SUMMARY OF THE SHOW:
Rosa Ponce De Leon is a keynote speaker, the podcast host of Powerful at Work Radio, and a leadership coach who has spent over twenty years working in law enforcement in Orange County, California. From her background in law enforcement and her personal experience, she has learned that tragedy is part of life that happens to both good people and bad people. Today I am talking to Rosa about the tragedy and grief within her own family and how, over time, she has learned to accept and be okay with grief. TOPICS THAT I DISCUSS WITH ROSA: · The immigrant experience · A career in law enforcement · Family tragedy and grief · Dealing with grief · Learning how to see the beauty on the other side of grief LIST OF RESOURCES AND CONTACT DETAILS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE Visit Rosa Ponce De Leon https://rosaponcedeleon.com/ LISTEN NOW:
SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Claire Rogers I'm Claire Rogers and you're listening to Boot Camp for the Mind & Soul, the podcast that gives you an inner workout. Before we get started, remember, just like in a gym where you may not be able to use all the equipment, pick up what you can in this episode and leave behind what you can't. Your inner workout starts now. Rosa Ponce de Leon is a keynote speaker, the podcast host of Powerful at Work Radio and a leadership coach who has spent over 20 years working in law enforcement in Orange County, California. From her background in law enforcement as well as her own personal experience, she has learned that tragedy is a part of life that happens to both good people and bad people. Today I'm talking to Rosa, about the tragedy of grief within her own family and how over time, she has learned to accept and be okay with grief. Welcome Rosa and thank you for joining Boot Camp for the Mind & Soul podcast. Rosa Ponce De Leon Thank you so much for having me Claire I'm excited to be here. Claire Rogers Rosa, you are the daughter of two hard working immigrants from Mexico, and I'd like to find out from you, first off, before we dive into everything... when did your parents immigrate to the United States and what was their motivation to immigrate? Rosa Ponce De Leon My parents actually met in the United States; they were from the same region in Mexico and they independently immigrated as the eldest of their families. They both are children from big families - my father was the oldest of 14, my mother was the oldest of 10, and they wanted opportunity that they didn't have in their hometowns. And there was opportunity across the border that a lot of people tried to pursue, and they decided that it was for them. They each had family members, out here, that they were able to come and live with, and eventually they met and got married and had me and they started their family. Their dream was always to go back to their hometown, after they had some success and could maybe have a future in Mexico but that never really happened. Claire Rogers Where abouts are they from in Mexico? Rosa Ponce De Leon The state is called Michoacán, and they're in a suburb of Morelia which is the capital of Michoacán. Claire Rogers So they immigrated to the US, they raised a family which includes you as the oldest alongside three younger brothers. I would like you to tell me about your childhood... what kind of environment were you raised in? Rosa Ponce De Leon We were raised in a tight knit family - my parents and their siblings were also immigrants to the region, so we were very close to my cousins and we had a lot of playdates and they were always very community oriented, so I was raised in a home where we predominantly spoke Spanish. It was considered rude to speak English when people could not understand you, because they can't get involved in the conversation so as a general rule, we always spoke Spanish inside of our home and I didn't actually learn English until I started going to school. So, Spanish was actually my first language, even though I was raised in the United States. Claire Rogers So was it a tight close knit family unit. Rosa Ponce De Leon Yes, so, my parents had me and my three brothers, my younger brothers, the eldest one is four years younger. Actually, there was a brother too that actually we're going to speak about today. So growing up I don't speak about him as much because I only had my second brother for four years of his life because he drowned in a tragic accident. That's part of the tragedy that we're going to talk about today but growing up, it was really me and my two brothers, but there was such an age gap that I was almost like a single child. I'm the oldest and then the two of them were always bound together. So I always felt like I had a little bit of a deficit I guess because I didn't have my little play date, growing up. Claire Rogers What kind of core values were you raised with? Rosa Ponce De Leon My parents were very, very clear on their core values. They wanted to make sure that we their children had a better life than they had. So we were always encouraged to work hard and to be grateful for the values that that they instilled in us in terms of being appreciative of life and of having an opportunity to contribute to society, to be an honest, hardworking person, and to also be patriotic because this country was so good to us. And so we were always raised to be thankful and even as a young person I actually volunteered as a cadet for the Air Force and was involved in some of those activities, just because of our values. We were also raised to appreciate the culture that my parents came from that I'm very much a part of, you know, the music, the shows on TV, the old black and white movies that my dad would make us watch that I still very fondly watch on occasion. So we just understood that Mexico was such a family culture that we were raised around, and we were always grateful that we had family everywhere we went whether we were in Mexico or here, we always had aunts and uncles everywhere. Claire Rogers You were just talking about your brother, Jose Luis. You were 11 months apart, and you shared briefly that unfortunately he passed away. Can you tell me how that happened, how he drowned? Rosa Ponce De Leon My mom's brother and his family were going on an outing. It was a holiday weekend, and there was a lake in our neighborhood. My parents were very hardworking - there were always projects at home whether my dad was fixing a car, whether he was doing upgrades to the home construction wise, whatever was happening there was always some type of construction activity or building activity and I was generally always helping my father and so was my brother. But that particular weekend, my uncle said hey we're all going to go to the lake, and the kids want to go. Are you okay with it? and my parents were said no problem. So they let us go. And I remember being at this park, and it was crowded, and I got in the water and we didn't know how to swim yet. I don't know that we knew about safety devices like vests and stuff, but I just remember getting in the water and thinking there's too many people here and I'm gonna drown, let me get out. And I just left. It didn't even occur to me that my brother was still out there. And so I went and sat with my aunt next to a tree and in a little picnic area and I remember at one point, where the lake was there was a crowd of people like something alarming had happened and I remember my aunt shouting out to my uncle go check out Jose Luis, and I don't know why she knew to check on him, but it probably was because she was like I don't want to be the one that something happens to this kid that I brought to the park. But long story short, the next thing I remember I was in a hospital waiting room. My parents were crying, and everybody was sad. And I think I realized from my father that my brother had died, and I wasn't gonna see him again. And long story short, we ended up burying him in Mexico because my parents still felt like that was their hometown and so we shipped him over there, and I spent a whole summer there. This happened in July, and I actually attended half of the first grade in Mexico. So I learned how to read and write in Spanish, I learned all of the stuff that you learn in the first grade there. And the other thing that I remember is that my parents were never hateful or mean to my aunt and uncle, they knew this was a tragedy and they knew this was an accident. No one meant for this to happen, even though they were super sad. I don't know how my aunt and uncle handled it privately; they may have felt some grief or guilt. I never spoke to them about it, but I just remember that it was a healthy grieving process where everybody just accepted that this was a sad moment, and there was no hating or blaming at least not from our family. And I remember as an adult thinking how far ahead they were that this didn't become dysfunction for our family. Claire Rogers Do you remember how your parents dealt with it? Or do you remember them even talking to you about it? Rosa Ponce De Leon Yes. Especially my mom. They spoke about it. Not to me directly. I don't think anyone sat me down or if they did, I was too little to really understand. I mean I got some advice from people like hey he's in heaven, you know, things like that but I remember my mom crying at night and I remember she would just grieve him, and I remember when we buried him that she was holding my middle brother the next in line, because he was alone. He just didn't go with anybody, he just wanted to be with either my Mom or my Dad. And so she was carrying him. Traditionally in Mexico when you have a funeral you walk to the burial site because it's real close. So we walked in, she was just carrying him and then once they lowered the casket, that's when my mother just finally started crying - she was fine up until that moment and she grieved him and everybody kind of understood and then we went home, and we remained in Mexico for a while. But I remember there were times when she would remember him and just cry, and she was never the type, she was just very pure of heart, if that's how she's feeling, she wasn't over the top she just was very genuinely sad. And I just remember thinking, okay my mom's sad again. As an adult now I'm kind of more of a stronger character so I don't cry often, but I always appreciated the fact that my mom was so honest with her grief because she would cry and not try to be strong, when she didn't have to be. Claire Rogers And your father, do you recall how he took it, how he managed his grief? Rosa Ponce De Leon He didn't speak... I'm probably more like him now that I think of it because he was more intellectual about it; he was more like hey this is what happened. Of course he missed his child, and I think now as an adult, I understand a little bit more of the dynamics between him and my next brother in line because my brother that died Jose Luis, he was really just a perfect kid, he was a little angel. I was a free spirited kid. I would leave toys everywhere and he was very organized, very appropriate and if my Dad needed anything he would always volunteer and say hey can I help with this, he was just one of those good kids. And then my next brother, I was with like him in a way, in terms of being responsible of my next brother. He's very strong willed and wants to do things his way. And until he figures it out and navigates it then he comes around, but you have to let him try first and him and my father always butted heads and I feel like my dad was used to Jose Louis, and then maybe didn't have as much patience for the other kid and he probably longed for his boy. So I know that there was some healing process that my next brother probably had to go through just because my father's heart was maybe not as patient with him. I've never saw my dad cry. I never saw him really talk openly about his grief; I knew that his heart was pure in terms of how I mentioned he wasn't blaming anyone. He just accepted that this happened, and he moved on. But I know that in the end he did have some after effects from the loss that probably he didn't necessarily navigate. He didn't go to therapy; they didn't do any of that. They probably could have benefited from that but growing up in our culture that's not common. Claire Rogers You said that there was no blame for your Auntie or your Uncle because it was a tragedy. Do you know how they came to that? Was it an immediate, it's not your fault, move on and we just knuckle down and remain the type close family we've always been, or are you aware if there was any discussion or some uncomfortable tension within the family or was it literally, we'll do this together. Rosa Ponce De Leon They literally lived around the corner from our house so even that night in the hospital, they hugged. They were like hey, this sucks we all realize this wasn't supposed to happen. And I wasn't part of any conversations that may have happened, but I know for a fact my father always spoke about how he never wanted my aunt and uncle to feel any type of guilt. He knew they didn't set out to do this, they weren't careless, they had all these kids there, it was a crowded environment. Looking back, probably there are things we could have done differently but no one really anticipated something tragic like this so as to us buckling down and being a tight knit family, I don't even remember that being an issue because I don't feel like the guilt part ever entered into the conversation, it just never happened, it was just like we're just going to continue to be the same family we've always been. Claire Rogers I think it's very emotionally intelligent of your family. It sounds very emotionally intelligent. I'm just wondering what gives them that emotional intelligence? Is it a solid grounding in family, or is it a religious upbringing, that gives them faith that enables them to have that emotional intelligence or is it innate within the family itself or is a combination of both? Rosa Ponce De Leon I'd say probably a combination. I mean, we were raised Catholic, I was raised in the Catholic Church I did all the rituals of First Communion, Baptism, all that stuff. And you are raised with an understanding that there's this God that looks after you and that provides for you. And so we did have that faith in that sense, but I think the intelligent part of it just came from the fact they knew hardship. My parents knew hardship from being raised on a farm where everybody has to pitch in. It wasn't a new thing - people in those circumstance lose babies, there's health issues that affect people and people are afflicted by very real tragic things. And so they had seen it in their upbringing, and they knew that this was part of life. Claire Rogers So how did losing Jose Luis impact your childhood? And also how did it, and again I appreciate you were really little, you were only five so you might not recall or know, but how did it impact your personality I'm wondering? Rosa Ponce De Leon In both ways I think it did impact my personality. It would be years before I understood this concept, but I guess when I was little, I made a decision to honor my brother by letting him hold a space in my life that no one else could really ever have. Being, you know, good friends or whatever I've always had wonderful people around me, but there came a point where I was at therapy and I realized that I was numb in some ways and, the profession that I was in certainly exposed me to other tragic events and I was very, I wouldn't say I was hardened, I still intellectually knew what was happening, but I realized that my emotions were taking a toll and that I was now limited to only a few emotions and the complexity of my emotions wasn't there. The depth of my emotions wasn't there, and I thought, man, I don't want to walk around the hallways like this robot. So, I did decide to go to therapy, and she helped me work through some of those issues and I went in thinking oh it's just my job. But then she uprooted some of the issues from that tragic death, and I realized that I needed to make a different decision about how I honored my brother and that it was more of an honor to say that he was an impact in my life and made me love me in such a way that I needed to allow other people to see what he saw as my brother. So, the kind of kid that I was, free spirited happy, I needed to let other people in without reservation. And it wasn't detrimental to him or it took nothing away from who he was to do that. In fact it was more of an honor to him because he was able to see it and he would want that. So it was kind of a big shift actually; it wasn't something that I realized was an issue, it sounds simple, it sounds logical, but it made a big difference in my life because then I just started evolving and being more myself. I didn't realize that I had been so reserved. Claire Rogers So, I'm going to come back to that, but I'm going to preface it by saying, you've told me that your father unfortunately died 12 years later in a car accident. You would have been roughly 17 years old when that happened. I would like to talk about how you shared with me previously how your mom was very free and open with her grief, yet it sounds like on the flip side, you were actually hardened to it. So I'm just wondering why you didn't emulate your mom's behavior, or did you feel as though you couldn't emulate her behavior because you wanted to be strong for her? Rosa Ponce De Leon I don't think I had that cognitive decision; I think I'm just naturally built a little differently. My mom is a very unique person. She has a servant's heart. She loves people and she's very quiet in her love - she's not very descriptive of her feelings, but she just lives it. She would tend to us when we were sick, she cooked for us, she was always paying attention to people, she's very caring and for her, the loss of my brother and the loss of my father, these were big people in her life in terms of her daily activities, these are people she cared for and attended to and now this was gone. So it was more than just a loss of a child, it was a loss of her day and I remember when my father died that actually a priest, he's actually my uncle, he sat us down and he’d had a close relationship with my dad, and he said, listen, it's gonna be tough for you guys because you've lost your father but just be patient with your mom because you guys still have each other, and you still have your mom. She lost her husband. She doesn't have anybody else that can fill that void. For us we had two parents. Now we at least we still had one. I just remember thinking that what he said makes a lot of sense. So I don't remember thinking I needed to be strong for her, I just remember thinking I needed to be patient with her and just to let her grieve, and I had already had the exposure of the loss of my brother and how she coped, and it was very similar with my Dad. Literally, it would be the middle of the night and I would hear her just grieving, crying just deep cries. And I would just walk over to her room and be like, Mom, it's gonna be okay. And, you know, but I knew that it's what she needed. To me it wasn't something I felt like I needed to fix for her, or that I needed to help her to get out of that grief , it was just her process and it was good for her. Claire Rogers So how did you actually learn the process of grief? Losing your brother, losing your father. How did you learn to understand grief? Rosa Ponce De Leon Yeah, and I don't know if there's a right or wrong way to process. I think bringing an understanding is really the key. Understanding how this tragedy impacts your life today. There were some things I did in therapy, many people who have been to therapy have probably gone through that whole inner child exercise - like what did your inner child experienced at that time? And maybe there's things there that you didn't have the capacity to understand but you do have it now and let's work through that. And so I did some inner child exercises to kind try to tune into what was happening and I don't even remember what the exercises were at this point, but it's just basically sitting down and taking the time to do what you didn't take the time to do before. And if you had taken the time you probably weren't equipped to handle it anyway, so it was just a very healthy thing to reach back and wonder, what was that pain like? and not run from it. Claire Rogers Did you get therapy when you lost your father at 17? Rosa Ponce De Leon No, I got the therapy much later. I was in my mid 20s, like I said, well into my career - five years - it doesn't seem like a lot, but I was working in very intense neighborhood’s, I was working in very busy high crime, high activity neighborhood’s, and there was a big demand on my body emotionally, physically, and intelligently. When you go through an academy you learn a tone, you're having to make decisions that have to be legally sound and so the profession is so demanding. But, again, for me it was a matter of, who do I want to be? do I want this career to suck the life out of me? or do I want to be a person who adds value to the community and actually is healthy? And so that's when I kind of also had an encounter with God at that time .And I decided that I wanted to be a Christian person who has not so much religion but has a relationship with my Creator. And so, both of those things combined, the therapy and the fact that I had gotten back in touch with my Creator, helped me to realize that there was a different way to be healthy. And so it gave me the courage to really seek out that therapy and to be honest, in the therapy, because I majored in psych I remember sitting in front of the therapist and thinking oh my gosh she's doing projection right now, okay she's doing this right. I knew all those techniques because I had studied them. And I was like, but you're here for a reason, so just be a good participant, be a willing participant in this process. So I had to remind myself of that. I didn't love sitting on that couch, but I knew that it was important for me to put in the effort. And so I did. Claire Rogers So was there a pivotal moment that made you seek the therapy? Was there like a tipping point when you thought to yourself, you know what, I need to get some help? Was it that moment with God? Rosa Ponce De Leon I think all of those things led to that moment, but I know there was one time when I was walking down the hallway and I saw one of my partners who was really good at having lighthearted funny exchanges with people at work. And I'm not big on elevator conversations or small talk doesn't work for me, so unless I get to know people and have real conversations, people don't really get to know me, and so people knew me as this person that you could banter with but that's really all they knew of me at work. And so with this one guy, I was walking down the hall and he just stopped me and he's like, hey what's up? You're all serious? and I thinking, I’m having a good day, what's the problem? but I didn't realize I was task focused. There was two modes; either you were goofing off or were working and if we're working, I'm very in a zone. I look serious but it's not like I'm disconnected I'm just focused. So I remember him stopping me and I remember thinking man, how do people see me, how am I showing up for them? and it just made me wonder why would he think that? It just caught me off guard that he questioned whether I was in a good mood or not. To me I was just like, I'm not in a bad mood I'm just walking down the hallway, what was that supposed to look like? It was just such a simple exchange, but such a life altering exchange because I realized that what people were seeing was a direct result of how I was showing up. I had to own that. I had to own that maybe I'm not allowing people to get to know me as someone who's just a regular person that has emotions and has thoughts and ideas that need to be expressed. I hadn't been doing that. I haven't been offering people the ability to just have a normal conversation outside of the job or the task that we're doing. Claire Rogers And do you feel comfortable sharing with me and our listeners the moment when you have a moment with God? Do you feel comfortable telling me about that? Rosa Ponce De Leon Yeah, sure. I think I was 25, and I was coming up to my 26th birthday and I had my career, I had my degree, I had a home that I had just gotten the keys to a year before I was dating a really great boyfriend at the time. And so I felt like I had everything that I needed in life that I was supposed to be pursuing and I'd done it, you know by my 25 fifth birthday I had all those things. And so I was thinking what else is left? why do I feel like I'm still missing something? And my boyfriend at that time had been raised as a Christian and he had a Bible, so I started reading it. And I have a cousin who is a literature major who's amazing, and who also had become a Christian in her life so I would just call her regularly and be like, what's this story about can you decipher this for me. And she's super patient, she's a professor, so she took her time explaining everything. And I did that for about a year and then my boyfriend and I had a conversation about whether we should start going to church again and I said sure, let's go find one. I didn't want to go back to Catholic church because even in college I had visited Catholic Church and I just never felt like - I guess what I was yearning for is what I later discovered was the presence of God where you worship, or you have an experience where you're actually in communion with God. I felt like it was absent in those services. So, there was a disconnect there. And so we started going to a little church locally, and we went there for a few months and it was really different than what I was used to from church. It was very conversational. It was very relatable. And it was presented in such a way to daily life. There's a way to connect what the Bible says with daily life, it wasn't just some, you know, you have to be a priest to be pure ,you have to be a priest to hear from God, none of that was there, it was just you can be a regular person, and have an encounter and a relationship with God and then I think it was November of, 2003, when there was a conference at church and it was mainly for young adults, but it was more for people my age. And after three days of being in that conference, I remember on one of those days that the worship was happening and people were getting prayer and I just remember sitting on the pew and thinking God is real. And I just remember having that encounter in terms of there was this real presence that knew me personally, and that had been with me my whole life. Because I was really very decisive growing up in terms of where I went to school, in terms of what activities I need to be a part of, and I was a little bit of a groundbreaker because I didn't have too much guidance from my parents. I was first generation, and I had just learned that I had this innate quality about me that knew what to do. And in that moment in the pew I realized that the reason I had that innate nature is because God had been with me guiding me and showing me. And I realized that the thing that I knew to do, I knew to do only because he was there with me. So I kind of did the math and was like, oh my gosh, you've been real my whole life, and I thought it was just me. So from then on, I decided I don't ever want to ignore you moving forward, I definitely commit to serving you and you're a good God and you're my Lord and it was just a decision that I made. And I continued to study the Bible and study his teachings and it's been very different ever since. Claire Rogers You say that you felt in that moment a presence of God. Can you describe to me what that feeling is? I've had similar feelings, which I'll describe to you in a moment, but I'm just curious as to how you knew what was the feeling was? Was there a tangible feeling inside or just like an aha moment? Rosa Ponce De Leon It was both. I mean it was just a very real experience of love, like I'd never felt before. I was loved by my parents, but my parents were not super like huggy, lovey. They were just providers, they're very responsible, they would tell us you know, it's because I love you that we're doing this and we're making the sacrifices – there was a lot of communication, but not a lot of physical affection because they weren't raised that way either. There was 14 and 10 of them and that just didn't happen so for me in that moment I just felt his presence in this warm. And this very deep love toward me that I had never experienced before. And so for me it was just something I couldn't deny. I was there. No one could challenge that because I'm experiencing something that is real. And to this day that's a marked moment for me. Claire Rogers You know what, I'm so glad you shared that story with me Rosa because I haven't told you this before, but I have had a similar feeling. So this was a long time ago, but one of my best friends died of a heroin overdose. And when I found out I was devastated; he was my one of my best friends from high school, I loved him intensely, he was such a good soul, a good, good person. And so I remember when I went through that grieving process, I would one day have this deep feeling of love for him, to the next day, just being so pissed off at him thinking how did you get into heroin? I don't understand. You came from a good family to my knowledge, we were all good kids, I just don't understand, how did you go down this path? And so I really struggled bad for about a year - I was oscillating between happy, sad, happy, sad and my husband I remember saying to me you know I don't know when you're going to snap out of this. I remember about a year into this grief of oscillating between pure love to just pure anger towards my friend and then feeling guilty because I felt angry towards someone who's died. I remember, probably about a year into that grief process going to bed one night, and people will say it was a dream, or I was imagining things and I'm cool with people saying that I don't need them to believe my experience. But I went to bed this one night, and I must have been thinking about my friend's still. And I remember waking up in the middle of night, seeing my friend walk towards me and hug me and this golden light was around him, and I have never felt such pure love in my life. Never. It's, I can't even put human words to that feeling, it was a feeling of pure and deep euphoria. And I had that same dream, visitation, whatever you want to call it, I had that every night for about a week. I felt my friend hugging me and I felt this warm embrace and pure love and about a week later I remember consciously saying, towards the end of the week to my friend, are you okay? and I remember him saying to me, I’m good, it’s just pure love. You don't need to worry about me anymore. And I remember consciously saying in my dream slash vision, whatever you want to call it, I don't need you to come back anymore. And I never had that dream ever again. To your point, that was a pivotal moment for me because I don't grieve him anymore, because I know he's okay and that was my God moment. I have told you before, I had a Catholic upbringing and that did not work out for me, but I'm still a deeply spiritual person and I believe in God and I believe in pure love. And it's because of that moment. So I think it's very interesting that you just described that your moment was that feeling of pure love as well. I am wondering in your moment of feeling God, did that change your grief process or your understanding of grief? For me it certainly did. I don't want to embrace tragedy; I don't want to go after tragedy. But I have a good understanding of death now. I'm not so scared of it, and I have a good understanding of grief and it's almost I say to myself that that's human nature. Now, rather than a bigger picture. Does that make sense? Rosa Ponce De Leon Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think that’s the complexity of our nature. You know, there's still so much that's being learned about how we're designed, like our design is crazy. The spiritual aspect, especially people. A lot of people don't understand that we are spiritual beings designed in the image of God I believe that anyway. But it's definitely complex. Claire Rogers How did grief and tragedy impact your personal life and impact how you dealt you people in your career in enforcement? How did that impact how you dealt with other people in that environment going through grief? Did it formulate a different way of how you would deal with them or confront them or deal with it? Rosa Ponce De Leon I think that it's a normal part of the process of life; where there's life, there's death and I think for me it changed in the sense of I learned to slow down and appreciate the people in my life differently because you know sometimes, we have friends that are in our life for a season, and they come and go. But, you know, it's so easy, especially in the culture in the United States to just get caught up in your daily stuff, and not slow down for people and I had been doing that, so I think in that moment I definitely realized that God had put people in my life for a reason and I needed to slow down and get to know them and appreciate them. And I learned to appreciate how much the people in my life made me better for other people in my life. It was this compounding good effect that because I'm close to one person doesn't mean I don't have room for another person, they all complement the overall experience of who I am, to everyone else and I needed to be courageous and willing to have those moments of appreciation for my life. Claire Rogers So for listeners to the show who may be going through grief or know of someone going through grief, do you have any advice you would offer them? Rosa Ponce De Leon Absolutely I know for me, it made me more patient I'm still on the job and actually I'm a field supervisor now, so I actually have to attend to every death that my team goes through. And so, I see them even more now, but ultimately, I've learned to appreciate that pain affects people very differently. I've learned to appreciate the fact that people are unpredictable. They behave differently. Sometimes they are as you described, one day being happy, or one day being sad or one day being angry. And those are all very real responses. And so, it has forced me to really have a deeper appreciation for what people are experiencing that you know not everyone is the same. And there's no wrong way. I mean obviously violence is wrong. But, if you're angry, don't go beating everybody up, acknowledge that you're angry and, and it's okay, don't fight yourself about it. So I think the way that I communicate with people is different in that you have to validate people's experience with pain, and it's healthier to express it than it is to just shut it down. Because if you shut it down, it's going to creep up later, so while it's happening while it's new, you really have to be more human with people and it's helped me to better connect to people. Claire Rogers I completely agree with you I think, talking about that moments of losing my friend and then going through the grief process and then having my moment of dreams/visualization with him. I remember waking up after all of this occurred thinking to myself, you know, what I have spent way too much of my life worrying about stuff that does not matter. And for me it taught great perspective, and that's where I thought actually almost this grief, this awful pain I've gone through is almost a blessing. It's not a blessing I've lost my friend but it's a blessing, how I've learned from it. Would you agree with that? Rosa Ponce De Leon Yeah, and I would add that grief doesn't only happen for people for loss of people. Sometimes it's loss of , a job, an experience, etc., Grief is an emotion that's very healthy, that's very natural. And I would encourage any listener who's experiencing grief for any reason, to be okay with it and to let it play out because on the other side of it is this feeling of thoughts of what are the things that matter? because now I know that the thing that I took for granted before was actually very important to me and so while I have it, I'm going to live differently with it in my life, so that when it's gone, I know I didn't neglect it. So, it helps you to re-prioritize your life. To simplify your life so that you're not overextended into things that really don't matter at all. And I think there's something beautiful about living a life that is simpler, that is less about how many hours are in the day so I can do a million things and more about how do I make those hours count for something? And you show up differently when you live that way, and I would hope that grieving process helps you really make sense of what does matter to you because we're all different. Claire Rogers So I know we've talked before and this really segues nicely into it… you're really into gratitude. Did that come from your parents, even before they lost their loved one, your brother, or is that something that you've actively cultivated even more growing up, because of tragedy? Rosa Ponce De Leon It was definitely fundamental growing up. We didn’t have everything…the latest and greatest. We grew up on used everything; and so we were grateful for every little bit that we had and little by little because of this my parents were so responsible, they were able to set us up to have better things like they've paid off their house in a lifetime, and they bought a new house and that's unheard of nowadays, and I think it was because they were grateful for that and for even what little we had that they were blessed with more. And so it's kind of one of those things that if you do live a life of gratitude, it, it comes with more things to be thankful for, because you are grateful in the little. Claire Rogers And so how do you carry gratitude with you today? How do you practice it today? Rosa Ponce De Leon I carry it in the sense of, I still don't live outside of my means, I still very much am grateful. I'm very clear about what do I really need? And it doesn't mean I don't treat myself to things but I'm very clear about not getting caught up in all the things that are marketed to me and I’m really focused on what is it that's going to help me be the person that I want to be and that's what I need to invest in. I don't need to have everything. So I'm very focused in that way but I'm also very grateful to the people in my life. I spend more time making sure that people know that I do things to make sure that they know that there's no lost opportunities in those exchanges. And I try to be courageous with my emotions with people too because I know that that my natural tendency is to be very intellectual, so I have to kind of balance that out. Claire Rogers And so, if, if our listeners were looking for a way to cultivate gratitude in their life., any tips, advice? Rosa Ponce De Leon Yeah, just make the decision. That's really where it starts. There's no wrong way to be grateful. Just say thank you for my car that gets me to work every day, thank you for just the little things in life…and it's not the big events in life, those are obvious. It's the little things every day that you appreciate …appreciate people for the little things they do, and they mean in your life. And it starts with that awareness and that decision. Claire Rogers And do you think that grief can actually make you more grateful? And the reason why I'm asking that question is it certainly was the case in my own life with the grief when my friend died. Now if I travel around the world or I do something really meaningful or important or impactful in my life I stand there and I think of my friend and say, I'm doing this for you. And that makes me grateful. His passing has taught me to live my life to the fullest and to a degree I do it for him. I don't do things I don’t want to do; I still get to be me but for example, I'll go hiking on a beautiful mountain and I'll stand at the top and send a kiss to my friends and tell you inwardly this is for you. And, and that's where I think grief can be beautiful. Rosa Ponce De Leon Yes, I completely agree. I have in my heart to do a foundation in honor of both of my parents because if it weren't for their risks, and their motivations I wouldn't have the life that I have. I think in the most basic sense in society is right now, certainly in America, we're a little bit dysfunctional. I think back to my father as the first feminist in my life. He was an example of feminism because, number one, he never treated me any differently than he treated my brothers, there was no double standard. I was seen as someone who was valuable who can sit next to them and hand them wrenches and who can also look beautiful and go out. But I saw how he treated my mother. Even though my mother was very set in her ways in the ways of her upbringing to keep the house clean - she was a homemaker, my father was like no, you get to do the bookkeeping for the household, you get to do all this, like we're a team. And so he was never the one that said where do the expenses go? they made decisions together about everything, which house they were going to buy, which car, and you they made decisions, but he just always gave her a place of honor, as an equal to him. And so I just remember thinking, how that teamwork was so healthy and for him it was ahead of his time, because the culture certainly was very patriarchal, I don't know how to say that one. So, for him he was very confident in his leadership, and the way the household ran was a reflection of their values of seeing people regardless of their identity or their gender. They were just very caring people. I think about him and how he was a model of great leadership in my life. Claire Rogers I'm guessing like me, that's how you find beauty and grief. Rosa Ponce De Leon That's how I honor his life, even though I wish he would have been alive longer, I honor his life. And I find that it's beautiful. Even though I lost him at 17, his legacy still lives on and I'm able to be a part of that. So for me the grief is worth it. Claire Rogers I agree with you. So, as we start wrapping up, I just want to clarify something here. We've both gotten to a place where we can see beauty in grief. However, there could be listeners listening to this, who are in the depths of despair, losing a loved one, a child a pet, you name it. They could be in the depths of despair. What words of comfort would you give those people that are not in that place where they think there's beauty in grief and actually, we could come across as condescending how we've just been talking. What comfort would you give them. Rosa Ponce De Leon Definitely the beauty comes after the pain. And there's really no way around the pain. So pain is pain. It isn't a matter of whether who's in more pain or comparing whatever pain you're feeling. Don't run from it. it hurts. It's not pleasant. There may be nothing anyone around you can do to make it better or to alleviate that pain, and hopefully you do have an experience and an encounter with your Creator that can bring a little bit of relief, but at the end of the day, pain is pain. I've seen it, I've experienced it and really, you know, people may say things and do things that are well intended but aren't helping the situation. Just know that on the other side of this is that beauty that is waiting for you. And it may not seem like there's any reason to believe it but the only comfort I can bring you is that it is very much the case and you sticking it out right now and not running from that pain is the healthiest thing that you can do and the most courageous thing that you can do, so hang in there. I mean that's really all I can say. Hang in there. Claire Rogers I think that's excellent advice and I would add to that, to just to know that they're not alone. There are many that have gone through it and onto the other side. You're not alone. You're really not alone. Rosa Ponce De Leon Yes, it's what connects us as humans and it's beautiful. Claire Rogers Rosa thank you so much for joining Boot Camp for the Mind and Soul. I very much appreciate you sharing your story and discussing grief with me and with our listeners. Rosa Ponce De Leon You've been a great host and it’s a great interview. I really appreciate it Claire for having this conversation with me. Thank you. Claire Rogers If you'd like to learn more about Rosa, or would like to get in touch with her, you can reach her at her website which is https://rosaponcedeleon.com/.
