We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Irving Pedroza. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Irving below.
Irving, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?
In a way, I do not believe you develop resilience by choice. You develop resilience by confronting difficult situations and not giving up. I think not giving up comes from having something or someone to fight for. I developed it as a child by always feeling helpless. Always going through obstacle after obstacle and always feeling like I could not do anything to change a life of fear, poverty, isolation, and violence, until you realize, you do have that power. At first that power is only as small as a thought – a belief that you do deserve better and can get better. I believe resilience is a never-ending and lifelong journey. I was blessed to have both a belief and a someone (mother, little sister).
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
As a lawyer and what I do professionally, I feel like I have and I will dedicate my life to helping people feel less broken. Having had a life of struggle and adversity, I feel like I can help others that go through similar situations. overcome those seemingly debilitating circumstances. As an attorney, I get to fight for injured victims. The injuries vary from severe physical injuries to traumatic emotional injuries.
I was brought to the United States as an undocumented immigrant from a poor town in Guerrero, Mexico. I always struggled with feeling discriminated due to my immigrant status and my inability to speak English. Growing up, my family was entrenched in an environment of never ending violence. While learning to adapt to all of this, we suffered extreme poverty, even to the point of becoming homeless. We also struggled with domestic violence, often leaving my mother fighting for her life at the hands of my father. My father ended up in jail as a result. Adding to my family’s distress, my older brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia. My brother’s condition brought on further economic and emotional hardships. I was often the target of my brother’s unstable mental health, landing me in the hospital numerous times at the hands of my brother.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
I am not sure it’s a quality – but belief/mindset. I think regardless of what I was going through, I always believed I could be different. I could change my seemingly disastrous trajectory. At the face of struggle, I always had confidence that I would overcome. Looking back, I’m sure people at the time would have thought I was out of my mind.
Love – I personally attribute everything I am, everything I will be, and everything I fight for to my mother and my sister. I believe my mother must have given me so much love as toddler that I had no doubt I could achieve anything. By ages 6-9 when life started to get tough and she could not give me the attention that my little sister or my brother needed, she gave me forced freedom. As such my mind and my spirit led me to believe in anything but I think in a way, I knew that no matter what, she would always be there.
My little sister and in a way, my schizophrenic brother before he was diagnosed. I wanted to achieve; I want to achieve things that are seemingly impossible so that I could be there for my little sister/so that I can be there for her. And my brother, the love, belief, and motivation he showed me before his mind started to betray him – I would never want to let him down.
Acceptance. I had to accept the cyclical traumas I had inherited. We all have them. Once I accepted and started to shift my mind from asking why me? Why us? I realized that generationally my family had fallen into cycles that led to mistakes, traumas, and more of the same. Regardless of good intentions or no intentions, I had to find a way to break away from that. This looking back, is easier said than done. Even looking ahead, it’s easier said than done, but having this understanding is a relief.
Awesome, really appreciate you opening up with us today and before we close maybe you can share a book recommendation with us. Has there been a book that’s been impactful in your growth and development?
Too many books. I love reading and self-reflection. I believe the easiest way to learn is from other people’s mistakes. Books provide us someone else’s life lessons in a book that can take us days and at most weeks to learn from. One of them that comes to mind is the Steve Jobs biography but mainly because it allowed me to understand and be ok with my own racing thoughts. It goes back to what I saying earlier, once I believed that my thoughts were my thoughts, that it was ok for me to think the way I did – then, but only then could I arrange them, control them, and use them to my own benefit. However, I love to read and there are many books that I learned from and continue to learn from.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://irvingpedroza.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/irving.esq/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/irvingpedroza/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/irvingpedroza/
