3. Values.

One of the many reason people feel unsettled or lack calm in their life is they feel they are directionless. Journaling can help one focus in on their values and finally uncover their purpose. Values are the main sail which you need to hoist to harness the winds of growth in your life. The more you understand yourself, the more you will uncover your values. Values make up the soil where purpose grows. Purpose is the third pillar of resilience. I wanted to highlight how the concept of purpose has become something many people feel is unattainable. It does not have to be saving the planet. I would like to offer the following definition of purpose. Purpose is when your passions come into alignment with your values and you want to give away the results, not hold onto them for your own personal gain. It could be as simple as cooking a meal for your family. Finding purpose in your life is fundamental to being resilient.

4. Connection to the Present Moment.

Mindfulness is misunderstood by many, yet it simply means our ability to be fully present. Author Jon Kabat-Zinn defines mindfulness as a means paying attention in a particular way: “on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally”. In other words, to be aware of where we are and what we’re doing. As you heard throughout my story, journaling raised my awareness. A direct outcome of my increased awareness was my being more engaged in the present moment. Becoming more mindful will support and strengthen your personal power.

5. Self-Trust.

Think about how often we stuff things deep down that we don’t want to face. Or how often we stick our heads in the sand. What are we actually communicating to ourselves? Well, we are doing nothing more than supporting fears, and creating a belief we are not capable. Over time, this can generate an internal, subconscious feeling of self-betrayal. That self-betrayal will cause us to lose trust in ourselves. Trust is imperative for self-mastery and growth. Journaling, in turn, fosters increased self-trust. Self-trust, at its very core, means looking after your own needs and safety. It means nurturing an empowered attitude. Journaling allows us to take off our armor, be vulnerable, and look objectively at the hard stuff. Think about armor for a second. The more armor you have, the less you know your own strength. You associate your strength with the thickness of the armor and the weapons you wield. It is when you take off that armor that you will learn your true strength and power. Journaling offers the space to take off that armor, nurture an empowered attitude and rebuild self-trust.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of peace to the greatest amount of people, what would that be?

I have always been a believer in the collective. We are a social being which needs connection and as we learned through COVID, the lack of connection can be devasting. Therefore, I would like to see more communal discussions of life skills. What I mean by this is that we all have something to share. We have each been through something that could lead to the growth of someone or make those who participate feel like they belong. Feel like they are not alone. There is a group called the Death Café where often strangers, gather to eat cake, drink tea, and discuss death with no agenda, objectives, or themes. It is a discussion group rather than a support group or counselling session. I would love to see Life Café’s pop up where people discuss their life experiences and the lessons they have learned to move forward with curiosity, enthusiasm, and positivity. A friend and I are building something around this concept which we call the Piazza.

We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them. :-)

To be honest, there are so many people that come to mind but two people who I would truly enjoying meeting are Edith Eger and Will Smith. I recently read Will’s memoir and found his insights so aligned with how I see the world.

Edith Eger is a person I have admired for a long time. I never miss one of her Ted Talks and have read all her books. She is a Holocaust survivor, a specialist in post-traumatic stress disorder, and one of the most inspirational people around. She is an example of conscious living, resilience, mindfulness, and calm. Everything we have been talking about.

It would be an honor to meet either or both of them.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

The best place to find me is at www.robertpardi.com or they can go to the Chasing Life website to learn a little about the journey with my wife as www.chasinglifethebook.com. I am also very active on LinkedIn if someone wants to connect through that platform. It is always nice to meet new people.

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued fulfillment and success with your writing!

Thank you! This has been a real pleasure for me.