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SUMMARY OF THE SHOW
Terry Tucker has been an NCAA division one college basketball player, a Citadel cadet, a marketing exec, a hospital administrator, a police officer and undercover narcotics investigator, a SWAT hostage negotiator, a motivational speaker, and most recently for the past nine years, a cancer warrior. TOPICS THAT I DISCUSS WITH TERRY:
LIST OF RESOURCES AND CONTACT DETAILS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE 'Sustainable Excellence: 10 Principles to Leading Your Uncommon and Extraordinary Life', By Terry Tucker, available on Amazon, Apple and Barnes and Noble. To learn more about Terry visit: https://www.motivationalcheck.com LISTEN NOW
SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Claire Rogers I'm Claire Rogers, and you're listening to Boot Camp for the Mind & Soul, the podcast that gives you an inner workout. Before we get started, remember, just like in a gym where you may not be able to use all the equipment, pick up what you can in this episode and leave behind what you can't. Your inner workout starts now. My next guest has had a large and varied career; Terry Tucker has been an NCAA division one college basketball player, a Citadel cadet, a marketing exec, a hospital administrator, a police officer and undercover narcotics investigator, a SWAT hostage negotiator, a motivational speaker, and most recently for the past nine years, a cancer warrior. So, without further ado, welcome, Terry, and thanks for joining Boot camp for the Mind and Soul podcast. Terry Tucker Thank you, Claire. I'm looking forward to it. Claire Rogers So, as I read your intro, it's obvious that you've had a very cool and variable career, but the one that intrigues me the most is being a SWAT hostage negotiator. I need to learn more about this. How did you become a hostage negotiator? Terry Tucker You apply. So, I was a policeman for a number of years. And I think most people probably know what a SWAT team is. I mean, we used to tell people, when the public needs help, they call the police and when the police need help they call SWAT. So, we would deal with going after homicide suspects that we knew were in a certain location, barricaded people. I mean, some of them were, you know, the guy's drunk, and he's got his wife in there, and you just wait for him to pass out and get in. And some are a lot more intense, where people were in a situation where it's a major crisis in their life. And I mean, let's face it, if you're talking to me, you're probably having the worst day of your life. Claire Rogers So, is it like the movies? Is it like a Denzel Washington movie...you're standing outside the bank, trying to negotiate to get 25 people out? Is it like that? Or is that just sensationalized? Terry Tucker I mean, yeah, potentially. It could be. But I'd say most of what we dealt with was just a barricaded person, somebody who was in their house with a gun, they didn't have a hostage, but they were in a life crisis. And we were trying to talk them out. And I always try to describe it like a teeter totter at the park. So, when we start talking to them, their emotional side is way up in the air and their rational side is down on the ground. So, we ask a lot of open-ended questions, you know, hey, Bob, tell me why we're here today and let Bob burn off that energy by talking to us. And the problem with being a negotiator is, as a policeman most of the time, the person I'm dealing with is right in front of me. So, if I'm watching them, and they're balling up their fists, they might be getting ready to fight me. Or if they're looking around, they might be thinking about running. So okay, I see that I can do something about that, I can put them in the back of my car and handcuff him, I can sit him down, stuff like that. But as a negotiator, that person wasn't in front of you. So, you're trying to figure out what's going on based on what they're saying? What they're not saying, and how they're saying, and a lot of times, it's trial and error, you throw out a question and see if you're going down the right path. And if you're not, a lot of times, they'll get mad, you know, heck no, what are you talking about? That's not what we're dealing with. Okay, now you got to pull back and go down another road and see if that's what it is. So, eventually, over time, you want to get to the point where they're their rational side is up in the air and their emotional side is down on the ground. Because when you're rational, you can make good decisions for yourself. But you can't when you're yelling and screaming, and you're drunk or high or anything like that, you have to wait. And that takes time. And that just is burning off that energy. Claire Rogers So, in your experience, were most of the people that were in that situation, were they quote unquote, normal people just having a psychotic break, or a lot of them, did they have mental health challenges? Do you know, or can you generalize like that? Terry Tucker Probably the funniest story I had was that a man had barricaded himself in his house with his wife and a gun. And I got there, and I was talking to the officers and they're like, he's drunk. Okay, but they had him on the phone. So, I talked to him. We talked for a few minutes and established a relationship. And I said to him, because he wasn't really emotional, he was just drunk, I said, what would it take for you to come out? He's like, give me a beer. I said, if I gave you a beer, would you put the gun down, let your wife go and you'd come out? Yeah. So, I gave one of the officers five bucks is to go out of the store, buy beer and bring it back. We put it on the front steps... let your life wife come out, put the gun down, come on out. He did. We handcuffed him, let him drink the beer off he went to jail. So, they're kind of funny ones like that where you know the guy is just stupid. But then there are ones where an individual tried to kill himself; he slit his wrists, that didn't work, he put his head in the oven, turned on the gas and that didn't work, and eventually he had a gun. And he called one of his relatives or the relatives called the police. So, we're talking to him for two hours. And finally, I think we just kind of wore him out. He's tired. He's like, I just want to come out. I said, Okay, so put the gun down. And come on out. I said, when you come out, I'll come down to the scene, we'll talk face to face and he's like, okay, but I said, bring the phone with you, keep the phone in your hand. Well, he hung up the phone, which is not uncommon, because it's just normal for us when a conversation ends to hang up the phone. And all of a sudden, one of the tactical guys who was outside his house said we heard a gunshot. He shot himself in the head. However, he shoots himself in the head, the bullet goes underneath his skin, around his scalp, and out the other side and never penetrated his skull. So, it wasn't his day to die, despite how much he wanted to. So, yeah, it just depends. A lot of it is, they're mad at somebody, I'm mad at my mother, I'm mad at my wife, something like that. And so, they're like, you know, I want to talk to my mom. Well, if we know there's a dynamic there, we won't let him talk to his mom, because it'll be like, ha-ha, mom, see, boom, and then they shoot themselves. So, we don't let them talk to the person that they're mad at. Claire Rogers So, I'm imagining it's a very stressful job. So how do you manage the stress? Terry Tucker Great training. We train every month. I was one of a group of probably 10 negotiators. And it just depended on when people were available and things like that. We had a psychologist that worked with us, and we would just run through different scenarios about how would we handle this? How would we handle a young person? One time we had this 15-year-old kid who was in the house, he just would not come out. And we were kind of at our wits end, and then we kind of were like, he's a kid, let's scare him. So, we had the tactical guys break a window and throw in a flashbang. It's kind of like a grenade, it makes a loud sound and a bright light, it doesn't blow up or anything like that. We threw that in, boom, he was out in like 10 minutes. You just kind of got to read the situation and try some things. And like I said, sometimes you’re right, sometimes you're not, but I never lost any sleep. We were probably successful 90% of the time of getting the person to come out, and nobody getting hurt, but 10% of the time, they made the decision to end their life. But again, here I am trying to solve this problem in a couple of hours or three or four hours, where that problem has been going on for 10, 20, 30 years. It's just not realistic. And, I'll do the best I can. But in the end, the bottom line is it's your decision on whether you want to come out or it's your decision, whether this is your day to go. Claire Rogers You sound very pragmatic, are you pragmatic as a person or is that training? Terry Tucker I think you kind of get to the point where you deal with a lot of, and I don't mean to use this term, lightly, goofs as a police officer, I've always said that if we didn't have alcohol, drugs or mental illness, you wouldn't need nearly as many cops as you do. So, a lot of the people we dealt with fell into that category. And it's hard to reason with a drunk, it’s hard to reason with somebody who's high on drugs, you just kind of have to do what's practical in the situation, whether that's taking them home, or that's arresting them or whatever it is. I mean, it wasn't like we always wanted to arrest people. We didn't. We wanted to try to solve the problem with the least amount of paperwork or intrusiveness into the person's life. But sometimes they didn't give us a choice, and we just had to be practical about it. Claire Rogers Did you ever feel bad? I've always wondered about this as a police officer, or even as a hostage negotiator. Do you ever feel bad for the person who's gotten themselves in that situation? Like, good people do stupid things, and then they end up ruining their lives and going to jail or so forth. Do you ever feel bad about that? Thinking, I wish the next result wasn't what's going to happen to this person? Terry Tucker Absolutely. I always tried to remember that these people were human beings; they had somebody somewhere, I don't care how bad their situation is, that love them and thought that they were special. But the bottom line is, so many of these people had just made bad decision after bad decision after bad decision. And you get to a point where, yeah, you made a bad decision. You've tied my hands. There's nothing I can do. I have to arrest you. I have to take you to jail. And then we'll see what happens, and we're not the judge and jury and executioner. We are just one part of the system. So yeah, they're humans, and you've got to remember that. And I think as cops, we tend to think that, everybody in the world is a criminal. Well, the vast majority of people are not criminals. And in a lot of ways, the same 80/20 rule that we apply in business... 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers, that same thing works in law enforcement. 80% of the crimes are done by 20% of the people and half the time, you know who did it. So, it's just a matter of proving it. Claire Rogers But I'm sure some of the time as well is that some people who get into trouble with the law maybe never stood a chance from birth, as well. I'm not saying it justifies it, but you can kind of see why some kids join gangs and so forth. I don't condone or justify it, but I understand why. Terry Tucker Oh, absolutely. When I was a policeman in Cincinnati, we had a curfew law that people under a certain age under 18 and under 16, couldn't be out after a certain time. And you pick up a 13-year-old kid at three o'clock in the morning on a school night, and you are like, okay, I've got to take you home now. Where do you live? Well, Dad's in jail, and Mom is a crackhead, I live with my Grandmother, and Grandma's 80 years old. You look at that kid, you're like, yeah, you don't stand a chance. Because grandma just physically can't deal with you. She goes to bed at seven o'clock at night, and you're a carte blanche, I can do whatever I want. Claire Rogers So, does being a police officer, because you see the worst of the worst, I'm guessing in humanity, does that impact your personal life and your mindset? Are you able to divorce your feelings? Terry Tucker No, I don't think you can. I mean, some people maybe can, I couldn't. We see a lot of helplessness and hopelessness. And I think the thing we have to remember is that the vast majority of people are not like this. And you have to have something that grounds you, whether it's your faith, whether it's your family, whether it's your friends, but it's not going to be a bottle of alcohol, it's not going to be drugs, it's not going to be going home, and taking it out and beating up your wife and kids. And, and that happens. I mean, it's a very stressful job, the suicide rate is very high. So, you have to have something that grounds yourself. And for me, it was it was my faith and my family. And, when I walked in from the garage at home, the job was over. It was a job. It wasn't who I was. Claire Rogers That is very fascinating. I'm going to pivot now to completely an opposite discussion. You say that the biggest challenge of your life was not hostage negotiation, or police work or anything like that; it was actually your cancer journey. And that began in 2012. Can you tell me about that? Terry Tucker Sure. So, at the time, I was a high school basketball coach, and I had a callus break open on the bottom of my foot right below my third toe. And I didn't think a lot of it just because of my job and being on my feet all day. But after a couple of weeks, when it didn't heal, I went to a podiatrist, a foot doctor friend of mine, and he gave me some pads to put in the shoe. And that didn't work. And I went back to him, he took an X ray and he said, yeah, it looks like you have a little cyst in there. And I can cut it out. And, he did, and he showed it to me and said. So, I see 1000s of these, I'll put a couple stitches in, you'll be good. In two weeks, everything will be great. It was the last good two weeks that I had because two weeks later, I get a call from him. And as I said he was a friend of mine. And so, the more difficulty he was having to tell me what was wrong, the more frightened I became until he told me, Terry, you have this very rare form of melanoma. We think of melanomas as a skin disease, some mole or a dark spot. Well, this is another form of melanoma that appears on the bottom of the feet, or the palms of the hands. And he said there's only about 6500 people in the US every year who get your form of cancer. And then he kind of hit me with Terry, I've been a foot doctor for 25 years; I've never seen this form of cancer, so I would recommend that you go to the MD Anderson Cancer Hospital in Houston, Texas, probably one of the greatest if not the greatest Cancer Hospital in the world. And I did and I had two surgeries to remove the tumor and all the lymph nodes in my groin and then when I healed, I was put on a weekly injection of a drug called Interferon to kind of help keep the disease from coming back. My oncologist used to say it's just like kicking the can down the road. We're just trying to buy you some more time. And I took those weekly Interferon injections for four years and seven months before the medication became so toxic to my body that I ended up in the intensive care unit with a fever of 108 degrees, which usually isn't compatible with being alive. Fortunately, I was at a level one trauma center and emergency room that was able to stabilize me and get me to the ICU. When I was on Interferon, I had severe flu like symptoms. So, imagine having the flu for two to three days every week, for almost five years. And that’s pretty much what I went through to try to just keep the cancer at bay, this wasn't a, we're going to cure you. This is just, we want to keep it at bay until we can develop more therapies. Claire Rogers So, I can I jump in? Can we go back slightly to what it was like receiving the diagnosis? Did you feel good at the time? Or did you have some symptoms that you were feeling off, that you knew something was wrong besides your foot? Terry Tucker No, I felt fine. I mean, I was like I said, I was coaching basketball. So, I was pretty active. Always had been active. And, on the day that I found out, my emotions ran the gambit. At first it was no, this has got to be wrong. I've done everything right in my life; physical exams, ate right, never abused alcohol and drugs, etc. And then you get mad, and then you kind of get down. And then it's like, okay, now it's your choice, what do you want to do? I mean, we're all going to end up in those dark places, from time to time, you know, we lose a job, or our spouse leaves, something bad happens. Everybody gets there. But it's your choice to stay there. And I chose not to stay there. I'm like, you know, what, these are the cards that I've been dealt. Now, this is a whole new life for me. And I'm going to have to play it to the best of my ability. Claire Rogers And did you ever ask yourself, why you? Did that ever cross your mind? Terry Tucker I asked my doctor, why did I get this, and I had all 88 genes that doctors either know or suspect, cause cancer. I've been genetically tested. And I have no mutations in any of my genes. So that begs the question, then why did this happen? And my doctor is like, I don't know, the only thing we can think of is maybe there was a trauma to that area that caused it, but that can't be it. I never broke that foot. I never sprained an ankle on that foot, when I was playing basketball. So, we just don't know. And I don't spend a lot of time worried about why. Because is it happened. Now, I've got to deal with it. Claire Rogers And how long did it take you to go from grief and denial and anger to a place of acceptance? And I have a choice here? How long did that process take? Terry Tucker Not terribly long. With all my years of being in athletics, and I'd had three knee surgeries in high school and was told that I might not play basketball again after my second one. And, and certainly with my time as a police officer, where you don't have a choice. I mean, you have to deal with the problem, everybody's running away, but you have to run to the danger. That's just kind of how I'm wired, how I'm made up. I mean, if you tell me something can't be done, I'll figure out a way to do it. So maybe a couple weeks before, you know, all the emotions were done. Claire Rogers That's it? I thought you were going to say six months or a year or something. Terry Tucker No, no, no. It was, you need to hurry up and make an appointment at MD Anderson. And, and within two or three weeks, I had that appointment and was sitting in that doctor's office room. Claire Rogers But what you said to me earlier was that they said that you're just kicking the can down the road. So how did you come to a place of acceptance of, oh, I'm not going to beat this. I'm just kicking the can down the road. Because I guess my thoughts are, all of us seem to think that we're going to get out of here alive. All of us think that we're going to live forever, and it happens to other people, not us. And so, I'm just wondering, how did you get to that place of oh, this is really happening. This is not curable. And we're just kicking a can down the road. How did you wrap your head around that? Terry Tucker I guess because in my heart, I had felt that I had figured out what my purpose was here in life. And I live that purpose. and tell me what that is. Sorry. I'm going to interrupt you. It was being in law enforcement. I tried very hard to do that. My Dad was very much opposed to it. He's like, you know, you're going to go to college. You're going to major in business. My Dad had my whole life planned out and it was kind of like, No Dad, I don't want to do that. But after I graduated from college, and I was the first person in my family to graduate from college, my Dad got sick, and my Grandmother got sick, and I had to stay at home with my Mom for the next three and a half years helping her, basically help them die. And so, I didn't want to upset my Dad, I didn't want to say, hey, I'm going to go do this. So, I got my degree, I went into business, but it wasn't my passion. So, my passion was law enforcement. And so, when I got into that I did it, I lived it. And a lot of times I tell people, especially now, especially if you're young, think about the end game. Think about what people are going to say about you at your funeral, you know, what is your legacy going to be? Would your ancestors be proud of the life that you've lived? And if the answer for those is no, then you've got time to make changes and corrections. You can't make those changes at the end of your life where it's like, oh, yeah, I don't have much time. And you know, I haven't done a damn thing with my life. Claire Rogers It's funny, I’m going to interrupt you. I think that we've all read the same book. And I don't even know where we read this or where we've learned this, but I've done this exercise on myself years ago, you know, what is my legacy? What are the people going to say at my funeral? I have done this exercise on myself. And that grounded me in purpose. I interviewed another guest a couple of weeks ago, he said the same thing. And now you're saying it. Have we all read the same book? Where have we learned this? Terry Tucker I don't think a lot of people have read the book. That's the thing. You may have just gotten the right people. With all the people that I've seen die as a policeman and certainly in a number of people that have passed on that I've met over my nine years of having cancer, the people that I think you and I would say died peaceful deaths, and again, I'm making a huge generalization are the people who found their purpose in life and they lived it. The people who go kicking and screaming, you know, I want another day, or I want another month, or I want another year, those are the people who never did anything with their lives. They never saw their purpose as being something uncommon and extraordinary to live. And those are the people that I really feel sorry for. But you had all this time to figure out what you were supposed to do with your life. I had a player, which was really kind of one of the impetus in my book, who had moved to Colorado where my wife and I live, and we had dinner with them. And I said to her one day, I'm really excited, you're here, because I get to watch you find and live your purpose. And she got really quiet. She was like, well, coach, what do you think my purpose is? I said, I don't know what your purpose is. But that's what your life should be about. A I mean, here's a young woman with a college degree, who was very smart, and she had never thought about that. It's like, I never thought about the end game. And so, I'm not so sure that a lot of people think about it, you just got some good people. Claire Rogers I agree. I think in school, we're told, go to school, get good grades, go get a college education, get a good job, buy lots of stuff, and then die, basically, is what we're sold as a kid. And if I had my way I would want to teach kids that. What is your purpose in life? Not what's your career and what's going to bring in your money, but what is your purpose? So, for me, my purpose is to serve. My purpose is to help people. 100% that's my mission in life. You do something similar in law enforcement. So, going back because I digressed there slightly. So, going back, you said that you got to a place of acceptance that you're kicking the can down the road, because you've lived your life of purpose, which sounds logical to me, but at the same time you have a wife and you have a daughter. How do you reconcile leaving them and accepting that? Terry Tucker I have a great family. And you know, people ask me, how did I get through this? or how have I gotten to this point, and I talked about the three F's faith, family and friends. And so, I have a tremendous faith in God. So that is certainly something that has helped to ground me. Yes, I have a wife and daughter and I would like to see my daughter get married; I'd like to see my grandkids; that's probably not going to happen. So, there’s not a lot I can do about it other than just fight every day. When I got diagnosed, my wife and I made a conscious decision, to be honest with our daughter, she was at high school at the time, and we're like, you know what, we're never going to lie to you. We're never going to tell you that things are different or anything like that. We're always going to tell you the truth. Now she's a young woman, and she's totally involved. When I lost my leg last year and found these tumors in my lungs, they wanted me to do chemotherapy and I was like, no, no, I don't think I want to go through that. I've had a good run. I don't think I want to do that. And so, I came home, and I told my wife and daughter and they're like, okay, family meeting. And we have a family meeting. So, I get out voted two to one. We laugh about it, but it's kind of true. My wife said no, no, no, you're going to do chemotherapy, we're not ready to let you go. So, I started doing chemotherapy. I remember in the police academy, our defensive tactics instructor used to have us bring a photograph of the people we love the most to class. And as we were learning how to defend ourselves, we were to look at that photo because he reasoned, you will fight harder for the people you love, than you will fight for yourself. So, at three o'clock in the morning, when you're fighting some drunk guy who wants to take your gun from you, he wanted you to remember that it's bigger than just you. There's a Mom and Dad or a Spouse or Kids or somebody out there who wants to make sure that you come home. So, I've always remembered that. And it's like, this isn't just about me. This is about everybody in my little circle, my Brothers, my Mom, my friends and stuff like that. So, I fight my butt off every day, just to make sure that I can have one more day to be with these people. Claire Rogers Amazing. So, tell me about your journey as it is today. So that was in 2012. You said that you had flu like symptoms for five years. You had if I'm not mistaken, your leg amputated last year. Is that correct? Terry Tucker Yeah. So, after the Interferon was stopped, and the disease came back in 2017, and in January of 2018, I had my left foot amputated. That was the first amputation. The disease came back again in 2019 in my shin; I had a couple of surgeries there. And then last year, an undiagnosed tumor in my ankle grew large enough that it fractured my tibia, my shin bone, and when they scanned it, they found that my entire lower leg pretty much was full of cancer. And at the same time, they also found I had multiple tumors in my lungs. So, my only option was the amputation of my left leg, above the knee. Right in the middle of a global pandemic, literally, my wife dropped me off at the hospital. I was the only surgery that day, nobody could be with me. I was scared to death, but it's like, you know what, you got to do it. Claire Rogers I appreciate, I got to do this, but how do you rustle up that gumption to say I got to do this? How do you push past that fear? Especially your wife can't go and hold your hand or say prayers with you? I mean, how did you dig deep? Terry Tucker I'll tell you, people asked me what I thought about the night before I had my leg amputated, and before I had my foot amputated. And I don't know why I thought about this. But the thing that that really kind of came to my mind was D day when there are 1000s of 15,16,17,18,19,20 year old kids sitting off on boats and ships ready to get into these Higgins boats and hit the beach into tremendous machine gun fire, mortar fire, knowing that most of them will probably be killed. I mean, so many of them were mowed down without ever getting out of a boat. And I thought about what courage that took. What courage to do something for somebody else, to do something that was bigger than yourself. And I thought you know what, when you start looking at that, and you put, you got to have your foot amputated, you got your legs, I am more than the sum of my parts. So, you can take whatever you want. And I'll still be Terry Tucker, I'll still have my heart and my soul and my mind. You can't take that stuff from me. So yeah, I thought about the big sacrifice that so many people had made, and my sacrifice didn't really seem to be that that big of a deal. Claire Rogers You are so inspiring. I'm trying to imagine myself in the same situation. I've got gumption, but you've got gumption on steroids. (laughs) Terry Tucker Don't tell my doctor. Claire Rogers So, tell me after the surgery, and you've had your leg amputated, you must have had depression or something. You couldn't have just woken up and gone, hey it's another day and keep moving forward, keep on trucking. You must have had some sort of a sadness or something. Terry Tucker Yeah. There's no S on my chest. I don't wear a cape or anything like that. Yes. Do I get, down? Do I get scared? Do I cry? Yes, I do all that stuff. I just don't do it very often. Claire Rogers Is it because you don't allow yourself to? Terry Tucker Yeah, it doesn't do any good. I mean, I can't be productive when I'm down, when I'm depressed. I mean, when you get there, it's just a spiral and it just keeps going and unless you stop it, people can get in a really, really bad place. Claire Rogers And so how do you stop it? Terry Tucker For me? It was learning to take the pain, learning to take the discomfort. I have this post a note on my desk what's called my four truths. And one of them is 'embrace the pain and the suffering that we all experience in life and use it to make you a stronger and more determined individual'. So, we know our brains are hard wired to avoid pain and discomfort and to seek pleasure. So, for me, it was like, everybody wants to run through pain, no, I don't want to do that, and it scares me. I'm sad, I'm depressed. For me, it was like, no, just do flip that pain inside, use it as energy or burn it as fuel to make you stronger to make you more determined, you can do it because if I can do it, and I'm a guy who when I was a little kid, and I knew my mom was taking me to the pediatrician for a vaccine, I'd wait till she got out of the car and lock all the doors from the inside. And this was before key fobs. So, she'd have to go get the pediatrician and his nurse. And we would play a cat and mouse kind of game before I'd get extracted. And literally, the pediatrician would put me over shoulder and take me in and give me a job. That's how frightened I was of doctors and needles and all that kind of stuff. And now, I'm on this clinical trial, and they're taking blood and there are days when I get stuck with the needle, 14 or 15 times, and I always love the nurses, well, let me know if I'm hurting you.... Well, it doesn't exactly feel good. Of course, you're hurting me. But what you do with that pain, you know, you can whine and cry, or you can flip it inside and use it as energy to make you tougher. Claire Rogers So, tell me about the clinical trial. Do you know if you're the placebo, or if you're getting the actual drug? Have they told you that? Do you know? Terry Tucker So, it's not a placebo. It's the actual drug. And it's a derivative of a drug called Interleukin two, which is a pretty nasty drug, if they give it to you, they usually have to give it to you in the hospital many times in the intensive care unit, because it messes with your body. So, what they're trying to do is enhance the good part of Interleukin two and try to take away the bad part. But for me, my doctor describes my body as very efficient for all those years that I took Interferon and my body knows what to do with it. So, when I get the drug, usually within two hours, I have a bad headache, I'm throwing up, I have a fever, I'm shaking violently, and other people who are on it don’t have that. I was at the clinical trial a couple weeks ago, and the man right across from me was having the same drug, the same dose, and while I was experiencing all these physical manifestations of symptoms, he slept the entire time. My doctors explained that's because I had five years of Interferon, the interferon programmed my body to oh, yeah, I know what to do with this, okay. And you want that body reaction, because basically what your body's doing is saying, okay, I'm revving up to go fight this cancer. So, for me, it's working. It's shrunk my tumors by about 20%. For a lot of the other people on the trial, who don't experience what I'm experiencing, they're not having the success that I've had so far. Claire Rogers Have you ever thought that with the awful side effects of the clinical trial that might pull the plug? Terry Tucker No, but it's funny you say that, because I had a nurse who came to me and said, Terry, you know, and I have the greatest nurses, the nurses that take care of me in the infusion center are wonderful, and they say, I have to take you out of pain, I have to take you out of discomfort. And, and it took me quite a while to kind of look at them and said, Look, you're going to have to let this ride, you're going to have to let me shake, yes, it looks terrible, but it's not painful. It's not like I'm in terrible pain. It's just, I'm constantly shaking. It's okay, let it go. Now we want to give you drugs. No, I don't want the drugs and that kind of thing. So, I had a nurse come to me and say, Terry, this trial is kicking your butt. You know, it's devastating on your body. And it is for a whole week. It is devastating. And she said nobody would think anything less of you, if you quit. And I tried to explain her to her my four truths - one of the ones I just gave you. I'm like, you know, my doctor may take me off the trial, or I may die on the trial, but I will never quit the trial