THE COIN IN MY HAND: A SIMPLE EXERCISE FOR WHEN YOU THINK YOU’VE LOST IT ALL.

When you think you've lost it all, take inventory of what you still have by trying this simple exercise.

Seventeen years ago this past May, I was paralyzed from the shoulders down in an off-road motorcycle accident. I spent nine days in the ICU and 81 days in an acute rehab facility.

Everything We'd Built Was on the Line

I had recently started a company with several partners and investors called Titan Brands Hospitality Group. It was May 2009 and we had a big deal fall through because the Great Recession had torpedoed it, and we'd spent nearly our first round of funding chasing that deal.

Las Vegas was in shambles. Property values were plummeting and the Strip was struggling. When I broke my neck, we had just started negotiating the lease for a new restaurant space and had never opened a restaurant. On top of that, we were competing for a management deal to develop and open a nightclub space in Arizona for a prominent tribe's new resort. Now, everything looked like it was lost. It would've been easy to quit right then.

Taking Inventory of What I Had Left

While I was in the rehab facility working hard to try to get something to move again, I was struggling to stay positive as I consciously began to take inventory of everything I couldn't do. I could no longer walk. I could no longer drive. I could no longer dress myself. On and on.

But then this mental picture came to mind. I pictured a coin in my hand. Heads was everything I couldn't do anymore. I would flip the coin over in my mind to tails, which was something I could still do. I told my girlfriend to get out a yellow pad of paper, and we wrote “heads” in one column and “tails” in another. I'd list something I couldn't do, and she'd write it in the heads column. Then I'd come up with something I could still do, and she'd write that in the tails column.

We filled page after page until I ran out of things I could no longer do, but I still kept listing things I could do. Seeing that list in front of me — proof that I could still do more than I couldn't — gave me empirical evidence that I had more than I had lost. That's the whole exercise: when a loss feels total, put it next to everything it didn't take, and let the page tell you the truth.

The Exercise: Heads and Tails

If you want to try this yourself, here's how it works:

1. Get a pen and two columns. — Label one “heads,” one “tails.” Nothing fancy — a yellow legal pad worked fine for me.

2. List everything the loss took from you. — Don't sugarcoat it. Write down every single thing, no matter how small.

3. List everything you still have. — For every item in the heads column, find something — anything — that goes in tails.

4. Keep going after the losses run out. — You'll hit a point where you can't think of anything else you've lost, but you can still keep adding to what you have. That's when the exercise starts working.

5. Look at the page, not just your head. — Seeing it in ink instead of just turning it over mentally is what makes the proof real.

Putting It to Work

I quickly insisted that my partners keep working on the lease and the proposal to the tribe. We moved a fax machine into the hospital room and got access to their Wi-Fi, which was not easy back in 2009. That let me review lease changes and start building a PowerPoint for our pitch to the tribe.

During those 81 days in rehab, my partners and I finished the restaurant lease, raised the money, hired an architect, and started construction on the first of what would become two restaurants on the Las Vegas Strip. We also pitched the tribe with my partners in Arizona and me leading it with a BlackBerry on speaker mode, wedged into my neck brace, in the hospital. My girlfriend flipped through the slides as we went, working the room over the phone with the team in Arizona — keep in mind, this was well before Zoom or video conferencing was common. We won the bid.

With two deals in hand, I made the bad joke that I should break my neck more often, since it was apparently good for business. The celebration didn't last.

Home Again: A New List

When I got home, it took five people to take care of me: my 74-year-old father, my 70-year-old mother with Parkinson's, my girlfriend, my 14-year-old son and 16-year-old daughter. We were frightened as we confronted our new reality. The obstacles seemed insurmountable.

A whole new list of things I couldn't do started forming in my head. But I'd already proven I could do more than I thought, simply by flipping the coin over. Once again, I had more to give than what had been taken from me. Filled with hope, my partners, our investors, my family, and I moved forward.

The Takeaway

The next time you're facing a loss that feels insurmountable, get out a coin, a pad of paper, and a pen, and start flipping the coin over. You'll be surprised by what you still have and what you're still capable of doing. That's resilience mindset in practice — not ignoring the loss, but refusing to let it be the only column on the page.

If this kind of thinking is useful to you, I write about it every week — the real mechanics of building a resilience mindset through physical, emotional, and business adversity. Follow me on Instagram and YouTube @scottallenfrost. And if you're an event organizer looking for a speaker who's lived this rather than studied it, I'd love to talk.