Sit or Stand: Cory George’s triumph over adversity
By Mitchell Sasser | WeINSPIRE Reporter
HARRISONBURG, Va. -Motivational speaker, life coach, television host, and author Cory George tries to teach others grounding in one essential question: what have you learned about yourself through adversity?
No stranger to adversity, George is a survivor. Though raised by people he loved dearly, George witnessed the impact of beloved adults falling to drug and alcohol addiction and experienced six years of childhood rape at the hands of family.
Photo courtesy of Cory George Media
George was at work when he started writing, knowing that he had a message that needed to get out. He realized that this was his introduction to tell people that his purpose was discovered after he uncovered all of the hurt and pain he had been through.
“I realized that when I started sharing my story there were so many people, especially black men, who were going through what I was going through. For me it was about having come through some of these hard, rough circumstances in my life and having come out of it mostly successfully,” George said.
Not just surviving, but thriving is key to the essence of George’s message which is captured in his book Sit or Stand 2.0: Living Successfully Beyond your Shadows.
“Each chapter really lives on its own,” George said. “I didn’t intend it this way, but if I look at every chapter, every chapter is its own lesson. The chapter before is not required to go forward in the next chapter. That’s the way I think about it, that you can pick it up at any point and get something valuable for it.”
George said that going through abandonment issues with his father taught him everything that he did not want for his kid. He believes lived experiences like this yield a choice: falling into the same pattern of destructive behavior, or choosing a new path.
“I could have sat around and hid it and kind of lived in victim mode,” George said. “But every time I told the story and it connects with people, it pretty much affirms that I’m doing the right thing, it pretty much affirms when I get older black men at age fifty or sixty emailing me saying ‘that was me and I’m still living through it. Thank you for sharing your story, now I can finally get help before I get to the grave.’ That’s a monumental thing for me.”
Photo courtesy of Cory George Media
Sit or Stand 2.0 offers four critical areas of situation resolution. These areas are acceptance, forgiveness, reconciliation, and retention and application of wisdom.
“Once you’ve learned the best parts of a situation and how it can improve who you are, you must always retain that,” George said. “If you retain the wisdom and keep applying it, it will make your bounce back much quicker. Oftentimes, if we don’t heal, we just pile up stuff.”
While everyone has a different situation, George believes that in his self-help philosophy that every individual has a choice in how to overcome their troubles. With his book, he wants to offer tools that people can recycle and use over and over again
“Yes, we heal, but life goes on,” George said. “And we can’t control what other folks do, we can’t control things and places, but we can control how we respond to those.”
As a survivor of sexual assault, George believes that it is necessary to “bump up and thrive.” George said that action alone will help you uncover things about yourself that the trauma tried to hide from you.
“For me, I realized that had I not gone through that - would I be as compassionate, would I be as vigilant with the cause, would I be as purposeful - I probably wouldn't,” George said. “It’s not making an excuse for trauma, it’s deciding how are you going to use it for your next way of living.”
“Failure is not a stop sign, failure is a question of what do I do with the failure,” George said. “If you follow people who inspire you, they’ve failed before. Instead of just looking at the reward, ask them how they got there, ask them how they went through the failures and what they learned from it so that you can get to a point where you were just like them at the point where failure happened.”
In the age of social media, George said that he has “messages galore,” and likes to create media these days instead of waiting around for someone to tell him to speak at an event. The work he is most proud of is Whispers in the Night, an interview format documentary that shares the story of three men who have survived sexual assault.
“It’s really, I believe, the very first documentary that tackles the full life cycle of black males and sexual assault stories from a black male perspective,” George said. “What I wanted to try in this film was to off the notion that it happens in certain types of households, that it happens to certain types of men, that it looks a certain way.”
George currently has a talk show, 1 on 1 with Cory George, on DCTV. George said that in five years, his goal is to be on TV as one of the top helping professionals of color with his own show.