because that's just not who I am. Claire Rogers So, tell me the other three truths. Terry Tucker So, the first one is 'control your mind or it will control you'. The second one is the one I told you 'embrace the pain and the suffering'. I used to only have three I've added this new one just within the last couple of weeks because I've been thinking about it for a long time and it's this 'what you leave behind is what you weave in the hearts of others'. Claire Rogers Oh, I love it. Terry Tucker And then the fourth one is 'as long as you don't quit, you can never be defeated'. I always remember those, I always think of those no matter how bad I feel, no matter how sick I am, it's like, those are kind of what makes me move forward and keeps me going. Claire Rogers So, you don't want to quit, is it for altruistic reasons? You want to see, because you're kicking the can down the road for you, so are you staying in the trial to give the scientists and the doctors the clinical data from you to help potentially other people? Is that why you're staying? Terry Tucker That's one reason and like I said, I've had some success. I mean, the tumors have shrunk by 20%. I mean, if we can keep shrinking the tumors or if we can keep the tumors at bay, I mean, who knows? In six months or a year, there may be another therapy that might help cure me, who knows? I mean, there's some things on the horizon. Moderna is working on a vaccine that is patient specific, where they're taking cells from the patient's body, developing a vaccine for the patient based on their particular disease, and injecting it back into the patient like a vaccine like we're doing with Coronavirus virus, but they're doing it for Cancer. So, who knows, maybe that'll have success. And that'll be ready to go in a year. I mean, I want to stick around, don't get me wrong, but I'm not afraid if I do have to go. Claire Rogers So, you said to me last time I talked to you that you feel as though and I can't remember if you feel it or if you've been told this, that you're towards the end of your life. How do you accept that? I mean, again, you've already accepted it from previous years because you've got like this rock star gumption, but how does it feel coming closer to that now? Terry Tucker Exciting. I mean, like I said, I believe in God, I believe there's something. I mean, I've seen the birth of my daughter. I've seen a herd of elk moving through the snow in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies. There is so much beauty and goodness and love out there that I'm like, yeah, us humans, yeah, we're not capable of that. That's got to be something bigger than us. So, I believe that, so I'm kind of excited. You know, I've had a great life. I've done it. You know, you read my resume. I've done a lot of things. So why be afraid of the next thing? You know, it'd be like saying, okay, I'm working for Wendy’s, now I'm going to go into hospital administrator, oh no I'm scared, can't do that. You know, why not say, I'm living my life. Now I need to die. It's okay. It happens every year. You know, in the fall, everything dies, and then the spring things come back. It's okay. It's the way we're made up. It's a way of God kind of like cleaning house, we need to move on, the next generation needs to come on at your turn. So, I don't know why people are afraid of it. Especially when you find your purpose in life and you live it. Claire Rogers I would agree with you. I'm 47. And I've had a very, very big life that I have magicked up through hard work and grit and determination. If I go tomorrow, and I get hit by the number six bus, I'm going to be okay with that because I've had such an amazing life. But at same time, I don't want it to happen. Yeah, I might be a bit pissed at God. So, do you ever feel a bit pissed? Terry Tucker No, no, I've never blamed God. People are like, do you blame? God? I don't think God sits wherever God sits is like, today, yeah, Terry Tucker you're going to get cancer. I mean, at least the God that I believe in doesn't do that. This happened, and this happened for a reason, and I hope that reason, is like you, you know, starting your podcasts and things to help other people. People ask me, you know, how close do you think you are to die? And I'm like, well, the way I look at it is, in my mind, I can't see myself in the casket yet. So, until I feel that way, like, yeah, I can see myself like that, I’m probably coming to the end. You know, everybody dies, but not everybody really lives. And if we all really live; death wouldn't have the sting that we all seem to be worried about when it finally happens. Claire Rogers I agree with you. And I think what you're basically saying is you can't worry about what you don't know. Terry Tucker Yeah, I always tell people, it's way above my pay grade as to when I'm dying. Claire Rogers I want to move on because you've written a book called 'Sustainable Excellence: 10 Principles to Leading Your Uncommon and Extraordinary Life', which is available on Amazon, Apple and Barnes and Noble. Is it available internationally? Terry Tucker Yes. Claire Rogers Awesome. So, tell me about the book and why you wrote it. Terry Tucker So, you know, you asked me, did I get depressed after I had my leg amputated? Well, no, because I wrote a book. I had my leg amputated in April and I had chemotherapy. I started chemotherapy from the tumors in my lungs in June. And that’s when I wrote the book between April and June. The book was really born out of two conversations. One was the one I've already described about the player that had moved to the area. The second one was a college student who had reached out to me on LinkedIn and said, what do you think are the things I need to know to not only be successful in my job or business, but successful in life. And I didn't want to give them the, work hard, get up early, help others kind of stuff. Not that those aren't important, they are. But I wanted to go deeper to get something that maybe resonated in his soul. So, I thought about it for a while, and I wrote notes and stuff like that. And eventually, I had these 10 principles. And I was comfortable with them, and I sent them to him. And then I sort of stepped back, and I'm like, I've got a life story that illustrates that principle. Or I know someone who has a life story. So, I literally sat down at the computer, and I had the principles. And then I just started building stories underneath them about either the principle itself or how the principle would interact in somebody's life. And so, I had a book, or did I have a book? So, I gave it to some friends, some younger people, I said, read this, tell me what you think. Is it garbage? And they're like, no, no, you got to get this published. So, I went ahead and got it published. And once it was published, I was like, I got to sell books, I got to sell books, I got to sell books. And I had a guy that I had connected with on LinkedIn, who's a best-selling author over in the UK in business books, and he said to me, no, no, Terry, you're going about this wrong. Your job is not to sell books, your job is to help people, if you help people, the books will sell themselves. And for me, it was like a slap across the face. And I am so glad he slapped me in the face. Because I totally lost focus to why I wrote the book. I didn't write the book to make money. I didn't write the book to get to be famous. I wrote the book to help people. And by him telling me hey, forget about selling the book, help people, the book of sell itself. Claire Rogers 100% I agree. I think personally, and they don't teach it in Business School, and they should, I think our missions in life should be to serve and to help people and money comes as a byproduct of that. That's against everything, they'll teach you in business school, and in your case with books, you help people, and people will invariably relate to you. And the books sell by word of mouth. Terry Tucker Exactly. The book is really about being successful; how you can go about being successful. And it's been out for a while, and I've sort of thought about this, I'm like, I think I'm missing the boat. I think that success is what we do. You know, you're a successful business person. I may be a successful author, whatever. That's what we do. I think the word that's missing is significance. Significance is what we do for other people; I think you can be both. I think you can be successful and significant. But the older I get are, the more time goes by and the more I think about it, I think significance is really what we ought to be concentrating on. Not about being successful. You can be both, like I said, but I think at the end of your life, nobody's going to care how much money you have, or what your title is or how important you are, you know what, you're going to occupy that same small piece of ground as the popper who has nothing occupying right next to you. Claire Rogers Yeah, you're right significance. In my case, I use the word impactful, you know, what's the impact that I'm leaving behind here? Terry Tucker Sure. Claire Rogers I have loved this conversation. So, for those of our listeners who've enjoyed this conversation, if you would like to buy Terry's book, as I say it's available on Amazon, Apple and Barnes and Noble and it's available internationally. You can also reach out to Terry at his website, which is https://www.motivationalcheck.com/ or alternatively you can contact me, and I will put you in touch with Terry. Terry, thank you so much for joining the show. Terry Tucker Thank you, Claire. I enjoyed it. Claire Rogers I loved it. Thank you. Terry Tucker Thank you. Claire Rogers That concludes this week's episode of Boot Camp for the Mind and Soul. Don't forget to rate and review and subscribe. Tune back in next Wednesday for next week's episode. 
SUMMARY OF THE SHOW
Gail Hamilton is an internationally-recognized motivational speaker, a powerful singer who has sung leading roles in two major opera productions and is the author of the book Soaring into Greatness. Gail is also totally blind. Born ten weeks premature and weighing a mere 2.5 pounds, Gail and her twin brother lived in separate incubators for six weeks with continual 100% pure oxygen. Though her twin was not affected, this high oxygen level damaged Gail’s eyes and left her with partial vision. It was during elementary school that her eyes developed cataracts; decreasing her sight to total blindness. Gail has experienced abuse, career discriminations, suicidal ideations, loss, and co-dependency, yet despite this, Gail has transformed from being a victim of her circumstances to becoming the creator of her destiny. Gail is with me today to talk to me about how she believes that if we change the way we see, we change the way we live! TOPICS THAT I DISCUSS WITH GAIL:
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SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Claire Rogers I'm Claire Rogers, and you're listening to Boot Camp for the Mind & Soul, the podcast that gives you an inner workout. Before we get started, remember, just like in a gym where you may not be able to use all the equipment; pick up what you can in this episode, and leave behind what you can't. Your inner workout starts now. Gale Hamilton is an internationally recognized motivational speaker, a powerful singer who had leading roles in two major operas, and is the author of the book, Soaring into Greatness. Gail is also totally blind. Born 10 weeks premature and weighing a mere two and a half pounds, Gail and her twin brother, lived in separate incubators for six weeks with continual 100% oxygen. Her twin was not affected by this high oxygen level, but it damaged Gail's eyes and left her with partial vision. It was during elementary school that her eyes developed cataracts, decreasing her sight to total blindness. Gail has experienced abuse, career discriminations, suicidal ideations, loss and codependency. Yet despite this, Gail has reformed from being a victim of her circumstances to becoming the creator of her destiny. Gail is with me today to talk to me about how she believes that if we change the way we see, we change the way we live. So welcome Gail and thank you for joining Boot Camp for the Mind & Soul podcast. Gail Hamilton Thank you so much for having me. Claire Rogers 01:29 So let me dive straight in. Gail, I have researched you extensively and your background, and I find your story fascinating. Can you talk to me about your experience of losing your sight in elementary school? Gail Hamilton When I was in fourth grade, I had partial sight and I loved to read and ride bikes and watch TV with my limited vision because I had cataracts, with what I thought was quote normal, and then all of a sudden, in the beginning of the fifth grade, I started running into walls, and that happened over the summer, and falling into trash cans and riding my bike into an embankment and crashing and burning and I kept saying to myself what is going on? And, and I can remember some of the last things I saw which was the world's fair in New York City in 1964, and the waterfall on the big globe and it was really cool. And so, I was confused by why all this stuff was going on, and what's is weird about sight, is it's located visual side, and in an internal site, the same part of your brain as the optic nerve. And so as my external site, decreased my internal vision increased so I was confused because in my head, I still saw, yet outwardly I ran into walls. I'm a kid and my parents aren't talking about it because they don't talk about it. And so how can I figure out what was going on? So I took a piece of paper in fifth grade and it had raised lines because I went to a school for the blind. And I wrote my name on the piece of paper and then I wrote a line from the L in Gail down to the bottom of the page, and my theory was if I could see that line, I would know I had sight. If I couldn't see that line, I'd know I was blind. And so I wrote my name, and I did the L and drew the line down and I couldn't see it, and I was devastated. And there's no one to talk to about it. And so, I held that grief in until like eighth grade, and then I exploded one day over the dinner table - you don't even know I can't see! Then they took me to our doctor who said oh you have cataracts. So it was a hard go through that, especially with no support, and no validation. Claire Rogers So how old were you when you actually lost all of your sight? Gail Hamilton 11 Claire Rogers While you were navigating your blindness, at the same time, your parents drank, you were verbally discounted and teased and physically beaten by your brothers. How did you navigate your home life, as well as your new reality of blindness? How did you navigate that? Gail Hamilton I went internal with everything; I was pretty depressed in grade school and in high school. You couldn't really get me out of my shell. I wouldn't talk in class, I wouldn't talk at all, I wouldn't talk anywhere because I just didn't feel heard and validated. I think the two things I would say, during that time that kept me functional would be the love of my grandma who always saw me as a person first and my disability second, and music - I had a fabulous piano teacher back then too. And she did the same thing, between them and some of the, I went to a Catholic High School - and some of the nuns in high school, they saw me and validated me as a person first. I was so far behind though in high school, it just wasn't funny, because of the difference between the school for the blind education and regular schools education. But music and my grandma were the things that kept me going. Claire Rogers And so, did you have any friends that you had before you lost your sight, did they continue to be your friend or did it kind of overnight, change your world by becoming blind? Gail Hamilton It happened in fifth grade, so I stayed at that school for four more years, so those friends stayed. And then when I went to high school, all that went away. And then the friends I did have and the friends I had no matter where I was and sort of to this day, as well, not always, but a lot of times, my friends would be the friends for better or for worse, they kind of feel sorry for me or they're my friends while I'm at school, but when I go home, they're not my friends. I mean they just discounted. I had a woman a few years back. Somebody said to her, what's does Gail do over Christmas? And my friend said, and this was just couple of years back, I don't know I never think about her. So she told me, and I was like, wow, so I'm in people's vision when I'm there but when I'm not, I'm not. And so they don't think that I can go to movies or ice skate or climb the Sydney Harbor Bridge or whatever it is, you know, and I had to convince them that I'm quote, normal. And that's kind of sad but there you have it. Claire Rogers I'm wondering if it comes from two places. Does it come from ignorance, and also could it be that people are reluctant to ask you to do things because they're scared that it will come across as insensitive? Gail Hamilton Probably both, yeah. Being blind, I'm always educating people that I can do the same as they can do. And when I have a seeing eye dog, I'm always educating them about the dog and so no matter what it is, it's constant educating. They just don't know because they've never been around somebody who was blind and I think blindness, like any other disability is the hardest one because people just can't see what it's like to be without sight because our world so visual, and they just can't imagine me getting dressed or putting on makeup or going to the bank or whatever it is and that fear they project onto me. Which is not really fair, but they don't know, so I’ve had to educate. Claire Rogers How did you learn to navigate that as a small child? Did you have a support system that taught you how to navigate being blind and being discounted? Gail Hamilton No, just Grandma during my grade school years, she would probably be the only one that loved me, when I got into high school it was my piano teacher, like I said, there's always been one champion in my whole life that's kind of seen me for who I am. I had a college teacher that was there. So, no, but I had lots of therapy later on life (laughs) . But as far as at the time, no real people to say hey you're normal this is what it is. Now I belong to a couple of organizations for the blind and I have a couple of friends who are blind, and especially one and she and I always talk about this kind of stuff. Claire Rogers I actually I have a bit of segue slightly from what I was going to ask you. I have an experience with dealing with people who don't have sight. It was a few years ago and I saw a sign in a local pub, and it was for a book club, and it had a sign for the book to read and the date to show up and I thought, well I love to read I'm definitely going to go there. So I read the book and I showed up on the respective date, and when I got there, there were about 10 people in the room and there were also about 10 dogs lined up along the wall and I remember being slightly confused because I don’t have a dog and I didn't know I was supposed to bring a dog. And then it dawned on me that they were seeing eye dogs. And I remember thinking, oh, but it didn’t say on the flyer that it was for people who couldn't see, but I joined a book club and I loved it, but I remember thinking actually that it was a very important lesson for me that, no it didn't say on the on the flyer that the people couldn't see, they don't have to declare that just like I don't have to declare that I can see. And I remember being humbled by that and thinking you know what, that was a good experience that I just assumed that it would be declared, that this book club was for people who couldn't see. Gail Hamilton (laughs) That's cool. I've had similar experience when I've taught piano. If I tell people I'm blind beforehand the mother brings the student in, then sometimes they'll go, whoa, how do you do that and how do you teach him. And then there are other times they go, oh cool. So it just depends on the person's fear level and their background and some people have stayed. Some people have left, you know after the one introductory free lesson. Claire Rogers Going back to your story, sorry I segued there slightly, but going back to your story, I was reading on your website that you said that when you lost your sight you kind of went internal and you really explored your imaginary and spiritual life, and I was wondering if with you could explain that to me. Gail Hamilton I think it came naturally - I don't know if I knew it at the time. I learned to see people from the inside out, and obviously I couldn't judge them on their appearance, and I don't even know when I had partial sight if I had that much sight that I could judge people on their appearance or not. And so, it forced me to see people's hearts and their souls. And if their words were congruent with their tone of their voice and their behavior and their actions and all that, and I think that came little by little, gradually, and I just sort of started learning to develop that part of me instead of basing it from the outside and instead basing it from the inside out. Claire Rogers So would you say that - have you become spiritual or is it more like an innate sense of self? Gail Hamilton I think both, I think then later on when I totally got it about spirituality and all that, which was like 10 or so years ago, that it just solidified and maybe I had it all along, I just didn't know it. And, probably based on my grandma, but I think both. So can you describe how you become spiritual, and what does spirituality mean to you? Gail Hamilton Wow. There's a good one. You know, I say grounding in God and sword and spirits. So you know I certainly believe there's something bigger than me that's out there, there's a love force, a universal force that we're all connected that we're all one, that there certainly is good in the world and the good outweighs the bad there is good no matter what goes on and what happens, it's all in Divine Order and all good. My philosophy is not only just a philosophy, but it's also who I am as a person. My philosophy says I believe my desire to fly must be bigger than my fear of falling, vision is internal not external, it's guided by my heart not my eyes, in order to be free to fly, I must want my dream, feel my dream and believe that my dream will come true, most importantly I must live my dream. I'm the creator of my destiny. The composer of my symphony, and I choose to live a life of greatness. So it's all about attitude, it's all about faith and it's all about action. It's all about not just believing but knowing that I'm okay, that I have a purpose and it is a divine reason for me to be here. And that my purpose is to touch other people's lives, it's to educate, it is to empower, it is to reach out and say, no matter what's going on, you're okay. And I totally believe all of that just from the core of my being, that I'm okay. I don't have to be as good as any other person who has sight, I can just be me, blind Gail with all my other characteristics, and I'm just fine. And I'm good, and I'm okay. I don't know if that answer that. Claire Rogers No, it does, it is beautiful, I completely agree with you, it aligns with my own philosophy of life. So, you've my sense from hearing this is that you've got a deep connection to your inner world, and a deep connection to your innate sense of self and I'm just wondering, for our listeners who may be perhaps lacking that themselves, do you have any advice on how they could cultivate that? Gail Hamilton Trust yourself. You know, for me, I've always done my passion, whether it was singing operas or writing my book or building my Habitat house or climbing that Sydney Harbor Bridge last year. I've always done my passion. So you know, I do have some advice. I based it on sort of like the five senses except I grew to seven. See your vision, so you know where you want to go, focus your eyes on that. Listen to your inner voice. So your spirituality, your God, your divine, but focus, listen to that voice inside you because that voice is really speaking to you and telling you what you should or should not be doing. Speak your truth, that’s really important. Don't speak what you think others should hear or just because you know best. You know when you're in alignment. And when you're not. Follow your heart. Do that passion. Reach out to others, that your hands. Walk with confidence and purpose, and then live a life of greatness, tune into the inner self and live a life of greatness. So, then beyond that faith, attitude, action, those are my three main things. Claire Rogers I love that; I really love that. In particular what I love is that you say listen to your inner voice. I agree with that, that's very important. But a lot of us have learned to not listen to that inner voice, we can live in autopilot mode, we're in a society that's full of distractions. I'm just wondering what do you do to listen to your own inner voice? Gail Hamilton I do a lot of journaling, that really helps me every day. Mainly every day I journal, I love to journal. And that usually ends up with gratitude, you know, doing gratitude, because there's so many things you can be thankful for compared to focusing on that negative. But journaling, meditating, praying, taking time to be quiet. Just to lay flat on the floor and just rest there for five minutes and breathe, breathing is really good. I love walking, no matter what the weather is. I love walking, it sort of connects me to God and nature and it's like, ah, here's what's going on today in the world. Music helps me sometimes, just listening to music or making my own, but songwriting, whatever. So it could be those things, or it could be gardening, or it could be cooking, or it could be, which I'm not good at all so that's not the one that brings me passionate and calm, but whatever brings you peace, and whatever brings you joy. Those are the two things you're supposed to be doing. If you don't have peace and joy in your life, then you are out of alignment. And so, then you have to stop, breathe and say okay, what's what. What don't I want what am I not liking here. What do I like what do I want. And then when you find out what you want, then go do that thing, because joy and peace and love are the three things we're here to do. So whatever equates to doing those is what you're supposed to be doing. Claire Rogers Gail, I read somewhere that you credit, Richard Bach's story about Jonathan Livingston Seagull as being an inspiration to you. I truly love this book. And if it was up to me, I would make this required reading in every school around the world. But before we carry on, for those listeners who are unaware of the story of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, it's all about a seagull that doesn't want to be a seagull. He wants to find fulfilment and a higher purpose in life, and he seeks to become the best at what he loves to do. So Gail I was just wondering, given that you love this story, can you share with me how you came across the story in the first place and how it's helped you personally? Gail Hamilton Absolutely. My grandma gave me a record, I think when I graduated from high school. Back in the days when there were records right? (laughs). And this record had a reading of Jonathan on it with the background of an orchestra. It was so beautiful ;I still have it and I was so moved by it. I was so depressed and so unhappy in high school. And I thought, wouldn't it be cool to be a bird? I've never seen a bird fly, but it'd be so cool to be a bird, to be so free to be untethered by these earthly gravelling scrapping for food on this shore. And I felt like an outcast by my parents, just like Jonathan, and I thought, there just must be a better way. And maybe that was my introduction to spirituality. I just knew that there had to be something else. So I've always longed to fly, and my favorite quote from Jonathan is your whole body from wingtip to wingtip is nothing more than a thought in a form that you can see break the chains of your thoughts, and you break the chains of your body to. How amazing is that statement? I think that's when I started learning that our thoughts become who we are. Besides therapy and reading some other books later in life. And that totally transformed my life - it came from Jonathan, that what we think, so we create. And so if I say I'm old, then by golly, I'm going to be old. If I say I'm fat I'm gonna be fat. And that's how I got totally my house, my Habitat for Humanity house, built. That's how I became Miss Colorado Senior America, that's how I got the book and that's how I got to climb the Sydney Harbor Bridge, all those four things was because I believed it to my core that this was going to happen, and this is who I am. It's totally shaped my life and if I'm feeling down, sometimes I go get the CD or I think I have it in my computer now as an mp3. I put that on. So it's a fabulous little CD, I don't know if that's out there in the world anymore but it's certainly a great book. Claire Rogers Oh it's a fantastic book, and you know what, I've actually got it on my desk and if I ever need a bit of push to get regained my gumption that's my go to. Your grandmother gave it to you. So were you a child when you first heard about it? Gail Hamilton No, I was in high school, I was graduating from high school. Claire Rogers So actually I just want to say to the listeners, you don't need to be a child, you can be an adult it is applicable to anybody. I would highly recommend reading it. So now, Gail actually I want to go back to what I said in the beginning of your introduction which is how you've transformed from being a victim of your circumstances to becoming the creator of your destiny. Can you describe to me how you were able to make that transition because I'm guessing like most people that didn't happen overnight. Gail Hamilton No, no, I was a pretty good victim (laughs) and some people who read my book, say ah, it's so victimy, but the ending is good. So, the first 50 years were horrible, I didn't say that my thoughts created my reality - I had some cool things like the operas that I performed in, and I had the mentors that helped mold me and show me the love to keep me moving forward. But I certainly didn't have the mindset, I certainly was suicidal, like for 10 years of my life, and thank goodness for therapy and thank goodness for her believing in me. So at the end of all the therapy and kicking and screaming out all the abuse and all the hard stuff that had been in my life. At the end of that, that's when my therapist said, you need to read the book, Your life is waiting, and besides Jonathan (Livingstone Seagull), it effect my life, and then I got it about that my thoughts and that I'm responsible for who I am. And yeah, it was slow. I mean it took her 10 years to get it through my head. But, finally, after 10 years, I kind of got it and I went oh, and then once I read that book, and started practicing focusing on gratitude’s and focusing on anything but the negativity; I tell you, my life overnight switched pretty much. I mean within a couple of years, you know, that's when I got the house and I wrote the book and all that happened after I read that book, but not because I read it, but because I took action, and did it, you know, it's not just reading it. Claire Rogers Exactly. There's a difference between knowledge and applied knowledge in my opinion. So what made you decide to seek out therapy in the first place. If you were in the depths of depression and things weren’t working for you, what gave you the push to think I need to change things? Gail Hamilton I was in grad school for a psychology degree. I think the classes were way above my head and I had no idea what was going on, so that got me into therapy initially. And then, the more I delved and more I uncovered the sexual abuse from my family and my father and my brother that I just kind of, you know, I just stayed, and I was the kind of person that I just didn't want to, and maybe this goes to your applied knowledge, I didn't want to, I equated it to like a car that I just didn't want to polish the outside to go, oh that's so pretty. I was determined not to stay depressed; I knew there had to be something more, maybe that Jonathan (Livingstone Seagull) was still nudging me from the inside "there's more, there's more". And so, I was the kind of client that I got out of the car. I went to the front, I open the hood, I took out the engine, I took it totally apart. I cleaned every single piece of that engine, and then I put it back together, stuck it in the car, polish the car and got back in and drove it. I wanted to be happy. I've been so unhappy my whole entire life with my grade school and high school and, and I didn't know why I was so happy. I didn't know it was the abuse or maybe I saw myself as different than instead of the same as everyone else. I believed that any sighted person was more valuable than me, which my parents stuck in my head. So, what a thing for me to live with my entire life? So, the therapy helped me realize that I'm just as valuable as anybody else. I just don't have to eyes that work, which is okay. Claire Rogers That’s amazing - I think it is beautiful; that actually helps me segue into what I want to talk about which is discrimination. You have faced career discrimination, and I imagine lots of forms of discrimination by society at large. And I want to know if you can talk to me about the forms of discrimination you face. And what we as a society can do better in terms of recognizing people with disabilities and seeing them as valuable as equal members of society? Gail Hamilton Yeah. Very good. One of my first ones, and most impactful ones was when I was in grad school, and I was one of the seven top singers in the country to this competition, I mean to go towards the finals of this competition, which a big honor we had a stack, two feet high of music, and I had