Are You Being Restored, or Re-Storied? How Changing Your Narrative Builds Resilience

There is a difference between those two words that took me a long time to fully understand.

Restored means you go back to what you were. The original condition. The baseline before the disruption arrived and changed everything.

Re-storied means you build something new from what you went through. Not back to before. Forward into after.

After the Miracle on the Hudson, everyone asked me the same question in different ways. Are you okay? Are you back to normal? Are you restored?

And for years I gave the answer that people were looking for. Yes. I am okay. Yes. I am back. But that was not the whole truth.

The whole truth is that January 15, 2009, did not restore me. It re-storied me. It took everything I had built across forty-seven years of living, the father and husband, the enterprise sales professional, the security director, the mentor’s student, and it burned it into something I had not yet become. Something with a mission attached to it that the previous version of me did not have in the same way.

The question I have been sitting with ever since is this one.

When the disruption comes, and it always comes, are you trying to get back to who you were? Or are you building toward who you are supposed to become?

In 2021, I had not swum seriously in over forty years. I weighed 258 pounds. And I signed up to swim 3.1 miles in the Hudson River Navy SEAL Swim to raise money for veterans transitioning from military to civilian life.

Not because I was ready. Because the mission was bigger than my comfort.

One hundred days later, I had lost twenty pounds and swum every one of those 3.1 miles. Not fast. Not gracefully. But completely.

That was not restoration. I was not the high school swimmer I had been at sixteen. I was something different. A sixty-something man who had survived a plane crash, built a global speaking platform, and decided that the second chance he had been given deserved to be spent doing hard things in service of people who had done hard things for others.

This year, that mission is taking me to Fiji.

My swim buddy is Bill Keefe. Together we are swimming 3.5 miles at the island of Namale for the Honor Foundation, supporting special operations veterans as they transition from military service into their next chapter. I weigh 208 pounds. Fifty pounds lighter than when I started this journey. Stronger than I have been in decades. Not restored. Re-storied.

Here is what I know about restoration versus re-storying after seventeen years of living the difference.

Restoration is passive. It happens to you. Time passes, wounds close, and gradually the familiar returns. There is value in that. But it has a ceiling. You can only be restored to the height of who you already were.

Re-storying is active. It requires a decision. A deliberate choice to take what the disruption revealed about you, the capacity you did not know you had, the mission you had not yet claimed, the version of yourself that the crisis called forward, and build the next chapter from that foundation instead of the previous one.

The question is not whether you have been through something hard enough to justify re-storying.

You have. We all have.

The question is whether you are willing to stop trying to get back and start building forward. The Miracle on the Hudson did not give me my old life back.

It gave me a better one. Not despite what happened on that river.

Because of what I decided to do with it.

That is the mission now. Helping leaders and organizations stop being restored and start being re-storied.

Your disruption is not the end of the story.

It is the beginning of the better one, your transformation.