to sing an opera, and work with an orchestra and two recital programs which is immense amount of songs that I had to know. I get on stage, and the National judge says after 10 minutes and I was allowed 15. That's it. She only had me sing my easiest songs rather than the more difficult, challenging ones. And I knew when I walked off on the arm of my accompanist that she discriminated. So he went up several hours later, because we both were in tears and devastated because I was the better singer. And it was for Fulbright scholarship for Pete's sakes, and so he went up to the judges room and said, why didn't she get it? and she wrote on the top of my critique sheet how can you have a career in singing when you're blind? I was devastated. I didn't know about fighting. I didn't know about discrimination. I didn't know about standing up for my rights. I took it because I had that belief that a sighted person was more valuable than me. I took her word as God. That totally changed my life. And that's probably why I went into psychology and counselling, but they discriminated too, and they said how can you be a therapist since you're blind, but by then I started psychotherapy, I started to fight and I realized I had a voice, and I realized that I am valuable. So I fought and I took him to mediation I won but that was, that is a whole other big description. I've been discriminated because my dogs. I was in Santa Fe, New Mexico once, and this was 30 years ago, and they wouldn't let me into a restaurant, they wouldn't let me into a bakery, they wouldn't let me into a grocery store, or a quilting company, all four or five of them in that week said you can't come in here because the dog. And sometimes I walked out and said okay fine, because I didn't have, at that time, my voice. But now, I'd go. I don't think so. And I have had some in Kansas that have said, you can't come in here with your dog, and I just bring up the little rules and I go over and say look up Kansas and check it out see what it says about seeing eye dogs, and they go, oh yeah, okay. So yeah, what can we do? Discrimination is so subtle too nowadays - you know they can't come right out and say it; sometimes they do. But you know, treat the person as you'd want to be treated with respect and love and dignity and kindness. We are not less than. I think holding us up to high expectations, instead of low expectations would be a good thing. So hold us up to high expectations, expect me to do the same as you'd expect of your other friend who isn't disabled, you know, and we will tell you if we can or cannot do whatever it is. When I was in Miss America, the state pageant directors said, well, we're gonna have everybody else stand on this little platform, and they'll get their picture taken. But we won't have you do that. And I said, well, why not? well because you're blind. I said show me what everybody else is doing. And so she did. I said, well here's how I'll do it. So we worked out a way I. That's how I've usually done it, even building of my house, or whatever it is. How's everybody else going to do it, then leave it up to me how I am going to adapt, because I know how I have adapted my own life, to everything. So, don't put your limitations on me. Claire Rogers Going back to what I said earlier, so it's basically, don't presume you can't do something and don't presume it's insensitive to ask you the question to do something. It's okay to ask you. It's not insensitive. It's not insensitive to ask. Gail Hamilton Absolutely. Totally ask me. If it's in your in your head, ask, you know, do you think, she lost on the corner of the street, I asked me, and I'll tell you. Does she want help across the street or not? Ask me, because there's some days I might. Some days I might not. Just ask me and I'll tell you if I can go to a movie or whatever it is. Just ask. Claire Rogers So can I ask as well, so say for example, I have actually seen this before. I’m in a coffee shop and I see somebody who is blind. Is it okay to go to them and say, do you need help, because again, I guess I have been in that situation where I thought oh well, I shouldn't presume that they need help, but what if they do? Gail Hamilton Right. Well, you can ask them if they do. I mean sometimes I won't, sometimes I want to be independent, and I'm just like, yeah, let me find my own coffee, I'm just gonna go for it. And then some days maybe I'm having a hard day and maybe you know it'd be nice for a stranger to come and ask, you know, so if it's in your head, ask because I'll let you know that day if I do or don't need you. And you know the other thing is, there are angry blind people, and there are nice blind people just like there are angry and nice sighted people. And so don't judge all the blind people just if you had a bad encounter with one of us. Maybe we were having a bad day, and we're sorry, and you know that's just the way it is, and we all have them, but don't judge me from some other experience you’ve had, and vice versa. You know, come and ask me I'll tell you and most likely I'm going to be nice. Claire Rogers Cool. I think that's fantastic advice. So my sense is that from what you've said you've got a deep innate sense of self that you didn't have when you were younger, but you do now, and you've got a burning determination to achieve all that you set your mind to. And the reason why I've come to this sense is because you've achieved a Master of Music Degree in Vocal Performance, a Master of Arts degree in Transpersonal Psychology, you built your own Habitat for Humanity house, achieved fourth runner up for Miss America and you've recently climbed the Sydney Harbor Bridge. Where does that burning desire to achieve all that you set your mind to come from, and can you give some advice to our listeners on how they can cultivate that burning desire? Gail Hamilton It I'm going to meld it into one thing, I think it's this thing, listening to that inner voice, which is the guidance from source, God, Spirit, whatever you want to call it, divine, listening to that, and following that. So I think the first step would be to stop to breathe and maybe write down a list of what you don't want, what you don't like in your life. I don't like being depressed, I don't like being at a job I don't like, my family, I don't like this, I don't like that, and maybe you do that for a long time, but things can come and then maybe you go back to that list and you write what would be the flip side of that. Well if I don't like being sad well, I must want to be happy. You know, if I don't like my job or I must want to do something else. Well what does bring me joy. You know, and if it's if it's vegging out in front of TV for a while, okay that could be where you are for a while, but then after a while it's like, well, now what. Maybe go back to what you liked doing at five years old. I've always liked to draw. I've always liked to hike. I've always liked to do this or that, I've always liked cooking, whatever that it is, there is that little kernel of something that you've always liked that brings you joy, and just start doing that little thing, no matter how small. And then the gratitude’s I think would help too. But the burning desire, it's in there, it's already there. You just have to figure out a way to uncover it, if it's journaling, if it's talking to people. And for me, you know that's partly how mine came unfolded by taking therapy. You know I love music I still love music. I love to write, go write a book, Okay, I love talking well, why don't you go be a speaker, you know I just keep doing the things I like. And somehow, it just keeps working out for me and I've never done. I can't say never, I've had a couple part time jobs I hated. But, but even then, I didn't hate them, because I loved connecting with the people, but I've always done the thing I'd like to do. And I've kind of let God, the universe, work out the details. And so I just keep doing what brings me joy. Claire Rogers Wonderful. So on the flip side, I think, even the most determined amongst us can fall down with our motivation or unexpected life events happen for, for example, COVID, and our greatest intentions fall by the wayside. And I'm just wondering, do you ever lose your determination and if so, how do you pivot in order to regain your focus. Gail Hamilton Absolutely. I'm just as human as anybody else and I could go eat a jar of peanut butter quicker than anybody I know (laughs), but at the end of the day the peanut butter is not going to help. For the first couple months (of the Covid pandemic) because I was speaker I thought, what am I going to do? I kept journaling. And I kept going. So I gathered a group of my favorite kind of career coaching people together and personal friends. And I said, give me some guidance because you have some expertise. I sometimes equate it to either learning piano or climbing a mountain. You have to have a mentor, somebody out there that's gone before you, you have to have the desire to do whatever that is. So, take piano, you have to have the desire to play piano, then you have to have the tools. So you have to have the piano, or keyboard, you have to have music. And those are just some of the tools. And you have to find a mentor, somebody that's been there before you, that can guide you on your way to teach you how to learn the skills of play piano. Then do you have to practice every day. And keep doing it with your mentor and their guidance and then you have to eventually have the faith that, yes, I can do this because yesterday I was just playing Mary had a Little Lamb, and today I'm playing with Moonlight Sonata. That's pretty cool. And then you have to celebrate when you get to the top of the mountain when you learn your piece, you get to have a little party, I used to call them student parties, and you get to celebrate that. So, for those who don't have the passion, or the desire and you don't know what that is, just kernel it down to the joy thing. Know that you have that spark, follow that and then if you don't know how, because when I wrote my book, I came up all these excuses I don't know how to write a book. And my therapist says, you don't have to know the how. All you have to do is have the desire. And so I did, I wrote for two hours a day for 10 years, writing and rewriting and 10 edits later and she said, there'll be an editor that can fix everything at the end of it. So there's always a mentor. There's somebody that's been there before you. And there's always somebody who can teach you. Claire Rogers So basically if we ever lose our way, your answer is, ask for help, get a mentor and get somebody to guide you on your way again. Gail Hamilton Right. It could be a therapist. It could be as a spiritual person, it could be somebody in your field, or it can just be a friend. Claire Rogers So you were just talking about your book. Your book is called Soaring into Greatness of which former President Jimmy Carter writes, and I quote "It’s a beautiful story of someone who has overcome a physical handicap and change it into a force that is an inspiration." Well you know what, if that's not an endorsement to read a book I don't know what is! So I need to ask you, how did you get a former president to come across your story... I mean do you have friends in high places? Gail Hamilton (laughs) Nope. Nope, I just wrote him because I had a Habitat house and I knew he was big into Habitat and I just wrote him and I had somebody help me find the address...I just wrote him and said, hey, I've written this book and would you endorse it, he said, yeah. So, just ask! Claire Rogers Exactly, the powerful lesson there is, you don't ask, you don't get right? That is absolutely fantastic, and I think, you know, don't have a fear of rejection. Gail Hamilton Yeah. Who cares if he says no. Claire Rogers I think it's amazing. So, before we wrap up, can you tell our listeners, what your book is all about. And what they'll get from reading it. Gail Hamilton My book is the story of my life which you've heard some of today. Going from the victim to the creator, it talks about my childhood growing up with the parents that I had, all the schools, all the discriminations, singing operas, it goes into relationships - all the codependency. I divulge everything - everything you'd ever want to know about me is in that book, up to the Miss America Pageant. What you'll get? I think I say in the back of the book, if I can provide a blind person insight that's hopeless & give some hope. I have a section at the back of the book. Totally worth reading called pearls of wisdom. It's written to people that maybe have a disabled child, it's written to parents of blind people, it's written from the blind person's perspective. I have all these little paragraphs from each kind of thing in my life to give them a little bit of hope and inspiration. It's for friends of people who are blind, and so if I can bring you hope that you know that you're not alone, that there is a way, there's always a way through the challenge, and that I've made it through the other side, and I faced some hard stuff. And I know it's hard, even COVID is, I don't have some issues some other people have, but I know there's a way through it and all things are possible. Every single thing. I'm not going to see in this lifetime, so you go you're not gonna see. All right, yeah, I'm not gonna see, I have prosthetics. But I don't have to see to make my life work. There is a way of coping with my disability that makes my life work. So just a way to cope with whatever it is, make life joyful and abundant and prosperous and peaceful and to accept it, you have to keep moving forward, because there's a reason for you to be here, and there's hope. And there's value in your life. Claire Rogers Oh, that's amazing. I think that's a great way to end, so Gail thank you so much for joining Boot Camp for the Mind & Soul. I very much appreciate you and our discussion. You can purchase Gail Hamilton's book Soaring into Greatness through Amazon, and you can learn more about Gale and you can contact her via her website which is https://soaringintogreatness.com Gail Hamilton Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Claire Rogers That concludes this week's episode of Boot Camp for the Mind & Soul. Don't forget to rate and review and subscribe. Tune back in next Wednesday for next week's episode. If you have any questions about this episode, or anything about the podcast, then don't forget to visit, https://www.itopiacoaching.com 
SUMMARY OF THE SHOW
Daniel Mangena is an entrepreneur, motivational speaker, philanthropist, and best-selling author. His work has been featured in major publications worldwide, including NBC, CBS, Market Watch, and FOX. Daniel is from Stratford, England, and joins me from his home in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, to discuss a life-shattering trauma that he experienced at the age of twenty. TOPICS THAT I DISCUSS WITH DANIEL:
LIST OF RESOURCES AND CONTACT DETAILS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE To learn more about Daniel Mangena and to connect with him, visit https://dreamwithdan.com LISTEN NOW
SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Claire Rogers My next guest Daniel Mangena is an entrepreneur, philanthropist and best-selling author and is from Stratford, England and is joining me here today from his home in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. He's here with me to discuss a life shattering trauma that he experienced at age 20. So, without further ado, let me introduce you to Daniel. Welcome to the Bootcamp for the Mind and Soul podcast, Daniel. Daniel Mangena Hey, hey, hey. Claire Rogers So, tell me about the life shattering trauma. I know we've talked about this before, we had a really good giggle last time we chatted. So, let's start how we chatted last time. Can I give a bit of background to it? Of course. Daniel Mangena Let's give the background. So, I got a place at Keeble College, Oxford University to study politics, philosophy and economics. It was a three A's or five.... So, I had to get three A's to get my place. I generally got A's anyway, all my predicted grades were A's. I was doing four A levels, so I actually had four chances to get the three grades I needed. Then somehow, I got the highest for my A2, the second half of my A levels. The highest grade that I got was a D or something like that. I've never had a C in an exam in my life, I've never had; going back through my entire education history. I've never had a C. Mostly A's a couple of B's that I've got my weak area, it's basically I get a B. So, this kind of threw me off a bit. I called up the admissions office at Keeble. I begged them. I said, "Something must be wrong. Is there any way they can hold my place? Can I retake my exams?" They said, "No, sorry, we've already given your place away." I ended up losing all of the places. The only university that I didn't get into was Warwick University. But every other university I got into. Now, I could have got into; I could have got my place at my backup Uni, which I think was Brunel. But I wasn't interested in going to an ex-polytechnic. I basically spent the next week arguing; because you don't really argue with grandparents. You make your statement once and then you spend the rest of the week being told that you don't speak back; and my proposition was, "Hey, let me... something's wrong here. Something's definitely wrong. Let me retake my exams and then I'll re-apply to university with my results and try again." Obviously, I got in this time. If I re-apply with the results, I've got a high chance of making it in. Obviously they like me. My parents said no and so a week later, I had to go through something called the clearing system. The current system basically is what's left after all the places have been given away. You go through a clearing system and you see where there's actually availability in places. So, I went through the university rankings, I look for a red brick Uni, so it's an actual University. I picked up some snobbiness from my parents, I think one ex-polytechnic. Claire Rogers Actually, can I interrupt you there for us non-Brits. What does ex-polytechnic University mean? Daniel Mangena It's a college that basically got awarded University status. So, it's like new kid on the block basically. Or as red brick Uni's were always universities; established universities. Generally, they tend to be older and generally tend to have higher pedigree for one of the reasons. So, I wanted to do economics and finance, which isn't something that every university does. Economics and finance or economics and something else is what I want to do. I didn't want to do pure economics because it tends to be more mathematic. Anyway, managed to find a place and much to my disdain, listened to my parents. So, I went off to do this and then about, I think it was like three months into my degree; wasn't very far into it. The story broke, that actually, something had gone wrong. They deliberately downgraded everybody's papers because they thought that the exam was too easy, because I had actually got 100% on one of my AS levels, one of my macro-economic paper, I got 100% on the exam. That's who I was. And that was the person they said that got C's and end up with D's, E's and it was terrible. Anyway, so now the story breaks. I'm like, "Oh my god, I'm vindicated." This is in the evening, right? "I'm vindicated. Yes, I knew it. I didn't get these results that they said I got." So, I called my dad and was like, because basically what the thing that you had to do was the next day, you had to take your actual transcript slips to your college, and they will actually send it off to get your papers. Get your grade sorted. But I was in Hull in the north-east of England, there was no way that I'd be able to get to my college in time based on the travel time it would take for me to get from home, back to London, get out to Essex, get my transcripts and whatnot and get back to London to get my stuff re-graded. So, I called my dad and was like, "Dad. I knew it. There's something wrong. Did you see the news? Can you go to my college and get my transcripts?" And he said, "It's over son, you lost your place at Oxford. Just get over it." And he hung the phone up on me. I didn't talk to my dad for 18 months after that. Something you need to understand about my dad, which is going to provide some background to this whole story is my dad's job, was he was a business advisor. He literally ran business development agencies for a living. Alright. And this is the man I wasn't talking to which will add some spice. You're laughing because you know a bit more about what happens. So, from that day I was just red with anger; I have been robbed. I'd gone through the embarrassment of people asking me for months, "How is it at Oxford?" and me saying, "I lost my place. I'm at Hull." Hull was the armpit of the country; no disrespect to anyone from Hull, but it's the armpit of the country and I was livid. I stopped going to my lectures. I didn't give my homework in. I walked into exams and just took them and didn't really care about what happened and I became determined that I was going to be a millionaire instead. Now, I'd already started visualization. I'd already started by working to study metaphysics. I'd already started my journey into studying about what now we call manifestation from about the age of 16. So, I decided that I was going to make that journey practical, and I was going to apply it now and I was going to be a millionaire. That's what I became obsessed with doing. I started spending more time coming down to London, because I was just not even really going to university all that much. I ended up one day finding, one thing that showed up was we found a company called Gem Discounts. What they did was they sell wholesale electronics. So, you’d spend like two grand, you get like a mixed batch parcel of stuff, but then you don't know what's inside. You're paying like 20 cents on the pound, 20 pence on the pound or something for the parcel. The business idea I had was, "Oh, I'm going to buy these parcels, basically and break them up and then sell them." My friend Joel; I was using his brother's computer, and his brother sees behind over my shoulder. He said, "What's that?" "It's this idea, I'm just trying to work out what I'm going to do with it." And he goes, "Oh my god, I can help you sell that." And that's where the business was born. It started off with that. Then, over time, there was other opportunities. I found a way to get cheap cars and all this stuff. Long story short, he got some of his friends and they got some of their friends and before we knew it, there was like 20 people working in an office doing a variety of different things. But here's where the problem was clear. The way that we raised the money was we got friends and families and people that everybody knows to put money into the business, which we then use to buy stock, to run deals, get letters of credit. We turn out millions of pounds. However, apparently this is a criminal organization because you're not allowed to take investment; even from friends and family in the UK unless you have something. A licence from an organization called the FCA. So that means every single penny that we made became proceeds of crime. Claire Rogers I'll interrupt just to tell our listeners that FCA stands for the Financial Conduct Authority, Daniel Mangena And they do a brilliant job. Their job is to protect the public from rogue people, basically. So here I am, 19 years old... Claire Rogers Going rogue. Daniel Mangena Going rogue, apparently. People are making money. Everything's good except that when we inevitably got shut down because we didn't have a licence; running around doing this. People end up losing money because we're not trading anymore. Fast forward four years when the investigation finally comes to its head. We have two trials. The first trial we won, effectively. It was hung jury's; not guilty. Hung jury basically means that not everybody agrees on a verdict. But if you look at the fact that we'd got not guilty for everything else, it was probably 10 or 11 people said not guilty and one or two said guilty. But anyway, we had a retrial. On a retrial, all of my co-defendants suddenly didn't have certain charges and were giving evidence to say that I was responsible for everything that happened. People that we had proven when lying in the first trial, were allowed to come up on the stand and actually go down and change their testimony. Claire Rogers Can I interrupt you there? This probably sounds ignorant, but can you not just say, "I didn't know I was supposed to be regulated. Hands up. Sorry." Doesn't matter. ignorance. And here's the problem. Here's the problem. It wasn't even their fault. When I; arrogant little toe-rag Mangena; was brought in to the police station to answer questions about this. I was like, "Do you know who I am?" I was rolling my eyes. I was yawning at the police. I basically, didn't exactly inspire any assistance. I basically raised the red flag in front of a bull and said, "Come and get me." And they did. This is the crazy thing. I'm very confident, for a while I was like, "Oh, it's because I'm black and all this stuff." Really it's because I was an asshole. Alright. There may have been some racial stuff in there. But I was an ignorant little asshole that thought, "I haven't done anything wrong so screw you." Little did I know; they were able to find some technical charges. They got me on the Companies Act. I was registered to be an electronics distributions company. It's illegal to be registered as a company to do one thing and do something else. Yeah. I didn't have an FCA licence, so they got me on the charge for that. And they got me another one for basic proceeds of crime; money laundering; because anything that I made was then proceeds of crime. So, every penny that I spent, was money laundering. So anyway, suffice to say, I did end up in prison at the end of it. How long for? Daniel Mangena I actually had to do the math on this, and someone asked me this the other day, and I got it wrong. So, the reason why I was confused, because my sentencing changed a number of times. Initially, I had seven years. Because; and this is unheard of, it's my first offence, completely clean history, they did it consecutive, which means that they added everything together. Claire Rogers So, it's not concurrent. To make it concurrent they made everything consecutive. Which was like, you don't do that. And they gave me the maximum sentence for everything. You must have really pissed them off. I really pissed everybody off. And I own this, I can own this now. At the time was like, "I'm a victim." But if you're gonna piss everyone off, this is what's going to happen. Okay. So first of all, there was that, then I ended up part...little did I know, part and parcel of the deal that got done was I was responsible for accounting for all of the money. So, when they came with the proceeds of crime order afterwards, where they tried to claw all the money back, I was left holding the baby. But here's the funny thing. I wasn't the one bringing investors into the business. And I wasn't the one that was actually on the day to day moving money in and out of the bank account. But I was the person that had to account for it, which I couldn't do. So, I ended up getting another six year or five-year sentence for the money that I couldn't account for. Which again, was consecutive. So that happened in six months. So, I'm already looking at seven years of get in. And then I think six months later, or something like that we're tacking more time on. And when I went through that trauma, my lawyer didn't show up, the person who did show up didn't know what they were talking about. I'm trying to say, "Hey, no, that's not correct." They're telling me to shut up and I got slammed with another notice. How old were you, sorry, when you when you got sentenced? Daniel Mangena This time, I'm 24. By the time this happened I'm 24. So here I am basically looking at 12 years or something crazy like that. But then we managed to get; I managed to post-show, basically by myself because I was refused legal aid; because I wanted to fight that. But the judge refused me any legal aid. So, I had to basically by myself write letters, and I managed to get the six years or whatever it is down to two years. Then we managed to get one appeal. They changed the sentencing guidelines. They changed the law to be able to basically still give me a longer sentence. They made everything concurrent, but then they increase the minimum sentence. Anyway, that's what it is. So, the thing that was crazy about this whole thing was that I literally started off with like, "I'm going to prove everyone wrong. I'm going to do this." Then it morphed into, "Oh my God, I've got a gift here. I can help people." It's people like my business partners; Grandma. She had some money problems. She wouldn't accept money. So, it's like, "Oh, yeah, just give it to me I'll invest it for you." I didn't, I just gave her the money back. These were the stories I actually ended up getting convicted for because I said, "Oh, you're a liar." There were people that were implanted into trouble that I was basically using as a way to give them financial assistance. And there was all sorts of funny things. Someone said, "Oh, I know. I was talking to Mr. Mangena because I spoke to someone with an African accent." There was a series of these nonsensical things. But long story short, during that time that the investigation was going on, I basically made another multi-million-pound fortune. Yeah, I made up another one because when I first lost, when they first clamped everything, first and foremost, I didn't think that it was going to be lost. In my head, I create my own reality. This is just a bump in the road. When they get to trial, I'm going to prove my innocence or they're going to drop the case; I even thought they'd drop the case or something like that. I'm going to get that money back. And in the meantime, I'm going to keep myself busy doing it again. So, I went off again, I was doing project funding. I was doing high-level consulting. People would pay me 1000 pounds an hour to pick my brain, basically, because they're like, "Who's this kid? He's like 20 years old." So, I was making a lot of money with like a 10-grand retainer, if you wanted to work with me. Built that up. Then a lot of that went into real estate in 2007. Claire Rogers Boom, a crash in 2008. Daniel Mangena Not the best time to do that. Then what was left, basically everyone that I was working with as soon as I got locked up, they basically ran off with all the money and disappeared and changed phone numbers. So basically, when I first got locked up, I was mad, I was angry. I was like, "Oh, my God." At first, I was like, "What's gone? What's going on?! But I didn't realize how much of a tidal wave had happened. I didn't realize I'd actually, lost everything. Because as far as I was concerned, you know what, at first it's calm, I'm still believing, alright, this is just a bump in the road. So, I was like, "Okay", so in my head, I'm like, "Okay, I'm gonna make this university that I can't leave. I'm going to just; I'm just going to think." Then when I found out one by one, things just started to be revealed to me that it's actually a lot more serious than I thought. First of all, I was in Wandsworth prison, which I found out was one of the most dangerous prisons in the UK Claire Rogers South of the river, isn't it? In London? Daniel Mangena Yeah, south of the river. So, then I find I've lost everything; it's actually gone. And then it hit me. And the first one's gone. And then it hit me. I've been sitting here for the last four years saying that everything's gonna be okay. And it's clearly not okay. And I cracked. Claire Rogers So, were you in there for four years when you cracked? No, no, no, I'd been in there for like a week or two. When I found that everything had gone sideways. I was like, "Oh, my God," because what happened was I was in with a guy called; I'm not gonna say his name, actually. I was in there with one guy who was doing the life sentence and he kind of was like, you know, he was a really cool guy. He's like, "Let me show you the ropes. This is how things are". Then he got moved, and I got put in with a heroin addict. So, as I'm finding out everything's gone to pants, I'm sitting there with a guy sitting in the corner smoking heroin. Claire Rogers In prison? Daniel Mangena Yeah. Claire Rogers How does he access that in prison? Oh, my God, you'd be surprised what people get in prison. We could tell some stories about that. Wandsworth was a bit interesting. You can get anything you want. People used to get all sorts of stuff in. Yeah, it was a whole thing. The prison guards were being paid to bring stuff in. There was one guy on my wing, he'd managed to hide that his wife was a prison guard. So, his wife was bringing him stuff and that was a big blow. So here I am with this guy in the corner, smoking heroin. I'm sitting there in a crappy prison tracksuit and it really hit me that I'm going to be spending the next; but that something's like three or four years I was expecting to see expended my life before it went up after a little bit; in this. All because the funny thing was, as everything started to go to pants with the business. I reconnected with my dad, just at the tail end of everything. Claire Rogers Who could have told you from the outset, you need to get an FCA license? Daniel Mangena Yes. And the funny thing is, by the time that I've been arrested, I started the process of applying for an FCA license. It was because it was a group of us; no one person was in charge; we all work together. But for two weeks, I was in charge of the whole business and during that two weeks is when everything went sideways. So, I brought my dad in, we started to make some changes, get new banking and all sorts of other stuff. Anyway, long story short, it was too-little-too-late, by then the damage had already been done. Well no, the damage had already been started the damage was complete with my stinky attitude. So, here's me, snobby little snot-faced 24-year-old who's walked in thinking, "It's alright I'm gonna be a millionaire, I'm gonna be fine." Claire Rogers Yeah. I'll find my way out of here. Daniel Mangena I'm just like, "No, no you're not getting out. This is life now." And here like I said, I cracked, and I looked around me and there wasn't...this is the thing; and I speak about this sometimes in my talks when I speak; there wasn't some hyped up, big emotional thing. Oh my god, it wasn't like I was in the deep, dark place. I just looked and I said, "Wow, I've done it. I've completely messed up." As far as I was concerned, there's nothing more to contribute. What am I going to be adding now? I've got a criminal record which means-. I've never had a job, remember? I didn't finish my degree. I'm a 24-year-old up never had a job. I thought I worked in a cinema when I was 16 serving popcorn because I liked serving popcorn. I thought it was fun for life skills. I knew nothing of the world, really. I didn't have any ability to actually go out and be a productive member of society. I started having flashes of films, like, "What am I gonna be doing? Just living on the dole for the rest of my life, unable to get a job? Claire Rogers Sorry to interrupt for our American and Canadian. Also, anybody who's not British, I should say the dole is unemployment insurance, Daniel Mangena Unemployment benefits, basically. Or I'm going to end up working on a building site or... I remember, I think I had a flash of the film 'Gone in 60 Seconds', where Angelina Jolie comes out from the thing she goes, "I've got to go to work." And Nicholas Cage goes, "Oh, but you're at work. While it looks like you've got to work twice as hard." Am I gonna be learning to be a mechanic? I was like, this isn't going to be life, this is going to be life. I said, "Okay. It makes sense now. I've already brought shame to the family name. I've got nothing to contribute here. What are my options for just taking my own life?" One thing that would have been possible for me would have been cutting my wrists open, but you've got a cellmate who can hit the alarm. If I don't do it right; which I've seen people with the cut marks; then I'm going to end up with these pathetic scars on my wrist to say that I tried it. I won't be able to hang myself, there's nowhere really to hang yourself from, I'd have to do it from the bed. The likelihood is I'm going to get found, that's not really going to work out. I could maybe start gathering paracetamol pills or something from the infirmary and do that, but then they could pump my stomach and then that's going to be sad. There's no way to do this. I said, "Well, maybe there is," and that's when it hit me. Everything had worked up to a point I'd actually achieved my goal. Had not only been a millionaire once, I've been a millionaire twice. It worked. That's what I've been focused on. But something was wrong with everything around it. I need to fix what's wrong with that model so that I can apply that and then come up with a strategy. Write an intention and set up, because the thing is, money being made can then last. The actual initial instance happened, but it didn't stay. If I kill myself, there's no way that I can come back from that, and undo it. But I didn't want to take any chances. So, the mission was take my model of vision: purpose, faith, gratitude, which is what I was using up to that time, and fix it. So that when I commit suicide, nothing goes wrong. And that's what I set off to do. Claire Rogers That was your new goal. Daniel Mangena That was my goal. Claire Rogers And is it literally because you could not see a future or is it what? I mean its Wandsworth prison. Well, it's got is got a notoriety about it as well. Was it the fear of being in prison and the people you were with? Daniel Mangena No, no, no. It was just what was I going to do? I was going to spend the next few years duking it out to come out and be what just a pathetic ex con. Claire Rogers Because you've got a criminal record, and I'm imagining it's difficult to build a life once you've got that. Daniel Mangena I had no mental cognitive connection with a life that wasn't me being an entrepreneur, going out making, that's what I do. That's who I was. That was my identity that had been built up from quite a young age. I didn't have any context for anything else. I wasn't thinking, "Oh, you know, I can go and get a degree or, you know, maybe even do something else." I just saw that everything that I done and ripped away and it had been ripped away because I delusionally thought, believed that this...and it wasn't manifesting at the time. Manifesting as a word kind of came out 2006-2007, it was I create my own reality. I am a conscious reality creator, and that now is just poppycock. So, I've been living this lie and I didn't know what to do with that. I was completely disillusioned at the thought of what I meant as a person, and facing down everyone I’d arrogantly looked down on, that I judged, that I'd said "Oh, look how pathetic they are, they don't create their reality. I do. This is what there was. I didn’t have a way of putting those two together. So, the most logical thing that made sense; which is to take suicide and commit suicide in my life. Claire Rogers What about your dad and your mom? Did you not think about them? Think, "Well, I shouldn't do it for them or...? Daniel Mangena I thought I was actually doing them a favor by actually just not being there to embarrass them anymore. Claire Rogers Really? So, then it becomes your mission to kill yourself? Daniel Mangena Just to fade away. Claire Rogers But you're here with me today, so something obviously changes in that goal. Describe to me what that was like. So, then you make an admission that you're going to kill yourself. So, what do you do actively every day? Try and figure out how you're going to do that? Daniel Mangena No, I had to work out what was wrong with the model. Because at the end of the day, as far as I could see, I was a failure. So, what I needed to do is I need to undo me being a failure. And like I said, I knew something worked with my original model. There was something to it because I got there, but I didn't hold it. So, I needed to dissect that. I went back as much as I could to order the books that I read before. I went into new books, I went into tapes, I was going back over; poring over what I knew; I was going over the practices. I was looking at stories of people who had overcome adversity, I would looking at stories of people who had done great things and I was looking for those threads. Because I had to see what was wrong with vision, purpose, faith, gratitude; because it worked up to a point. As I went on that journey; got to remember; I was spending hours a day, hours. 23 hours a day you're locked in a very small room. It's like you work out stuff. So, then I didn't notice that the light was starting to shine in on my situation. I didn't notice it because I was so focused. But what was happening was is that much the way that many of us do this with negativity, I was doing this with positivity. I was spending so much time in positive content that my brain was getting rewired. Claire Rogers Right, okay. Daniel Mangena All of my inputs, I wasn't really associating with people. I was just sitting down. I ended up getting new skills. I learned to play the guitar, I learned languages, I would just keep my brain busy. So, my brain was operating at probably the sharpest level it's ever operated, because I had to keep my brain sharp so that I could stay focused on this mission. Claire Rogers Can I interrupt you there? So, you're programming your brain, but how do you do that in such a terrifying environment? I mean, I'd like to talk about the prison experience, if you don't mind, because I'm trying to figure out how do you keep that positive mindset; although it's a bit weird; your positive mindset towards killing yourself? How do you keep that mindset while you're in such a scary environment? Because I'm imagining prison, you're in a perpetual state of fear, or am I wrong there? Daniel Mangena Here's something that actually clicked in when I got my Asperger’s. I got my Asperger’s diagnosis when I was 27 so it was towards the end of my time that came in. Because I didn't really feel fear. Fear wasn't something that really kicks in. I don't have extreme emotional states, because of the way my brain works because of Asperger’s. I don't have impulsive responses or reactions to things. Everything has to go through processing. Claire Rogers Okay, yeah. Daniel Mangena So, if something that should be fearful comes up, my brain actually goes to process that; needs to make sense of it before I can have a response to it. So generally speaking, everything goes through a logical process. So, for example, it was generally the people that are involved in like, internal criminal actions, like whether they're drug dealers, or drug takers, or they steal stuff from people, but they'll do that because they had stuff to steal. A lot of people like inter-gang, or inter-area warfare, but I wasn't in this world. There was people that I view, like, there was a time when a guy had robbed somebody, and then the people that he robbed came to the prison, and they were in another wing. And because he thought that they were gonna get him, he managed to sneak there and get a knife and like, try to kill him and... but they had stuff going on, I didn't have any stuff. Claire Rogers So, you could avoid the dangerous situations? Daniel Mangena Yeah. And the thing is, is that I had people that I'd play chess with, for example. But they tended to be people like me that were like, we're not prison people. They're like, they've made a mistake, like someone's there for tax evasion or something like that. So those of us that were in that kind of situation tended to end up migrating into to each other. And I kind of, I learned to keep my head down, really. And the attitude that had got me into trouble, quickly, you see that's probably not going to work here. I remember there was one guy who got his face cut open because, again, this is the thing about attitude. Someone had asked him for an extra piece of bread. He hadn't asked very nicely. So, Scarface says to him, "No, eff off." He says, "Okay." He goes, comes back, "Can have another piece of bread?" "I told you to eff off," boom, cuts his face open over a bit of bread. I had no intention of being a part of that. So, I didn't, I just basically stayed out of it. But the automatic response now, there are like I've had stomach trouble since that time, so I know that there was a physiologic response to an innate level of trauma from being in that situation. My insomnia flared up towards the end of my time and got really, really bad. That's when I ended up being referred to Dr. Helen McEwen who's one actually diagnosed my Asperger’s because we saw that they were inter-connected. So, there was definitely stuff. It's not a nice experience. There was a lot of depressive episodes during that time. But I was so focused on my mission, that although the mission did change, I was so focused on the mission that I was quite distracted, and didn't really have a conscious awareness of the environment. It's like, "Okay, this is when I'm doing this thing." Claire Rogers How did you change your mission from wanting to kill yourself to now you're not going to do that? Daniel Mangena I didn't change it. I didn't change, its kind of just changed by itself. And the funny thing is, you know, people have asked me, "But, when was the aha moment? What was that like?" There wasn't one honestly, Claire, it was just kind of, you just notice that "Oh, I'm writing a book about this stuff that I've been studying. That's not the behavior of someone that wants to kill them self anymore. I haven't really obsessed over if there's any new options that have arisen. Okay. Oh, I'm making plans for the future. Oh, when my mind is quiet, and visions are coming up. I'm actually having hopeful visions of the future rather than these dark depressive thoughts about being a bum living on the street with nothing to say." So, it kind of just evolved over time, until I just found myself I suppose, as giving in more to those positive visions. And the idea that everything's not over. And then I remember, I started to reach out to people that I knew from all the business and what would happen was that my I'd call my girlfriend at the time and she'd email them for me. And then they'd email back and then she'd read me the responses over the phone. I started to build relationships with people like, "Oh, you know. I know that this isn't new, you know I've got your back; anything you need." And some people were like, "Yeah, don't email me again," obviously. There were still people that were like, "You know, if you need anything," and then people would write me these beautiful letters. At first, I couldn't receive it. But I found myself able to receive letters and able to actually respond to them. Now remember, I remember when I said to my girlfriend, I'm like, "Just forget about me. Go and carry on with your life. I don't want to hold you back or whatever." And finally, about six months she kept writing me and writing me and writing me. Then I found myself able to receive even those letters and say, "You know what, thank you. Like, I still want you to live your life. But you can come and see me if you want." Yeah, my outlook...I knew my outlook had changed because the way that I was responding, and my behaviors and my choices were changing. Again, this is part and parcel of what's really started to underpin what my model evolved into because then I noticed as well, that I stopped blaming other people. I stopped. I was able to just acknowledge, "You know what? The police were doing their job." Claire Rogers Yeah "And I did this to myself." Daniel Mangena "I did this to myself." At the end of the day, I was 19 years old. I had no business running around the City of London, doing multi-million-pound deals, like just go get drunk, finish your degree, but like, live some life. When I look at even my co-defendants, they had families, they had kids, and I wasn't nice. I didn't exactly inspire. Would I have done the same thing in their situation? No, but I'm a different person. People hate where they are against what was done. So, the responses changed, my thoughts about things changed. And as I got deeper and deeper into it, stuff just started to make sense. As I started to put pen to paper with this, and map it out, I saw where I'd fudged up. And the more that I saw where I'd fudged up, and that I didn't have to fudge up and that other pieces started to come in; understanding the mind at an even deeper level than I understood it before because I had more time to go even deeper into the mind. Doing all of this with a lot of humility, as well. A key thing, you know, the first step of beyond intention, the model that I work with now that evolved in this time, except the foundation of that is something I call common denominator theory. Which is that I'm the central figure in everything. There's only one common thread of all my experiences, and that's me. So, if I change me, then things have to change. When I started to overlap that with a lot of the stuff I learnt from the world of esoterics and started to find science and facts and real stories that actually gave substance to that. I saw more and more and more and more and more. This just unfolded because of who and what I was at the time. The choices that I had made had unfolded to this. So, if I change those choices, I can change my reality. Claire Rogers So, when you came to that conclusion, how much longer did you have in that bit, in that sentence? Daniel Mangena This is something that continued to evolve into me coming out. So, I got out, and I had some shakes because when I did get out I did try and go and get a job. And exactly as I thought, I couldn't even get a job as a cleaner, which was hilarious. Claire Rogers Oh really? Nobody was willing to give you a second chance? Daniel Mangena No, nobody. Absolutely nobody. Claire Rogers Why do you think that is? Do you think people just don't believe in atonement? Daniel Mangena Ultimately, I think it's because I didn't want it. When I look at this, like down the rabbit hole, I didn't really want a job. I wanted to get myself together. So, I reached back out to some of my business contacts and decided, "Okay, let's find if there's a problem that exists in the world that I can solve and maybe try and do something from there." A couple of people gave me a chance, I was then able to find a part time job. Claire Rogers Yeah. Daniel Mangena In a call center, which I worked in the call center from one o'clock in the afternoon till nine o'clock at night. So, I got up in the morning, I'd work on my business, I'd go to the gym, then I'd go to work, I'd sit under the desk with my Blackberry. And I built that business up in, hang on...within three years I built up to a seven figure a year business. Claire Rogers Amazing. Daniel Mangena Yeah. But very, very different this time; didn't involve anybody else. There was no need for the FCA because there's no regulated activity, anytime anything even remotely regulated popped up. I walked away from the table. I'm going to stay away from that. Claire Rogers Yeah. Daniel Mangena And yeah, I built up a life that I really loved. I loved my life. You know, I got to travel. I got to...because I didn't travel before. Claire Rogers How do you travel with a criminal record? Is that difficult? Daniel Mangena No, that's not difficult. Because it's not drugs, it's not terrorism, it's not violence, you know, I can pretty much go anywhere. These are the things that people really care about. And again, this helped me to see, "Oh, this isn't such a life sentence after all." Then I found out more people in my life that I knew and respected have been through trouble as well, when they were younger. I'd read Richard Branson's story, and that he'd actually got into trouble when he was about my age, he managed to get out of getting convicted. He was probably a nicer boy than me and he was probably more polite. Claire Rogers As well, I think, one of the stones, I can't remember which one of the Rolling Stones he ended up in Wandsworth prison as well, at some point like this. Daniel Mangena There's so many people. So many people and I also stopped judging myself. Then the shame started to dip. The shame still tries to get me sometimes. But it's actually having the, I don't want to say bravery. But it's kind of bravery, basically, to have these conversations and put these out into the world. To tell my story on a regular basis, to share about this has helped me overcome and still feel that, "They're going to judge me..." Claire Rogers Tell me where that comes from because I've actually interviewed a few people for my podcasts that have been to prison. I'm starting to think this might be the incarceration show. But actually, I've noticed the most remarkable people actually are the ones that have been to prison so far that I've been interviewing, because I think my perception is it can break you or you can become a brand-new human being on the other side. So, I personally don't have any judgement towards that at all because I just think, "Things happen," you know? Daniel Mangena One of the things I found, Claire, as well is that this has been a great way of deciding whether I even want people in my life or not. Because the fact of matter is this, if you look at my life up to 2008, there's nothing that supports the narrative of me being someone worthy of going to jail. If you look at everything since, even during and since, there's nothing to support it either. So, you've just got this one blip that's an anomaly. Claire Rogers And it shouldn't define your life. And it doesn't define you as a human being. Daniel Mangena It shouldn't define my life. It doesn't define and if people want to take that as the definition, especially once they've gotten to know me personally and want to take that definition, then, "Bye, Felicia." I don't really think that we should be around each other anyway. Claire Rogers Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. So how long have you been out of prison? Daniel Mangena Oh, God. What year is it now? Claire Rogers 2021. Daniel Mangena I think 10 years? It'd be 10 years this month. Claire Rogers So, tell me what your life has been like since you've been out. You went and got your call center job and so forth. But then you turn that into a seven figure a year.... tell me how you did that. If somebody was listening to this podcast, and maybe had a difficult background or doesn't know how to see their way or you know, see the light? Because they've got that shame and the guilt from the past? What advice would you give them to move forward? Daniel Mangena Everything for me came down to relationships, because at the end of the day, number one, I had polluted my mind with so much positivity. I changed my internal expectations; I changed my environment. So, the inner world created the space for me to actually create. If I hadn't had that internal change, I wouldn't have been able to do anything, because I would have still been trapped. As the past version of me; bitter, victim blaming. I had justification; I was screwed over. I did it, but it happened. So, you know, that's that. But being able to let go of that supported me being actually able to make the choices that were going to take me to where I've managed to get to. Ultimately, relationships, and solving problems. Solving problems and doing that within relationships and doing that nurturing and fostering and building relationships. That's because if it wasn't for the guy that gave me the chance, and said, "Hey, my company will white label the services for you to go out and sell this," because I've got this problem that I want to solve for people, this is what it's gonna take, you also want to know I can do it. "I know that this has happened but if you would just give me a chance." He'd be, "No, anything you need I've got you." And he helped, he created that opportunity because of the relationship. I mean, we'd had a nine-year relationship by that time; eight-year relationship. He'd helped me make our first million. Without him, I wouldn't have been able to do it. So, he was ready to give me that chance and to this day, you know, I still will always honor him. I still send him clients. I still respect him so much because he gave me a chance and that chance that he gave me would create the space for me to go out and build a business. I don't know if I would have been able to do that otherwise, who knows where I would have ended up. Claire Rogers So, if someone's listening to this podcast, and again, has gone to prison or had a dark blip in their past and they've got shame and guilt and trying to forge a way forward. Your advice is that they need to forge good relationships, but also, with themselves first, forge a positive mindset. So, I have done work on myself to forge a very positive mindset, but I have different methods to you. What is your method that you would recommend? If somebody you know doesn't have that natural inclination to know how to do that, what you would say they would do? Daniel Mangena Well, first and foremost, you have to want it. You have to want it or accidentally fall into it like I did. But you have to want it because at the end of the day, the person that you are today is going to fight against any change. Not because your mind is your enemy, but your mind is your friend and its job is to keep things the same. So, as you go out there and try to make changes, your mind is going to come in and say, "No, that's not what we do. You're going to self-sabotage. You're going to procrastinate; stuff isn't going to happen." So, you have to really be committed to the course. If you're not committed to the course, it's not gonna work. Because you're going to come up against yourself, you're going to come up against people saying that you're full of it. You're gonna come up against challenges. Without the leverage over yourself that comes from really wanting it, nothing's gonna change. Claire Rogers So, you say, "Work on yourself every single day." That's what I do for myself. Every single day. Daniel Mangena Multiple times a day. Remember, I was spending hours a day filling myself with positivity. I was in a very, very, very dark place. But I was spending hours and hours of the day, not for a couple of weeks. For years. Claire Rogers So, what do you do now to maintain a positive mindset? Because, in my experience, you know, I've got a very positive mindset. I've done some deep inner work on myself, but for me, personally, I believe it's a daily exercise. Whether it's first in the morning, I get up and I do my mastery where I'm reading books, and I'm studying or I go to meditate, or I run. Something every single day. It's because for me, your mind is like a muscle and if you don't exercise it goes. So, what do you do each day? Daniel Mangena How you start your day, I feel really sets the rhythm for the day. You know, especially when you've got deep built-in trauma or deep stuff, it can leak out in your dream space. All it takes is a trigger, like watching...I remember my sister suggested watching Orange Is The New Black, triggered the hell out of me. It triggered. I watched the first episode or something. So, curating your environment to support your movement forward as well. Setting yourself up for the win. Little things like; and this seems random but it's mainly; my guitar is very close to me where I am most of the day. Reason being now I've got no excuse. I'm removing the resistance to me getting up and having my daily practice. My journal right here. So, when I sit at my desk in the morning, my journals there to get it done. My phone goes on airplane mode and sits on the other side of the room so that I can't wake up in the morning and jump straight on social media and look at text messages before I've set myself up for the day. Curating your environment so that you're able to then get up, and you can consciously decide what your weather is going to be for the day. So, I get up, first thing that comes out of my mouth is I'm so pleased with it. So, I start that. So, I get the powerful, progressive, expansive narrative going straight away. That sets me up to go and do my morning prayers, to do my morning gratitude’s, to go and have my meditation, to do some breath work if I need to. Before my feet even touch the ground. So, I get that momentum going. Then if something does pop up, I'm at least somewhat resourced to have a stop gap before I get into addressing it. Claire Rogers Tell me something because I do this. I make this you know, I have basically two hours every morning that's Claire time. I don't look at the phone like that's me, mastering myself for the day. Quite a few people have said to me, I don't have time for that. So, what do you say to that argument of, "I don't have time for self-mastery.”? Daniel Mangena I mean, I've got a newborn. Right. So, I haven't had as much time, it's not always on my own terms. Now, sometimes, you know, the baby needs stuff. But it's recognizing that you can have minimum deliverables, or I call them minimum deliverables, like a minimum something that you can do. A minute or two of heart-go-hear-its, a minute of breathing can at least anchor you somewhat. A couple of words of gratitude for the things you're grateful for even like just sitting with an image of gratitude. That's five minutes. There's a woman called Kelly Howell that's got an app called Meditate Me, that's got a series of really powerful meditations that are 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. They're free. There are other reasons too, like the calm app, and some of these other apps, 5 minutes. 5 minutes and you can carve it out. I mean, for me, I actually sprinkle my day with what I call check ins as part of the practices that I teach. Something called check ins. And what that means is that every few hours, I carve out little 10 to 15 minutes slots in my diary, these are carved out so that I stop and see how am I doing? How have I been since my last check in? Have I been up? Have I been down? Do I need to take a break? Do I need to go and get some fresh air? Do I need to go do a five-minute meditation? Do I need to go and do some star jumps to get my body moving? So, I've integrated that into my day. Is it always convenient to stop? No, sometimes I'm on a call, but my alarm goes off. And I can just stop inside. How's my heart, what's my breathing, what's my posture, and slow down. And then it becomes something that's a part of your experience rather than something you do and forget about over the course of your day. It's integrated into how you're actually living your life and then I bookend it with slowing down at the end of the day. Turning my phone off. Give myself time to slow down. Watching my mind movie, doing an evening journal and speaking about the day and things that I'm grateful for. Taking five minutes to slow down and have a little meditation, another 5-10 minutes. You can do it with 5-10 minutes in the morning, 5-10 minutes at night. And even if it's just like once during your lunch break just to stop for five seconds. Claire Rogers Or on your commute. Daniel Mangena Exactly. Claire Rogers You can find it, you know, take the earphones out, turn the music off, turn the alarms off the phone and just five minutes on a commute. You can find the time; you can find time. Daniel Mangena It may take longer. Or you can do...I mean, I've got an agreement with my wife that Saturday morning, I do get longer time. So, she watches the kids for like an hour or something on a Saturday morning so I've got dedicated time now that I can do my big dreaming and go through my 50 lists. You know, explore myself and anything I need to do. And we've got an agreement to make space for each other. So, for example, she gets to go to the gym in the mornings. I've changed my work day so that I'm watching the baby so she can go and do that. We make space to be able to do that. But again, that's curating the environment because who I'm with creates space for me to actually be able to make those choices. Claire Rogers Exactly. And that often makes it a healthy relationship as well because you're both being your best version of yourself by having that space. So, you've written a book as well. So, talk about your book and where our listeners can buy this book. Daniel Mangena You can head to my website, dreamerdan.com. There's a books page that's got some of the books that I've written. The main book that talks about this journey, this adventure, and the work that I do now that comes off the back of that is called 'Stepping Beyond Intention'. 'Stepping Beyond Intention', took 4 attempts to write because it's the book that I started writing when I was away but then realized that I was writing it for not such expansive reasons. And then try it again and try it again and finally got it to the place where it is now. Claire Rogers So, before we wrap up, what is the, not number one but the first tip you would give to someone who needs a push? You know they're in a dark place, trying to move forward and don't know how because you know we've all been in that dark place where you just can't see the wood for the trees. What would you say is your number one tip? Daniel Mangena Micro-shifting, which is a concept that I teach about. And what micro-shifting invites us to do is not try to take it all on at once. Just to ask yourself, "What step, no matter how small, can I make right now?" It may just be moving your body, it may just be changing your breathing, and you'll still be sad or depressed or angry. It may be standing up and getting some sun. It may be that you do have the space to go and do a five-minute meditation. Just whatever you can do, there is always something you can do, no matter how small, that's the minimum deliverable. So micro-shifting is consistently putting those steps together, to get closer. You may not get there every time. But you might get a 10th of the way this time, and then be sad for a couple of days and feel better. The next time you might get 20%. But it's just pushing that edge every time and asking yourself, "What can I do now?" You'll reach an edge and you'll say, "You know what, I can't I can't do any more right now. I'm still sad, but I feel a bit better." And just acknowledging yourself. So, taking those small steps and acknowledging the steps that you do make. That's what I would offer to anyone that's really, really stuck. Claire Rogers Fantastic. So, you know what? I'm going to buy your book, I'm going to read it, and will you come back? Daniel Mangena No, you're not, we're gonna send you a copy. Claire Rogers Oh, thank you. I want to read it because I'm very interested about this. I love this. I love the you've got a brilliant sense of humor, an English sense of humor, I love it. If I read your book; I'm going to read anyway; will you come back on the on the show and then I can pick out parts of your book, and we can talk about it more? Because I think you've got a lot of great stuff that you can share with my listeners. Daniel Mangena Definitely. Claire Rogers Yeah? Awesome. Cool. But thank you very much for joining Boot Camp for the Mind and Soul. And yeah, I'll have you back on. Daniel Mangena Great stuff. Claire Rogers Thank you. That concludes this week's episode of Boot Camp for the Mind and Soul. Don't forget to rate and review and subscribe. Tune back in next Wednesday for next week's episode. If you have any questions about this episode or anything about the podcast then don't forget to visit itopiacoaching/pod 
John Beede is a worldwide adventurer who has travelled to 67 countries, written three books, and the newest is called The Warrior Challenge: 8 Quests for Boys to Grow Up with Kindness, Courage, and Grit.
He has also climbed to the top of the tallest mountain on every continent, including Mount Everest. And for context, more people have orbited in space than have climbed the tallest mountain on every continent. During his nine years of adventures, he has survived avalanches, pulmonary edema, tribal warfare, and lived on a whole lot of Clif bars. John joins me today to discuss his adventures and much more. TOPICS THAT I DISCUSS WITH JOHN: · Climbing Mount Everest · Living with PTSD · Embracing and re-framing vulnerability · Boundaries and kindness · Re-framing what it means to be manly LIST OF RESOURCES AND CONTACT DETAILS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE The Warrior Challenge: 8 Quests for Boys to Grow Up with Kindness, Courage, and Grit by John Beede available on Amazon and all major book stores. To learn more about John Beede and to connect with him, visit https://www.johnbeede.com LISTEN NOW
SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Claire Rogers I'm Claire Rogers, and you're listening to Boot Camp for the Mind & Soul, the podcast that gives you an inner workout. Before we get started, remember, just like in a gym where you may not be able to use all the equipment, pick up what you can in this episode and leave behind what you can't. Your inner workout starts now. My guest today is John Beede, a worldwide adventurer who has travelled to 67 countries, written three books and given live presentations to nearly 1 million live audience members. John has climbed to the top of the tallest mountain on every continent, including Mount Everest, and for context, more people have orbited in space than have climbed the tallest mountain on every continent. During his nine years of adventures, he has survived avalanches, pulmonary edema, tribal warfare and lived on a whole lot of Clif Bars. He's also the author of three books. The newest is called 'The Warrior Challenge: 8 Quests for Boys to Grow with Kindness, Courage, and Grit'. So, without further ado, welcome, John, and thank you for joining Boot Camp for the Mind & Soul. John Beede Claire, thank you so much. I'm thrilled to be here with you. Claire Rogers So, let's just dive straight in. Reading your introduction, it's obvious that you are an adventure junkie. So, what drew you to these adventures? John Beede That's an awesome question and the answer is, yes, I am an adventure junkie. What drew me to these was I had a friend pass away when I was 15 years old and that made me think life is short. It put it in my mind early and I wanted to get the most out of my life. I kind of wanted to live a great life in his honor as well. So, there was this real early mindset shift of life matters, it's important and we have to make the most of it. For me that was going out on these adventures. Claire Rogers So, before you turned 15, were you an adventurous kid? Or did you literally change your mindset when you lost your friend? John Beede It was a pretty sharp mindset shift. My parents took me on some camp outs and the Volkswagen bus that we had an I have gone camping, I was in Boy Scouts, I was an Eagle Scout. So, I had done some adventures, but it really took a sharp turn towards the "let's get out, let’s really push the envelope, push the limit, go rock climbing, start climbing big mountains, get in the white-water"... all that happened after the age of 15. Claire Rogers Amazing. I was reading your website, and now I'm really intrigued. What happened on Everest that was not the experience that you had expected, and can you tell me that story? John Beede Yeah, we're diving right in then. I wouldn't expect it any other way. I thought it would be this huge adventure where we get to the summit and conquer this mountain and destroy, you know, like these crushing languages that we have, as climbers, "Like stomp that thing, destroy it, it's gonna be epic", and like, be this hero on top of Everest. Instead, on the way up, there was a man who was on his last breath, who I came across, and he was left behind by his team, frozen into the ice. I stopped in the middle of my own climb in order to try and help him. He was beyond help, so I had about three or four minutes with him where he was on his last breaths. That completely shifted my sense of purpose and why I was there. It came across this question, you asked before this, "Why these big adventures?" And it made me wonder, "Is this worth it? Is this really, like, risking my own life...Is it worth doing these things? Or is there a different purpose to it? And I'm in this sense of self-doubt, and wondering, and having been across this man who just passed away, resulted in post-traumatic stress disorder. So that was two years of decompressing and re-wiring my brain and the childhood messages that I had for myself, since I was a kid about like, "Why need it? Why need to push through the pain so much? And that's ultimately what has led to this conversation, of this book that I wrote, that this is a toxic message for young people to have. Claire Rogers Before you saw that happen to that gentleman, what did you get from climbing mountains? Was it a feeling or a sense of achievement? John Beede Yeah, there's a sense of achievement. There's also a sense of pride, like, "Hey, look what I did, look how high I climbed today." Or, "Look at this picture that I've posted on Facebook or on Instagram." That was a feeling that...sure it makes you feel proud, but it also is ego. It's a sense of ego. So, to be able to slowly learn to let go of that; which I'd started to do; but then be slammed with this trauma was a real point of growth for myself. Claire Rogers I think that's really interesting point. How did you recognize that it was an ego trip doing these adventures? John Beede You have a lot of time when you're mountaineering to think about what's going on in your mind and to reflect. Climbing Everest takes two months. When I was in Indonesia, that took us 13-14 days. Antarctica, that trip was 12 days. So, you have a lot of time to reflect and you start wondering when you're alone in a tent, and it's like one o'clock in the morning and you're waking up, you used to ask yourself, "Why am I doing this?" That was when I started realizing I kind of want the pride and the ego. Then it shifted towards, "I want to see what I'm made of. I want to see what capabilities I have and what...can I do this for myself?" Then finally, it shifted to where it is now; is mountaineering and climbing is like my church. Those mountains are my cathedrals. That's where I go for spiritual connection. Connection to other mountaineers and other climbers and that is my current state. That's what it shifted towards, is, "Yeah, I'm going to go climb so that I can be connected in a really big way to some wonderful people and wonderful scenery." Claire Rogers So, it shifted from being an ego trip to now a sense of community and oneness with nature. Is that right? John Beede Exactly, exactly. Claire Rogers How did you recognize that you had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder? Did you get help, or did you have an awareness and know that you needed help? John Beede The last thing that I wanted was help. Just to put a timeframe on everything, you climb Everest in April and May, so I got home in June, and thought "Man, it was just a crazy thing that had happened." I've been around other people passing away on other mountains and this was kind of the culmination of all of those. The worst of the worst was on Everest. So Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a lot of people are really flip about it. Like, "I stubbed my toe on the side of a bed, now I have PTSD," or like, "I kind of have PTSD when I'm going around this specific staircase from the one time I hit my funny bone." That's not what PTSD is. You don't truly have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder until three to six months after a trauma, if you're still locked in that fight or flight state. When something bad happens to any of us, we have this surge of adrenaline, which is how your body saves you from the Sabre-Toothed Tiger that's attacking. Your brain thinks is attacking. So, you get this surge of adrenaline and then that causes you to either fight it back, to run away from it or we also have the faint mechanism, which is just kind of play dead like a possum, or freeze. So, if you get locked into this state, your brain will keep pumping out those chemicals. And you will end up having...your brain will tell you that you're always in a state of danger. About three to four months after climbing Everest, I started noticing that it was scary for me to be in line at a coffee shop. I would think I'd be attacked from behind irrationally. I would see this gentleman who passed away on Everest in places that had no business, like I remember being in a shower and seeing him there on the tub floor. This is wrong, this shouldn't be happening like this. I remember just being completely anxious, having nightmares, not wanting to go outside, not having any interest in any of the things that used to bring me to life, like climbing or kite surfing. These are all the symptoms; classically of PTSD. Claire Rogers How did you know that? You've described the symptoms, and seeing this gentleman and so forth, but how did you know it was PTSD? Did you go and ask for help? Because from my experience; and you can correct me if I'm wrong; but a lot of guys don't ask for help. John Beede That's true. Claire Rogers So how did you know to ask for help, or did you ask for help? John Beede I did not. I was confronted by a friend, Sandra, who recognized what was going on with me. She saw me give a speech presentation about climbing Everest and she came up to me afterwards and kind of just noticed that I wasn't in my normal flow. She says, "John, you know, like if somebody were to break their leg and then they kept trying to walk around on their leg, what would you tell them?" I'm like, "Their leg is completely broken and they're still trying to push her out on this broken leg? Yeah, I would tell them they're being really prideful and that's ridiculous. Doctors know how to set it right so go see a doctor. There's no reason to, like, keep hurting yourself. You can heal." And she says, "Exactly. There are doctors out there who know how to put hearts back together and know how to put mind's back together. If you're bumbling around on this heart that's been broken, there are doctors who know how to put it back together, then you're just being prideful." She shared the symptoms with me of what PTSD was, and said, "Do any of these match what you're going through right now? I said, "Yeah, every single one of them." And that's when she said, "Well, it's super easy to find a clinician who knows how to put your heart back together. But it takes the courage to be able to go ask him to speak with them." That's when my ego dropped yet again. Maybe it's time to go to work through this. So, it was actually a joyful experience to be able to connect with somebody and share what was truly going on. This sense of shame or pride over, "I don't need to talk to somebody, or I don't need a therapist," is only that. It's only our own blocks about trying to defend an identity that doesn't need to be there any longer. Claire Rogers What does treatment or therapy look like? I'm just thinking for our listeners who may potentially have those similar symptoms in their own life. If they were to ask for help, what does that help look like? What does that therapy look like? John Beede The first thing that I would recommend is make sure you find somebody that you really enjoy speaking to. Make sure it's somebody that you jive with, that you feel like, "Yeah, maybe at one point, this could be almost a friend, but in a professional way, like somebody that I just look forward to seeing." So, there's nothing at all wrong with that, just like you would go to a few different restaurants to find your favorite restaurant. Go to a few different therapists to find who's that person that you just think, "Yep, that'll work. I like that this person isn't pushy with me or doesn't try and put words in my mouth, but they open up and they'll listen." I thought it would be like laying on the couch and talking about my Mom and Dad and all those classic things that we think of when it's therapy. But in fact, I had a process, it's called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and for any trauma, this is the style of therapy that worked wonders for me. What it is, is you identify what your negative belief is. So, for me, it was, "I'm not strong enough, or I don't have the skills to bring this man back to life." It was an irrational thought because he was already there for over 20 hours and I got three or four minutes with him when I saw him on his last breath. This irrational thought in my mind is, "I can't bring someone else back to life." So, we identify that thought and then there's this free-flowing, associative conversation that happens where everything's game. It's like, "Okay, you have that thought, where do you feel that in your body?" And I'm like, "What do you mean? What do you mean, where do I feel that in my body?" "Well, what's your sensation changes in your body?" I was, like, "Oh, my shoulder tensed up. But why is that relevant at all?" I would always argue like, "Why does that matter? Well, let's just go with that. What does that shoulder tensing up remind you of?" And I'd have some story from when I was in middle school, "Oh yeah, I remember my shoulder did that," and suddenly I tell the story and the shoulder relaxes. "Okay. Let's go back to the belief." You go back to that belief. "Is it changed at all?" "Well, a little bit." "Okay, what belief do you want instead?" "Well, instead of thinking that I'm not capable of helping somebody, I want to feel like I have an efficacy in the world that I can affect change. That I'm loving with people and they're loving with me. That's what I prefer to believe." Then you just keep doing this process of checking in with your body and then looking at your past and chatting with a therapist until suddenly, it's the weirdest thing, Claire, it's like, boom! Suddenly, you believe that new belief that you would prefer, and that old belief? It's like, "No, who would say that, that's silly." Claire Rogers You're reprogramming your brain. You're going from a dis-empowering belief to an empowering belief. John Beede Exactly and it's completely your choice of what that new belief is. So, you're not being brainwashed like some doctors putting this new belief in your mind. It's you choosing. Here's the belief that I want, here's the person that I want to exist in my skull. In my brain these are the beliefs I want that person to have and the doctor will be able to take you from where you are to owning a 10/10 belief system for that new belief that you want. Claire Rogers And now does PTSD ever go away? Or do you have to practice that new belief every single day until it's hardwired in your mind? John Beede PTSD goes away when you no longer have the set of symptoms that qualify. There's nine total symptoms or something like this that you could have, and you need five of them in order to qualify. In my experience, if you change enough of your beliefs, they eliminate the symptoms. They could re-occur; it could come back if you start to slip. But I'm at a place in my life where I don't qualify for it any longer and I'm thrilled about that. I'm a happy dude, love climbing mountains still, love hanging out with my friends and family. In every bit of experience, I have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder just like many mental health conditions. It's curable and, worst case, it's very manageable. Claire Rogers What advice would you give to someone who may be going through trauma right now and doesn't know how to get that help or how to ask for that help? Because they may feel it challenges their ego, or maybe they may feel it's not manly enough to ask for help. Do you have any advice for someone like that? John Beede For somebody who's going through something tough right now, I would say, "It's tougher and it shows more courage to go speak to somebody and if you're such a badass, than why are you so scared about what a single person in the room is going to think about you? Why does that challenge you?" It shows more fear, in my mind, it shows less courage if you hide from somebody else. "If you truly are that awesome of a person then why is it such a scary thing to go chat with somebody for 40 minutes or an hour?" Claire Rogers So, what you're saying to me, it speaks to vulnerability. You have to be willing to be vulnerable and to drop that ego. But vulnerability in today's society... you know, society loves to sell perfectionism. We're sold a bill of goods; we've got perfect lives and air-brushed faces, and everything looks amazing and shiny from the outside. As a society; I know I'm giving a blanket statement; but in my opinion in society, vulnerability is seen as weakness. So how do we teach society and people; kids in particular; that it's okay to be vulnerable. It's okay to show that side of you? John Beede You brought up the social media and everything. Like Facebook or airbrushing our faces and everything like this and that's where a lot of the issue comes from. Vulnerability is not posting on social media. "Here's all the crap I'm going through in my life." It's not stopping the guy on the bus and being like, "You got to hear all my worst nightmares and the horrible stories." He's going to be like, "Holy cow." That's not vulnerability, that's you just complaining. True vulnerability is wisely selecting the right people to open up to. If you speak to a very close friend, or a family member, or a therapist, they're not live streaming that conversation, hopefully. Of course, they're not taking photos of it. You need to find the people who are not going to judge you and that's why therapy is such an amazing place. Because that person, not only can they legally not share; at least in the United States; they legally cannot share any of the details of your life, or they get fired. But most of them do want to help and they want to hear your story and they're not there to judge. They're there because they're fascinated in you as a person. So how do we help society to overcome this sense of vulnerability? It's not about changing society, it's changing individuals. If one person's mind gets changed to, "Oh yeah, I find the right people to open up to and then opening up on little incremental bits feels good. So then suddenly, like medium opening also feels good. Actually, you know what, I'm ready, I'm ready to take the step to truly open up to somebody so that this healing can take place that I know needs to happen, but I just don't have the guts to go there with somebody or the trust to go there with somebody." It's not an overnight thing. I was chatting with this particular therapist for two years before the real change started happening. It was not a, "Okay, sat down. One session, wham, bam, thank you, ma'am. I'm out of here." Like, that's not how it works. Claire Rogers Did you get comfortable straight away with sharing your story? It's very vulnerable to talk about PTSD. Did you get comfortable straight away with sharing that out loud and outside of therapy? Or did that take you some time? Did you fear judgement? John Beede Definitely fear of judgement. Definitely took me some time. I remember being terrified to tell my brother and my parents that I was even going through something. "I'm having a hard time right now." It was hard to even say that phrase that I'm having a hard time right now. Then the first time I considered saying, "Hey, this is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that I'm dealing with." That took me a month to even admit to anybody outside of therapy. Even when it was suggested, like, "Hey, this is PTSD," from Sandra, from the therapists, like she agreed, it was like, "No way, that's for people who were in the military." Then I researched it and I said, "Oh, okay, there's this condition that is for people who have gone through horrible things. But I don't deserve to have this because I see these other people who have been through much worse traumas than myself." I was judging their traumas to be more valid than my own. Claire Rogers And invalidating yourself in the meantime. John Beede Exactly, yeah, which is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder speaking. Those are the negative messages that like, "Oh, you don't feel like you deserve to even have a title of a condition that is negative? What other belief would you prefer to have?" That was one that we went in and worked on. So, I was invalidating myself and it took years to be able to openly speak about it. Now, if somebody looks at me and says, "Oh my gosh, he had PTSD." I don't even have this worry of shame or feeling judgement from anybody else. I've grown to a larger place of character where others who aren't in the understanding of the, "No, it doesn't affect me." I've just built this bomb armor. I know you're a Harry Potter fan, so I've got some serious wizardry that bounces off anything that comes at me now. It actually opens up a big sense of being able to educate and share like, "Here's what PTSD really is." It opens up conversations of, "It can be healed. It can be cured. It doesn't have to stay how it is." I can show people who were like myself, who were kind of more ego-centric; as I was; that you don't have to be such a such a tough person. That you can open up to somebody else. In fact, the toughness is the opening up and growing stronger and growing bigger. I think that having been to the top of the tallest mountain on every continent, and to bring that message, bring some weight to it. It's like, Oh, it's not just some dude saying, "Go talk about your feelings." It's some dude who's done some pretty intense things and some pretty badass stuff. He's saying go do it. I think it brings more permission for a lot of people. Claire Rogers Absolutely and I actually want to echo exactly what you just said. My background is, I was highly successful in corporate life and didn't know that I was headed to burnout. I suffered from panic attacks, anxiety and depression. And I had that for 18 months. Didn't tell a soul what was going on. If you'd looked at me, I looked like I'd made it in life. Nobody would have had it. I deserved an Academy Award. But I want to actually highlight that I did exactly the same as you. I invalidated myself, which makes it much worse. I'd like to say that to all of the listeners, it's worse when you invalidate yourself. I used to say to myself, "I've got no right to have anxiety attacks and depression." I was scared to even open my mouth in a coffee store just like you. I used to say, "I have no right to those feelings. Because there's genocide, there's war, there's rape, there's all sorts of things. Yeah, I've got no right to have these feelings." So, I would want to echo exactly what you just said. I think that's important. That's two people now that I've met that have said to me that they've invalidated their feelings. I want to say that to all of our listeners that you can't compare and contrast your trauma to someone else's, because that makes the symptoms even worse in my experience. John Beede I didn't know that about you and thanks for sharing. That's a level of connection. We all think that we're the only ones that are dealing with anything tough. We all get in our own brains and our worlds become so small. Then you have this little devil in your mind. That's like, "You're not enough, you're not good enough, you're not strong enough, you don't have what it takes. You're not lovable." And this little demon in our minds that we all have, is screaming these messages to us. By saying that that voice doesn't exist, or by thinking that, "Oh, I don't deserve to get any change or; like you said; You invalidate it, that actually like insulates those messages, and it locks them in there. And if you validate that, "Oh yeah, everybody deals with something and I'm allowed to deal with this stuff, too." Then suddenly, it's like that insulation around those negative thoughts. It just breaks away and then those thoughts also start to dissipate. Claire Rogers Yeah, and I tell everybody. I mean, I go stand on stages. Now you put me in front of 2000 people, I will shout that from the rooftops. I'm like, "I've seen the light people." Certainly, I came to like an 'a-ha' moment like, 18 months into my private world of hell. Thinking to myself, "I'm actually not enlightening anybody by invalidating myself." So, I thought, "Well, I don't have a right to have these feelings. But actually, I'm not enlightening anyone. I'm not making the people who are going through genocide and war and so forth any better by invalidating myself." That was a big 'a-ha' moment. And I'd like to say I commend you greatly for getting help, because my stories; I didn't. I white-knuckled it. I white-knuckled it myself, because I was scared to go and ask for help. So, I'm really grateful that you've said out loud that you sought help because I did the complete opposite. John Beede I definitely know the white-knuckling feeling because I did that between the ages of 15 and 32. When between when my friend passed away and an Everest. So, white-knuckling, I've been there, and it sucks. You're absolutely right, you don't help anybody else. Maybe like, I had this thought maybe there's a parent listening right now, if you're going through something, if you try and white-knuckle it and not share any of that with your kid, they're gonna pick up on it in some way. What does that teach your kid about what you do when things are tough? They're gonna learn to white-knuckle it as well. Then their kids are going to learn to white-knuckle it also. If that thought, in any way, no matter where you are in life, a parent or not, you have the ability to stop these generational cycles of gritting it out and internalizing this negativity. It shows up in your body and you get injuries, you get ailments, people get sick because these negative thoughts end up going somewhere in our bodies. You can stop that whole process for your entire generation, or for your entire family by making a choice to change it. Claire Rogers Exactly. Ask for help. That's my biggest thing. Even if; and I'm very conscious, some people can't afford to get help. But there are charities out there. So, I would say to any of our listeners who can't afford to pay for therapy, there are charities out there that can help you. John Beede Worst case scenario, there's tonnes of zoom therapists now that have come up as a result of COVID and a lot of them have free introductory meetings with therapists. I know it's not the same to like actually speak with somebody in person. It's really not, but you can start there, and you could even just do like a 15-minute introduction. Try it on for size. Like say, "I'm going to meet with one person or three people for 15 minutes each. Just stick my pinky toe in the water and see if this John guy and this clever lady know what's up or if they're totally full of it." Just try it. It's free. What are you scared of? What do you think you're so hardcore for that that's scary for you? If you're really not scared of anything, then go try it. Claire Rogers Absolutely. I want to pivot slightly. You faced life-threatening dangers while climbing Everest and the Seven Summits. You swam with sharks, climbed the world's tallest mountains, kite-surfed double-headed waves, and experienced tribal warfare. Which I need to learn about that too. But why do you say none of those things define you as a person? John Beede Those are all my past stories. That's all stuff that I've done, it's true. They're fun stories and we'll go into some of them I'm sure. But none of that defines how I show up with you right now, in this moment. If I show up and I'm not present, or I'm distracted, or if I show up and I'm like, wishing that I was actually clearing out my email inbox or that I was taking my dog on a walk. If I wish I was anywhere else. Or if I'm like, so full of myself because like, "Look at all the stuff I've done." Then I'm no longer here with you in this conversation. All of those things have led me to be able to more fully be with other people. And that's the point of any accomplishment, in my mind. It's not a trophy and it's not prestige. It's who you show up as right now, in the moment with others and if you show up as a... I like to say that if you go to the mountains, as a jerk, you're going to come back a bigger jerk. If you go to the mountains as somebody who's seeking kindness and wanting to connect with others, you're going to get more of those qualities. Mountains are amplifiers. So, none of those things actually matter because what truly matters is you and myself right now in this moment. I will say the same thing about the next person, the gas station attendant, when I go there, that's what matters in that moment. That's what reality is in that one split second of time. Claire Rogers Sorry to interrupt, so what you're speaking to...I agree with your analogy about mountains, I say that mountains are great listeners. I'm not a mountaineer, but I'm definitely a hiker. For me, there's nothing greater than being on a mountain and just talking to them. They're great listeners. That for me, speaks to mindfulness but I wasn't always so mindful. In fact, I'll be honest with you, I probably lived 20 years of my life in complete and utter autopilot mode. Were you always mindful or did you have to learn to be mindful? And am I even describing what you're saying correctly? Is it mindfulness? John Beede It's absolutely mindfulness I'm speaking to. No, I was not always mindful. I remember hearing Brene Brown's speech. Her TED-X talk about vulnerability and I said, this is a bunch of BS. And then somebody suggested, maybe meditation, you know, drop this ego guard you've gotten. I was like, "Well, if I'm really that tough then I could try it once," and I hated it. "I'm not gonna sit still, I got stuff to do." I was in the same thing; I call it reactionary mode. Where you don't have this split second of time of how you're going to answer somebody. If they upset you, or cross you the wrong way. What mindfulness does, in my opinion, is it opens up the amount of time or it extends the amount of time between stimulus and your answer to it. So, most of us, it's like stimulus, and then boom! Your conditioning causes you to react in a certain way, like, "Dishes are in the sink," super-easy example. "I'm pissed, I asked you not to." You just make it worse. So, mindfulness, and being in the now puts all these other thoughts about what might happen in the future, or what's already happened in the past. So okay, "There are dishes in the sink. What is the most effective way to not only clean those dishes up now, but make sure this doesn't happen again? I'm going to calmly, rationally figure out how to adjust the scenario and then I'm going to take action." That whole sentence that I just said, it takes place in like half a second. That's what mindfulness helps you with and you're able to better choose which life directions or which possible avenues you're going to walk down in your life. Claire Rogers So how did you learn to be mindful? John Beede Meditation was a big part of it. Watching my breath is a very big part of it. I think my first mindful moments were mountaineering. I'd be in high altitude, I'd be at 20,000 feet, 25,000 feet above sea level. Take one step and I'd have to breathe three, four times in order to have the strength, the energy to take a single, extra step. I had no idea what I was doing, because I thought I was just trying to take another step up a mountain. But I was watching my breath, counting my breath, seeing how it affected my body. Then I would take that next step and I'd do the exact same thing. Well, next thing I knew when somebody says, "John, you should try meditation." I sat down with a little guy on this app; It's called Headspace; I was listening to. He says- Claire Rogers Andy Puddicombe? John Beede Yeah, good old Andy. He says, "Now you're gonna watch your breath. And now you're gonna like do a scan through your body." And I was like, "Well, I've been here before I've done this. I've done this for hours and hours in the mountains." When he linked up, all this breath work that I had done and all this body scanning I had already done. Now here's how to take messages from it, that's when it really like clicked for me. Claire Rogers So how do you...So I'm a marathoner. A runner, and I've noticed if I put music on...so I am a really good runner with no music. I can listen to my breath. I'm amazing. I'm in the zone. It's great. Put music in and all of a sudden, I think I'm Usain Bolt. I think I'm the best runner out there and my ego is off. And I have to watch that ego cause my ego thinks I'm pretty freakin cool sometimes. I'm just wondering, do you ever have to watch your ego? And remember, no, no, no, this is my ego talking and go back to mindfulness. I have to actively work on it sometimes. John Beede Of course, of course. I mean, were I to have totally eliminated my ego, we wouldn't be speaking right now because I would be in the ether and I would have disappeared. If I had dropped my ego completely, not once would I have looked at the little thumbnail of myself that I can see over zoom while we're like having this conversation. Not once would I have wondered, "Oh, is what I'm saying resonating with people?" I've had all these thoughts and those are all ego thoughts. So of course, we all have this ego and the trick is not to judge it, not to say, "Dang it! I looked at myself in a mirror!" Or, "Dang it! I'm like, the fastest person on the track right now running." Or like, "I'm gonna pass this lady. Yeah, she couldn't possibly keep up with me. Or this guy, I'm gonna totally overtake him like that." It's not to judge yourself when you notice that those things come up. The key is just to recognize it. "Oh, there's that little demon in my mind. There's that little ego. There's that little guy that always likes to jump up." And then I like to think of taking your palm and, like a parent, patting on the forehead. You know, kind of like a derogatory pat like, "Oh, aren't you cute?" That's how I like to think of how I treat my ego. Like, "Isn't that cute you popped up again?" Claire Rogers I do something similar. I kind of talk to myself and I'm like, "Ooh, don't you think you're special? Oh, look at you thinking your hot stuff." And having a real humor about it. I think you're right, don't judge your ego, we've all got one, but just have that awareness of when you start letting that take over. I want to go back to mindfulness. I personally believe If I had my way I would make every kid learn mindfulness from like age five, you know, sit there and learn how to breathe and learn how to tame those thoughts and so forth. That note takes me to your book, 'The Warrior Challenge: 8 quests for boys to grow up with kindness, courage and grit'. Can you tell me why you wrote the book and is there a link to mindfulness in there? John Beede Yeah, absolutely. Why I wrote the book is because there are so few resources for young men in particular about how to grow up with values, how to grow up with mindfulness, how to grow up in respecting others who are not like yourself. Not making this sense of the kindness is a weakness but in fact, kindness is a strength. Those messages are not in... they don't exist in the world, but they should, and they need to. There are plenty of resources for young women and this is what my publisher had recognized as well. Penguin Random House, they have like all these metrics and numbers saying, "Look at how well all these books for young women are selling." And then they have a response in a question of, "Okay, well, where's the book for young men?" and they literally couldn't find those that existed. So, they asked me to write this book and I was 100% on board. I'm incredibly proud of this thing to exist as far as the mindfulness part of it. So, each chapter is a quest. It's designed like a video game where you have to pass this quest in order to get to the next one. Each quest is a true, real life story of a hero who had to embody a certain trait, or a principle, or a value in order to succeed at his big thing. So, with mindfulness, there's this true story of Danny Way, a professional skateboarder who jumped over the Great Wall of China on his skateboard. He had a broken ankle; a fractured ankle at the time. They had this massive ramp; half a million-dollar ramp that they had built; film crews from all over the world where there. People are coming out of the bushes to try and watch this thing happen, like illegally. They're poached up, they're like, "Oh my gosh, she's gonna jump over the wall." And the day before, he fractured his ankle on a test run. Well, now it's the day of the real thing and he's standing on top of his ramp, climbs up, he's feeling this pain in his ankle and he starts rolling down and everybody is going, "Well, he's got a fractured ankle, how is he possibly going to stick this landing?" And by studying everything that exists on Danny Way, I've figured out how to live in his brain a little bit, and he's mindful. He's able to just watch what's going on in his body, breathe through or breathe to become more present. He said, the pain in his ankle is not anything compared to what he knows that his skills and abilities are. So instead of letting this monkey-mind thing go off and saying, "You're never gonna stick this thing, your ankle hurts too bad." He said, "No, I know what I'm made of. I'm a professional. I've been doing this for, like 20 years he was a professional skateboarder. And I've got this." He replaced that negative thought of, "You can't, you're not good enough. You can't make this happen. It's too tough," with, "I can, nothing's too gnarly," in his language, "and I've got this." So, then the story stops, and we break down how to breathe, how to observe what's going on in your body. How to replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts. And all of this is just this one chapter out of the eight quests. So, it's real. It's nutritious, I like to think of it and it's just as valuable for parents to read with their kids as for kids themselves to read. Claire Rogers So, is it the book that you would have wanted to read as a kid? Is that why you wrote it? Because that's why most people write books. It's the book that they couldn't find. John Beede That's awesome insight. Had I had this book when I was 10-11-12-13 years old, my whole life course I think would have been different because I would have learned about mindfulness. I would have learned about setting boundaries with other people. I would have learned about how to find teammates and that it's okay to say no to other people, as your friends or as relationships. Kids don't know that they're allowed to say no to being friends with certain other kids who aren't good influences. They don't know that they're allowed to say no to that life course or, that direction isn't the one that I want to take. It might be good for you and I respect that. That's not taught. Things like vulnerability, like we spoke about, is in this book. what if every five-year-old knew that it was okay to say...well, for every five-year-old is like, "Ow this hurts," but then we get shamed that because; and we get shamed for it for a reason. Parents want to say like, "Hey, I need to move on with my day, your little ow thumb doesn't matter right now." And there's like an effectiveness to that. But what if something really traumatic happens, then we have that same thought of ow in my heart, but I don't feel like it's safe to say it because I'll just get dismissed. That's where that comes from. What if we retaught a 10-year-old, 11-year-old 12-year-old, here's how to find the right people to speak to. Here's how not to blab to the random stranger on the bus or the kid in school who's going to share this and embarrass you. Instead, here's how to find the right people to talk to and how to safely open up to the correct people. All these lessons. I don't know how the world wouldn't become a better, more humane, caring, loving place where we uplifted one another if every kid had these lessons. Claire Rogers I want to go back to what you said about boundaries. That really stuck with me because I didn't realize until a couple of years ago; and I'm 47 now; I thought that it meant if I had boundaries, and I said no to people, that meant I wasn't a good person. That was a big 'a-ha' moment. I would say yes to everything. "You want to do this Claire? Or can you do this and so forth?" I would always say yes when my body would be screaming, "Hell no, I don't want to do that." But I thought it meant I wasn't a good person. I'm just wondering, did you have that same experience with boundaries, or did you have a different experience with setting boundaries? John Beede I was 35 or so when I started realizing it was okay to politely decline, and by politely at first it was like, "No, I can't do that thing!" Then it wasn't so polite. And people would be like, "Whoa, John's in a bad mood today." Because it was such a sense of anxiety over saying no to anything because I, too had this sense of pride of like, "I'm going to take care of everyone. I'm going to do absolutely everything, any request anybody has. I'm going to shoulder that with them and for them and every step of the way. And I'm going to handle all my own stuff. And I'm going to reach out to other people. Just offer to help them with their things." It resulted in, like burnout and anxiety and collapse because I just couldn't shoulder it all. Just like you it was when I was 35-36 when I started realizing, here's how to healthily, politely decline. And that actually gives others the ability to respect you so much more because they know where your borders are. They know who you are as a person. That allows you to actually be more loved, for others to have a greater sense of respect for you. And to not over-ask. Because if you don't ever say no, then people go, "okay, that's okay. I'll ask more, I'll ask more, I'll ask more." Next thing you know, you're at work, and your boss is asking you to come in for an extra three or four hours, then it's five hours, then it's 10 hours. Next thing you know, you exist as a work-bot for the boss. Being able to set boundaries in every sense of your life and your relationships, "No, I don't like the way that this or this happens, let's change it." Or, "This makes me feel..." Here's a template, you know what, let's just go right into here's how to set a boundary. The first thing you do is you just state, "This is what I'm feeling." Because nobody can argue with that. If I were to say, "Claire, I feel sad, mad or scared." Those are the only three negative emotions that we have at our core. Those are the only three you actually have to identify. "I feel mad when I get called at two o'clock in the morning," let's say you just didn't think about the time difference. This is a totally fake scenario. "I get called at two o'clock in the morning, it makes me mad because I really value my sleep." That's not something that you can argue with, right? Like, okay, John gets mad when he gets called it two o'clock in the morning. And then you say, "But I love feeling connected to people and I would love to have this connection with you." So, you state what the good side is that you're trying to get to because you don't want to give the sense of I'm angry at this other person or that it's about them or you hate that person. You just want to be like...you want to establish that you're trying to create a connection. "So, in order for me to feel really connected and close and for us to have awesome conversations, can we schedule for a different time of day?" It sounds like such a basic thing. But most people don't go there. They just go, "Quit calling me. What are you doing?" Or it's like, "Oh, I'm exhausted because...". Then they bottle it up and they never mention it and then it keeps happening. And that's the template, just state the emotion that you feel, re-establish that you want to connect with somebody and then offer an alternative. Claire Rogers I would even go so far as to say that no is a complete sentence. You don't need to justify yourself. You don't have to be mean or unkind, but you also don't need to justify saying no. I think that's something that we could teach kids as well, is healthy boundaries to be able to say, "No I don't want to do something," and you don't need to justify that emotion. John Beede Mm hmm. Yep. Claire Rogers Before we close out, kindness is a big thing for you. It's my core, core value. How do you think we, as a society can be more kind to one another? If we were to tune into the news, you would think that the world has gone to hell and a handbag and everybody's, you know, divided on one side. And everybody has to be right, and there's no middle common ground. How do you think we can all put down our gauntlets and hear each other properly again, and just be kind? How do you practice kindness? John Beede I practice kindness with everything that we've been discussing. Vulnerability is kindness to yourself. Setting boundaries is kindness to others, even. Having values is a great thing. Now when values collide, which is what we're seeing in the news right now. Instead of looking at the details, the biggest tip that I can give is to look at that person's needs. Their need for security, their need to feel safe, their need for their emotional safety. And if you can step back from the details, and see that others have the same exact core needs as you, they're just trying to meet them in totally different ways. That often gives us a level of kindness and a pause to see that we're all actually going after the same thing. We're all seeking love. We're all seeking safety. We're all seeking security, significance. And just starting there, by saying, "How is this person trying to get the same things that I am?" makes you take real pause. To connect, to re-evaluate, and to be more peaceful in your interactions with others. Claire Rogers Absolutely. It speaks to going back to that common ground. Personally, I think of it as, "I don't need to be right. I'm totally cool with what I believe in and I don't need to be right." So perhaps, the kindest thing I can do is listen like I'm wrong. That for me is kindness. I might not change my mind at the end of it, but listen like I'm wrong, because perhaps that person is going to share something with me that I hadn't thought about before. That could be kindness, just listening. John Beede I love that. I really love that. It reminds me of a meme I've seen going around it's like, "If you believe that, two plus two is 25 then I'm past the point in my life where I'm trying to tell you that you're wrong." Claire Rogers I love that. Cool, well I think we're gonna leave it at that. So, John, thank you for joining Boot Camp for the Mind and Soul and very much appreciate the discussion. I think we're gonna have to do another episode because I could talk to you all day long. You can purchase John Beede's book 'The Warrior Challenge; 8 quests for boys to grow up with kindness, courage and grit', through Amazon and all major bookstores. To learn more about John, you can visit him at www.johnbeede.com. Thank you for being on the show. John Beede Claire, thank you so much for having me. It's been a joy. Claire Rogers That concludes this week's episode of Boot Camp for the Mind and Soul. Don't forget to rate and review and subscribe. Tune back in next Wednesday for next week's episode. 
Christine Handy is a model, a spokesperson, and the author of Walk Beside Me, a story of one woman's journey from a world of labels and superficiality to a far richer world of friendship, loyalty, and love. But most importantly, Christine is a cancer survivor and advocate for breast cancer charities.
Christine joins me to share her story of how breast cancer led her to change her life and serve others. TOPICS THAT I DISCUSS WITH CHRISTINE:
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SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Claire Rogers I'm Claire Rogers, and you're listening to Boot Camp for the Mind and Soul. The podcast that gives you an inner workout. Before we get started, remember, just like in a gym, where you may not be able to use all the equipment, pick up what you can in this episode and leave behind what you can't. Your inner workout starts now. My next guest, Christine handy is a model, spokesperson and the author of 'Walk Beside Me', a story of one woman's journey from a world of labels and superficiality, to a far richer world of friendship, loyalty and love. But most importantly, Christine Handy is a cancer survivor and advocate for breast cancer charities. So without further ado, welcome, Christine and thank you for joining Boot Camp for the Mind and Soul podcast. Christine Handy So happy to be here. Thank you. Thank you for the intro. Claire Rogers So, Christine, we have modelling in common, we've talked about this before and I want to start off by talking about that. So what started you down your modelling path? How did you get into it? Christine Handy So, interestingly enough, I used to be told as a child that I should model. I had three other sisters so my parents weren't really interested in me modelling. First of all, they had a lot to do with my three sisters. But also, they didn't want to distinguish or put anybody in the spotlight, right? They wanted everybody to be equal. But I kept seeing pageant things, pageant mail, you know, mail like we see in the trash can. And I would, I would say to my mom, like, that was me, that was labelled to me. Now, this is very young at 11 years old, and I would say, why won't you let me do that? And it almost became like, a battle of the wills, right? I was just determined, I really wanted to do it. I thought, I could; it would be interesting; it would be fun. I mean, I was a child. So I just ended up winning the battle and I worked as a model from the start of age 11, until really 35. Then I had health issues, now I'm modelling again. I just signed with an agency last year. But modelling, it just became my way of life. Claire Rogers So, how did modelling impact you in the sense of your body image? Because you started young. So did you, I mean, will you remember what your body image was pre modelling? Christine Handy Yeah, I kind of do because I think even at that young of an age; I think it's probably worse now with social media with young kids; I think I really cared at 11 - 12. In fact, I know I did because I'll never forget, I went on a shoot at 15 and the client was Pepsi. They wanted me to wear a one piece bathing suit, which I was modelling bathing suits at 13. You know, it was no big deal. It wasn't anything risque, it was just what we did. I remember being in the dressing room and the client had given me wardrobe and I opened the wardrobe, it was this bathing suit and I went to put it on and my breasts had just kind of developed at that age. So I was uncomfortable, I was almost embarrassed because you know, at the time, when I was modelling, we were supposed to be sticks. You know, way back when; we were sticks, it's not like now where you have these big breasts and booties and all that stuff. We were sticks. So I was super worried. I went out into the photographer's studio and I was kind of like hunched over and I remember wearing a robe out there feeling kind of ashamed. So that's my first memory of being, kind of, ashamed of, well, body image. It was then that I really developed a bad eating disorder and that went on till I was about 21 until ultimately, I was hospitalised for an eating disorder. But modelling had a huge impact in my life. I was thinking about that this morning, because I thought we would be talking about it. One of the most interesting parts of modelling and body image to me was that when I was going through, like, the most working time of my life which was probably 18 to 22, I kept saying to myself "body image doesn't really matter to me." I was trying to convince myself of that, but, it was everything to me. So my mind was like trying to play tricks on me going "No, no, no, don't acknowledge what's happening." But ultimately, I had to acknowledge it because I had an eating disorder. Claire Rogers So tell me something, I remember from my experience, again I told you I started when I was 18 years old, I'm 5'7. At the time, I was about; 120 pounds now but back then I was probably about 105 and I remember my first modelling gig overseas where I was living overseas for six months. I walked in the door and they gave me a bag of speed pills and said "Here you go, take these and keep skinny; keep small." I never took them because I was that scared kid that was scared I was going to get in trouble. I look back on that and think, "I was 105 pounds, and you wanted me to take speed pills to keep even smaller." So I have no doubt in my mind that girls developed eating disorders. Did you develop that because of that need to have to be skinny to be that today? Christine Handy Oh yeah. We used to get weighed in at our modelling agency. Then I worked in Barcelona, I worked in Europe as well and, you know, the girls that I was working; it was almost comparison which was maybe more of the problem, right? I was working with these other girls, and they were so skinny, so I was like, "Oh, I have to be that skinny." I even had a friend who took out ribs. Yeah, to work more. So then I thought; and I remember looking at my body going, "What can I take out?" It was crazy. But no, I didn't take anything out. Claire Rogers No, I remember, because I was old. I started at 18 and that's old for a model. I remember having lots of young girls 14 - 15 years old that were scared to be away from home. So I was kind of a surrogate mom, but you'd see them 14 - 15 and they're putting metal rods in their stomach to look like they have abs and they're pinning their ears back and their nose and they're having boob jobs and their boobs haven't even grown in yet. I'm just thinking this industry can can really damage your self-body image. I'm wondering, did you ever feel the need to change what you look like? Did you ever feel the need to get the plastic surgery and all that? Christine Handy I didn't. I mean, again, I had an eating disorder so obviously I was really into body issues, right? But I didn't; it didn't go that far. It was not healthy for me clearly. But I ended up doing it for 25 years and it became kind of my life path, my career path, of course, and to go back now, after all these years, it's just, you know, I find that in life, whether it's a good environment or bad environment, what we're used to, we tend to cling to, right? Even though there are parts of modelling that were really unhealthy for me, part of me is still clinging to that because that's all I know. Claire Rogers Yeah. It's your identity. Christine Handy Which really brings up an interesting point in my story which we'll talk about is all the scarring and all the illness and how that really messed up, you know, my identity because I was clinging to the identity of "My beauty is what the world admires." Claire Rogers Let's move into what you were just saying. You suffered an arm injury which resulted in complications. Can you share that story with me and our listeners? Christine Handy Yes. When I was 41, that was probably the happiest time of my life too. Not the surgery. But I was doing tonnes of yoga, I had young kids, they were 11 and 12 and things were just going well. To the outside world, I had the perfect life, I had two young sons and they were beautiful. I was married and I lived on the right street and I carried the right bags and it just, you know, whatever society idolises; that was my life. And I wasn't happy; really; I mean, I was happy because I thought "That's the happiness that I should feel." And it was enough for me. So I had a torn ligament in my right wrist, I don't know if you can really see my; if you can you can see my screen. So this is a one bone from here to here. I don't have a wrist. So I went to...I was doing yoga and I had a yoga injury. I went to a surgeon, the Stanford best doctor in town, so to speak, and he performed surgery to repair the ligament in my wrist, fine, had a cast on for six weeks, the cast came off and literally my arm ballooned. My arm looked like my thigh bone. And I called him on a Sunday and he said, "You over ice it." I said, "Okay, well, I'm not an MD." I was in horrible pain, but I didn't get a medical degree. So he's the doctor, so I believed him. About three days later, the pain was so horrendous, I couldn't get out of bed. So I went to his office and he diagnosed me with this disorder called RSD, which is basically your brain telling your limb in this case, it was my arm, that there was pain and trauma. Ultimately, it was misdiagnosed. For months and months; seven months he bullied me, he told me I was a hysterical housewife and all the pain was in my head. At that point, my self-esteem was so wrapped up into what culture thought of me and my external and my beauty and honestly the bags that I was carrying and trying to keep up with society that i just...I'm not saying it was my fault. It wasn't my fault. He had the medical degree and he was a bully, but I allowed him to bully me and I didn't see a second opinion for months later. Ultimately, I got up the courage and saw a second opinion and the guy took one X-Ray and my wrist was totally destroyed. Every bone in my wrist had broken and fallen into a pile right here and there was no way to repair it. S0, I flew up to New York and they put a cadaver bone, which is what this is, a cadaver bone, and a cadaver Achilles tendon right here to kind of cushion it. And that was it, game over, I had no more wrist, I had no more ability to really use this arm, I can move my fingers, but it's horrible pain. Six weeks after my arm was fused, and bone grafted, I was in a cast from my fingertips to my shoulder and I was in a hotel in New York City. For all those months that I was being bullied by this doctor, whenever I would shower, I would put my arm out of shower because my cast's on. I would just pour liquid soap over my shoulder and just let it wash down my body. I was 40 at the time so I wasn't worried about breast cancer, I wasn't worried about self-exams, and I have no family history of it. So I wasn't really doing the breast check. So, the way I could clean, well, bathe my body was just to use that liquid soap. When I was in New York City and I was at this hotel, I called down to the front desk, and I said, "I need some liquid soap." And they said, "Too bad, there's a bar of soap in your shower." And I was like, "How am I gonna wash my body?" So I've got this big, huge cast outside of the shower, and a purpose bar of soap, and I started to wash my body and I felt a lump in my breast. I was like, "There's no way I have breast cancer. It's, got to be impossible." Ultimately, five days later, I was diagnosed with cancer and it was an aggressive form. I went on to have 28 rounds of chemotherapy, which in the cancer world, is a tonne. Ultimately, from 10 years ago to now I've had 21, non-elective surgeries. Nine on my arm, and 11 with the breasts. Claire Rogers What was the type of breast cancer? What was the diagnosis and how did you take that news when you're not even thinking that's even a possibility? Christine Handy So I was I was diagnosed with stage two, level three breast cancer. So stage two, meaning it wasn't in my lymph nodes, thank God. And level three was the most aggressive form. So, because it was level three, that added 12 more chemos to my regiment. I was really, I was really suicidal, to be very honest with you. I thought, my value in this world was only what I looked like. I felt like value to not only society, but to the friends and my family that my identity was wrapped up into all the external, I don't even know who I was. So, to go from being this thriving mother, wife, athlete, self-proclaimed athlete, model. To having now a fused arm, which I couldn't even understand how I was going to live the rest of my life, how I was going to drive, how I was going to do laundry, how I was going to take care of my kids. I had to deal with that reality, right? Then on top of that, I'm going to oncologist appointments, when they're telling me I have to have all this chemo, and I'm going, "Wait a minute, what what's a port? What do you mean chemotherapy? What does that look like? What do you mean, I have to go to a chemo room? What do you mean, I'm going to lose my hair? Like that's who I am, that's my identity, you can't take that from me." So I was kind of bucking the system going, "Oh, no, no, no, I'm not going to do this. I'm going to take myself out of this equation, because I'm going to control it." Ultimately, I really did plot my suicide, I just said, "I have a way out." And it was about three weeks of telling people, "I don't want you to think that you missed this. But I have no value and I'm going to take my life." And and my friends would go, "Well, why would you? Why?" First of all, my brain was not in the right frame of mind, obviously, you know, there was a lot of trauma in a short amount of time and I had been on massive antibiotics for my arm, and I just had major surgery and so my brain is not in the right state of mind. My thoughts are very dark, right? I didn't even have a chance to figure out who I was, because things were going so quickly in the illness world. So, I didn't even have a chance to say okay, you know, from a bird's eye perspective, this is what's happening to you. Who does that, right? I mean, I do it now but especially when you're in trauma, and things are moving very quickly, you don't stop and go, "Wait." You can't think. So my only thought was I got to take myself out of this equation. Ultimately, it was the women in my life who showed up for me and said, "We're never going to forsake you. We will always be by your side, whether it's one illness, or two illnesses or three illnesses," and it doesn't matter the length of time, because I really thought I had used up all my chips. Like with my friends and family, they took me to physical therapy for months, you know, they watched me cry over the pain in my arm and the devastation of now what happened to my arm. And I just thought they're done. You know, I'm just sucking everybody dry. So, it really took them to convince me that my life had value, it didn't matter what this looked like it was who I was inside. It took me a while to figure out that I did have value. They also said, "You know what, when you're done with this chemotherapy, and you're living your life, and you are going to get through this, then it will be your responsibility to take it from there. And then you have to help other people like we've helped you." So I took that very seriously, because they walked with me, they gave up their resources, they give up their time, they give up time with their family to take care of mine. So I took it very seriously, which is ultimately why I wrote my book about it because I think that the world we live in really portrays women as catty and tearing each other apart. And in my life, it was the people that showed up that saved my life. So my book is almost a model. It's a fictional depiction of my life. But it's almost a model of the road that I took which was very external and very transactional, to the world that my friends showed me, which was a life of service. And it's the difference between the two, and the tragedy between. So there's a lot of life lessons in that book but I think most importantly, it's people showing up. Claire Rogers And so when you were going through that journey, did you ever ask yourself, why me? Why did it happen to me? Christine Handy Yeah, I still do. Because it's confusing. You know, I'm allergic to sugar. Again, like I said, I'm a self proclaimed athlete. I do things right. You know, when I was modelling, I was never addicted to drugs, I never did any drugs, I just ignored that whole thing that was going on around me. So, when you think to yourself, I don't have any family history of it, I'm doing what I'm supposed to. I'm eating well and exercising. All those things that we think will protect us. Well, that got shattered, right? Because I was doing those things and I still continue to. When you have that kind of mentality of "I'm untouchable, because..." That's not true and that was a tough lesson for me. But I did a lot at that time; "Why me? It doesn't make sense to me." But it doesn't make sense. Breast Cancer doesn't make sense. They don't know why it's caused. You can make yourself crazy by asking that question over and over again. You're never going to get the answer. Claire Rogers Did you ever go down the route of... from what you're saying everything in your external life was perfect. Did you ever go down the route of maybe something's not working for me internally? Did cancer bring you to start doing some introspective deep work? Christine Handy Oh, yes. Yes. I mean, my life wasn't working for me, I was very empty. And the idea of serving other people, I had no time for that. In that previous life, that previous version of myself. And don't get me wrong, I loved who I was back then, I'm not saying that I was a bad person. I just was a very self involved person. And also, I really depended on what other people thought of me and that's a very lonely life. So now, I don't really care what people think of me. You know, if I can help somebody, that's my goal, like in life. But if people don't like it, it doesn't bother me at all. There's a very different mentality, right? I think most people care about the comments. I think most people care about the comparison. For me, when you're diagnosed with cancer, and you're faced with life or death, you go, "You know what, none of that really matters." So, again, I think that the life that I lived, versus the life that I have now, it's just a complete paradigm shift. And I'm very lucky that I paradigmed this way because a lot of people go the other way, and they get bitter and angry, and go to fill themselves up with things that are not healthy. Claire Rogers And did you, I'm guessing for sure you would have feared death. How did you navigate the idea? Because I believe that most of us go through life thinking that we're going to live to be 100. And that, you know, stuff happens to other people not to us. Christine Handy Exactly. Claire Rogers So, I'm imagining you get that diagnosis all of a sudden. I'm guessing that death comes to your forefront, which most of us don't want to think about because we all think we're getting out of here alive. How do you navigate those feelings of fear of death? And also, how did you share it with your kids, because I'm guessing they're kind of scared too. Christine Handy Right, and I have boys. So they don't talk, right? They don't emote. They don't share. And that was really hard for them. Still is, I believe. It's funny because, of course, when you're faced with life and death, that's your ultimate fear, right? So that's, I think the control part of that came out of me. I was like, "Oh no, cancer is not gonna take me. I'm gonna take me." So that was the suicide part. But once I really stepped up and wanted to fight for my life, then I was afraid of death. So it was different, right? Very different. And when I became afraid of death, when I was going through chemotherapy, I kind of became... definitely more religious and very spiritual. I realised that as long as I was serving people, and as long as I was sharing and helping others, for however long I'm going to be in this world, then it doesn't matter when I die, because I've done my job. And it wasn't the job of being a model, wasn't the job of being in front of a camera for a picture, it was a job of being in front of camera, or for an interview or a podcast or a speech, because that was how I could serve other people. So I'm completely resolved to, "If I get taken out today, I'm good. I've done everything I can to help other people." Claire Rogers You know, Christine, I have to say, I recorded my podcast episode yesterday. I think I've done about two or three months worth of recordings that will go up soon. And the common theme is exactly what you just said. Every single one of us seems to have hit rock bottom. And when you come out the other side, say the meaning of life is to help people. And I wonder, why do we have to hit rock bottom to realise that? Do you have any thoughts on that? Christine Handy Because we're taught in society that, you know what their ideal is. We live in a world of fluff. We live in a world that people are ashamed of vulnerability. We live in a world of plastic, right? So that's what we idolise. We don't idolise the people that are doing what we're doing. We don't idolise that. We idolise the people that are wearing the Louis Vuitton and being photographed all over the world. And that's what's on TV, that's what's on our computers, that's what is on the billboards. I think that you almost have to go through trauma, sadly, to get to a point where none of that really matters. And there are some people that are evolved enough to dismiss all of society and that's... I want to be around those people. I just want to touch them, and figure out "How did you do that, like without all this trauma?" But to be honest with you, that's the only reason I'm sitting here right now is to try to teach young people not to... you know, shield them from what we... well, I don't know your story completely, what I went through, so that they don't have to go through that. Because ultimately, for me, a lot of the mistakes I made were self esteem issues. And self-worth, and self-love issues. I wasn't fighting for me. I was fighting for society. I was fighting to be light. That didn't work for me. And even though the outside world looked at my picture of this perfect life with these perfect little boys and this perfect husband, and this perfect house. That wasn't happy. That was lonely. So I hope that we can teach people that the outside is society. It's not important. The bags that we carry, it doesn't matter. Claire Rogers I love that. So I'm going to deviate slightly and I'll get back to our questions, but I love what you just said. I'm wondering, so my story is I went through bone crushing anxiety, depression. I'm a fighter. I'm a scrapper. You knock me down I can get back up 1000 times but I got to a point where it was so bad. I lost a very close friend to heroin. I didn't even know he was in in the first place. I was in a bone-crushing bad place. I was in hell for 18 months. 18 months was living hell and nobody had a clue what was going on. I had the perfect life. I'm beautiful, had the cool clothes, the house, the husband, the holidays, you name it, but inside I was dying. But I can now say in hindsight, because I went to some dark places. I uncovered all of the self-worth issues and all the darkness and abuse and I got it out there. I shone the light and I did my own personal therapy on me. Christine Handy Good for you. Claire Rogers I can now say all these years later, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I don't want anyone else to go through it, but it's the best thing that ever happened to me. So, I want to know, because I wasn't in a life or death situation, although it felt that way at the time. I want to know, with your diagnosis, do you ever get to a place where you think this is a good thing that happened to me or, you can't think like that? Christine Handy I do. I do. I mean, in my life now I feel joy. I'm in chronic pain, and I have no breasts, and I am getting a divorce and on and on and on. And I feel joy. And I'll tell you, because the difference is, there's great happiness in this world. But joy comes from serving. And I wasn't serving in my past life. So now, even in chronic pain, even in going through this emotional heartache that I'm going through right now, I still feel joy because of the ability that I have to share my story and to serve. I think that's, I think we should be yearning for joy and not happiness. I think we should yearn to serve and not to be served. I think those are the biggest things in my life. That I wake up every day and go, "How can I serve somebody today? What can I do to help somebody else?" and by the time I go to bed, I'm okay. I'm lonely, and I have anxiety over some issues in my life right now but I can deal with those because of serving. Really. Claire Rogers You and me both sister. Exactly. That's what I do every single day. My intention is how do I help people? Christine Handy Exactly. Claire Rogers And if I help someone, job done. Cool. So you just were saying as well that you are a religious and spiritual person, were you always that way or did getting cancer take you down that path? Christine Handy I was always, I mean, I was always religious. I always believed in God. But it's funny, my friends would say to me, "Oh, let's go to a Bible study. And let's really commit time, like every Wednesday morning, let's go to a Bible study." And I was like, "I got yoga class. I got to work out." You know, my value, like, so much of my value. I should have said this before, it was also in my physical exercise. If I didn't work out every day, I felt like I was worthless and I've gotten over that too, by the way. I didn't really work through that one. But it was a false idol, right? I mean, I had a lot of false idols. I had a Louis Vuitton false idol, I had an exercise false idol. I had a friendship false idol. There were things that were false idols that got, you know, completely ripped out of my life. And my hair was a false idol. And so, yeah, I think that cancer, you know, ultimately was a blessing. I wouldn't wish it upon my worst enemy. Claire Rogers Did you go deeper with your religion, then? Christine Handy Yeah. So when I was diagnosed with cancer, I decided that maybe I should give the Bible studies a chance, right? Because what else do I have to lose. I'm not going to lose that so I really dove into my faith. And my friends were very religious, unfortunately. I'll give you an example. One of them came over right when I was diagnosed and took everything that didn't resemble life out of my house. Skulls and crossbones, it was right before Halloween. They took out the witches and they just replaced it with plants and life-giving signs. Another friend of mine walked around my house and I had a big house at the time, and put little sticky notes with scriptures all over my house. On mirrors, in my kids bathrooms, in my kids bedrooms and in the kitchen and in cabinets so that I would open up and I would see them. And so they were feeding my soul with life. And they were feeding my soul with a different way of thinking. And so I wasn't looking at, you know, the external anymore. I was looking at the faith; I was looking inside. So then I started to pour myself into it. In my own world there was a lot of times when you're going through cancer where you're alone, physically alone. And so I would look at Bible apps and I would read the Bible and I would listen to preachers on podcast. And that really shifted me especially in the serving field. That has carried me through all of these surgeries. I don't know how I would have ever survived without faith, to be honest with you. Claire Rogers So all of those surgeries, help me understand, why did you need so many surgeries? Christine Handy S0, my arm was super complicated and once I had, well first I had the infection, and so then it was fused. Then they needed to add an Achilles tendon, a cadaver Achilles tendon in here. Then they did reconstruction and took the metal out, that was another surgery. Then they, you know I'm in chronic pain so they tried to help me with the chronic pain with another surgery. With my breasts, first I had a lumpectomy, then I had chemotherapy. Then when I was done with chemotherapy, they decided that I needed a mastectomy but I was too sick to have a double mastectomy. So I had the cancer side mastectomy, then two years later, I had the other side mastectomy. But with each mastectomy, you have two to three reconstructions. It's like, it was the multiplier effect and I didn't have one illness, I had two going on at the same time, which is a completely different story than most people's. I was scheduling chemos, between arm surgeries and between breast surgeries. Claire Rogers How do you as a beautiful model, who, now you've had your breasts removed. How do you navigate that new identity and do you keep your body as it is or do you go down the implant route? What's your thought process during that time? Christine Handy Those are two really good questions. One, I navigated it through knowing that there was purpose in this pain. I believed that there was going to be purpose in this pain. I was the only one that could make that happen and I knew, during chemo that I was going to write a book. So I would take meticulous notes and I would try to, I couldn't remember anything going through chemo. So I would write, I would make sure I wrote and I would save emails and tax. I knew that if I could make sense of the pain by using it to serve other people, that I could get through it. Once I got through the surgeries and things like that, then I was able to really focus on shifting my career. I was gonna be a different version of who I was, and now was going to be a writer. And now I was going to be a speaker and I thought to myself, "Isn't this interesting how I was in front of the camera for so many years and now I'm just a different version of that." Because now I'm in front of a camera speaking versus just sitting there, taking a picture. So, after my mastectomy, I didn't want to go flat. I was young, and I was very much into, "Oh, great. Now, this is the prize, I'm gonna have implants." All this trauma is horrible, but look at my prize, and they're going to be perfect and they're going to be, not big because I never had big breasts to begin with. I wanted them to kind of be small, but they're not going to move, like they're gonna be high on my chest, and I'm gonna walk around in my bikinis because I live in Miami and I'm going to be super happy. You know what, I loved them. I loved my implants. I'd never had implants before so that was really fun for me. Then, about two years ago, the bio-cell implants were recalled by the FDA, and those are the ones that I had. They were causing breast cancer. I was like, "No." I had literally the exact ones that were causing breast cancer. Of all the implants they could have put in me, those were the ones. I thought that was a sick joke, right. So I had to take them... I had to get them removed, and they put new ones in. I was like, "I can't believe I have to go through another surgery. It's just mind-blowing that I have to deal with this." But I grit and grace, like you, grit and grace, grit and grace. I'm going to just grind my way through it. So I got the implants in and I was like, "Okay, I can handle this, they look good. Back in my bathing suits. It wasn't such a bad surgery, blah, blah, blah." Well then, six months later, which was last March, when the whole world was shutting down, I got an infection in my left breast cavity. In the implant so I ended up in the hospital for four nights, which was frightening because there was nobody there. There was no elective surgery so the hospital was empty other than COVID patients. You cannot have visitors and you cannot... you know, that was in the beginning of COVID where you just don't know what's happening. So I'm in a hospital room with a picc line in my arm that they inserted because I have to have massive antibiotics. So I'm physically like, sick to my stomach and I have a staph infection in my breasts. I have no idea what's going to happen. So they sent me home with a picc line in my arm and I had a nurse come over every day to put intravenous drugs into my body. So that's a lot of pressure on your body, right? That's, that's another, that's liver. That's it's going through every vein in my blood, right? I go see my doctor, he's like, "You're fine. Everything's fine. The staph infection is gone." Come April, end of April, exact same thing happens. I wake up, I go for a walk. I sit down for lunch, and I have this pain in my left breast and I'm like, "What is happening?" So I go in my closet and I take up my shirt, and sure enough, it looks like a red, cherry apple. The brightest apple you've ever seen is my breast. Now this time, you can see the redness going up my chest. So I text a picture to my oncologist and I text a picture to my breast surgeon and like, immediately my phone starts ringing from both doctors. I pick up the phone and they go, "Get to the emergency room, do not stop at red lights." I go to the emergency room, I drive myself to the emergency room. Now it's further into COVID. Now we're wearing masks. Now there's people at the emergency room with hazmat suits saying, "Who are you? Why are you here?" and I was like my doctor's inside. This is an emergency. I don't want to be here. I don't have COVID. They checked me into the hospital and I'm there another four days. Another picc line in my arm. They send me home; two weeks with massive antibiotics at home with a nurse. So now my life is completely disrupted. Two weeks later, my doctor says "You're fine. You're fine." "Okay. All right, I feel fine." I felt fine. My breast was the same colour as the other one. So I looked fine. Six weeks later, I'm on a plane going to visit my son. I come home and the whole left side of my body was wet. And I'm thinking myself, "Why am I sweating on one side of my body?" So I get home and anytime I get out of a plane, I go take a shower because planes are so dirty. I take off my shirt, I'm undressing and I'm looking over and I'm like, "Why is there still dripping?" It was a hole in my breasts. The infection that was in the implant that never went away, had made a hole in my breast and there was green pus oozing out of the left side of my breast. So now, I have no faith. I have no faith in doctors. I have no trust, this is June, this past June. I look at myself and go, "What what am I going to do? Text pictures to my doctor's? Go to the hospital for another four days? Have them send me home with a picc line?" You know, it's just like, oh my gosh. So, I texted a picture to my doctor. She FaceTimed me and she said, "I'm sending an ambulance right now." And I go, "No, no, no. You're not sending an ambulance cause I'm not going to the hospital." I started to cry and it was just it, I had had enough. Ultimately, I went to the hospital because if I hadn't, I would have been in septic shock by the next morning. The staph infection had turned into a mersa infection, which is deadly. And within five hours, I was at the hospital. There were people in my room panicking. And now, there's COVID going on in the emergency room. And everybody's masked up, right? My doctors, the surgeons that came in, took off the masks, I thought they were gonna cry. They took off the mask, and they said, "We have to excavate your breast cavity immediately." And it was like midnight by that point. They had compiled five surgeons to come in that night to completely excavate my breast cavity because they thought I was going to die. I'm alone. I have no family, I have no friends. First of all, none of my family even knew where I was because I had just gotten off a plane and come home to shower. Within five hours, my breast cavity was completely excavated. I woke up with one implant and there were stitches everywhere and I was in so much pain. It was horrible, horrible. I mean, they gutted me like a pumpkin. You can feel ribs, you know, and the next day, they said, "There's no way to reconstruct this. You now have an empty breast cavity for the rest of your life." And I said, "Well, you can't leave one, you have to take that off. I'm not going to be misaligned." Ultimately, they said, "That's an emotional decision. You have to wait six months." I was like, "You got to be kidding me." Claire Rogers Why do you have to wait six months? Christine Handy Because they said it was an emotional decision and they wanted me to really be clear about what I wanted for the rest of my life. They said, you have a healthy cavity. Well healthy, I mean, it was an implant. I had a mastectomy. I ultimately made the decision to take the other one off because it sure seems like, when we look in the mirror, not that we want to look like this but we want to be aligned. Claire Rogers Yeah. Christine Handy So having one implant; fake breasts and an empty concave cavity, it wasn't working for me. So ultimately I had the other one taken off. So now, technically, I have had four mastectomies. When you go into that type of surgery, they label it as a mastectomy. Claire Rogers Looking back, do you regret ever getting the implants in the first place? Did you feel a pressure from society to put them in or was that exclusively your decision to put them in? Christine Handy I think I did feel a pressure from society and I also felt like, again, I felt like it was the prize after breast cancer. And I can assure you, it was not the prize. My life was the prize. The serving was the prize, not the implants. But I also think that if a doctor had sat me down and said there's a bigger surgery, it's called a, I can't remember the whole name, but it's some sort of flap surgery where they take muscle out of your back, and they put it in here so you actually have your own tissue. Not implants but as breasts. I was so sick from chemotherapy that I don't think I could have done it at the time. But if a doctor had sat me down and said, these are the risks of implants, I sure would have thought about that surgery really hard. And in hindsight, of course, I would have maybe done that surgery but I don't even know it existed at the time. There is that surgery that you can do. Claire Rogers So how do you feel? Now again, you're a beautiful model, but now you don't have your breasts? How does that impact your identity, or are you just so focused on serving people, you don't care? Christine Handy Both. Because I'm going through a divorce and you know, out in the world as a single person, this is a little bit more of an issue for me. I don't really care as far as what society thinks. I'm not covering it up. I don't wear prosthetics. I wear a bathing suit, but I don't wear pads, I just want who I am. I think for people who have gone through what I've gone through and chosen to go flat or, not had the ability to put implants in, I'm a really good role model because I think from what people have told me, there's a lot of shame in what this looks like to them. So they see me prancing around going, "Whatever, who cares?" and it's helping them a tonne. Again, there's purpose in that pain, which helps me ultimately go, "Okay, well, if I'm the one that had to go through it, God knew that I could." and God knew that I would share the story. So okay, I'm good. Claire Rogers Absolutely. I think, personally, my thoughts are, as a society I think we all need to just leave women alone and embrace every single body shape, we don't need to be sticks. I've got small breasts, they never really grew in. I've kind of always been cool with it and I think I said to you last time I kind of missed the 90s when it was okay to have flat boobs because it's not cool to be like that now. I know, I'd happily never wear a bra again, because they're so uncomfortable. So I think I'd like the message for women listening to this is that 'Get implants, don't get implants, have big boobs, have flat boobs, it doesn't matter because we're all beautiful.' Christine Handy We are. Just be you. And society, like you just said, the 90s was this, the 2020s this, the 2030s that, it's gonna go up and down. We can't go up and down. So just be you. Don't go with the roller coaster of society. We got to just be ourselves and be good with that. But that's, self-esteem, right? We got to work on our self-esteem. That's one thing I talk about a lot with women. You have to take time everyday to work on your self-esteem. It's like going to school, it's like going to work out for your body, you got to work out the self-esteem and the self-love. Claire Rogers Absolutely. You have to advocate for yourself. Christine Handy But it's not that simple. It's hard. Claire Rogers No, and it's hard when you look around and it's ironic that we're both from an industry that doesn't celebrate self-worth. I always think, I'm one to talk, but I'm telling people just love yourself. I was kind of a bit of part of that problem for five years. But I think, yeah, it's hard. You live in a society that's airbrushed lives, and airbrushed faces and so forth and I think we need to take that mask off. I really admire, I saw your pictures online where you're totally embracing being flat chested and I remember thinking, "Oh my God, that's my girl. That's what I do. You know, we need more people like that." So I really admire that. Before we wrap up, I wanted to ask you, if there's a listener listening to this episode and they are either at the beginning, middle or towards the end of their breast cancer journey and they're looking for advice, or a tip, or nugget of wisdom. Do you have anything you could share? Christine Handy I think my best advice is, it's a season in your life. I think it's true of all illness and in COVID for example. We go through seasons in our life, like when I was going through chemotherapy, I thought this is never gonna end. I'm always going to be sick and you know, the 'always' and the 'nevers'.Those types of words are unhealthy. I wasn't always going to be sick. There was a season in my life when I was sick and yes, I have had complications since then. But those were also seasons, it doesn't last forever. So when you're faced with a diagnosis, remember that. Every day. Baby steps every day. It's going to stop, it's going to end and you're going to get back to a healthier life. Again, and I say this to people in COVID, they think, "Oh, this is never going to end." It's going to end. There's going to be a beginning, a middle and an end, and it's going to stop. But if we have this perspective of 'always', that's blocking us from living a healthy life. Emotionally healthy life. Claire Rogers And would you say, again, because I've not been in your situation, so this might be condescending. So I practice every single day gratitude. You know, "Thank you, thank you, God that I woke up today. That's a bonus. You know, thank you for my sight, my ability to walk or whatever. Are you able to practice that while you have a diagnosis like that? Christine Handy Oh, yes, absolutely. I mean, I would look around and go, "Thank you for my friends. Thank you for the roof over my head. Thank you that I'm able to have treatment. Thank you that I have doctors. Thank you that I'm not on my deathbed." I mean, there's always a reason to be grateful and it became a big part of my life. Some days are not easy, don't get me wrong and there's grace in that. I think being graceful to ourselves is critical. So some days we can be super grateful and show these mantras like, "Oh, I'm great. I have gratitude for this or that." But the other days were like, "Are you kidding me? My life sucks." And that's okay, too. Because you have to remember, tomorrow is another day, it's a new beginning. I'm not a big believer in New Year's because I think people have these great grandiose ideas of like New Year and a new beginning. Every day is a new beginning. Claire Rogers Exactly. There's no difference between a Tuesday and a Wednesday and a New Year's Day. You can change your life mindset, whatever you want every single day. It's a new opportunity. Well, that's amazing. I love this interview, I think we might have to have you back and talk more about stuff. So, Christine's book 'Walk Beside Me', is available on Amazon. It's also available in Barnes and Noble. It's available internationally and if you want to learn more about Christine, you can reach her at christinehandy.com. I will put the spelling of that in the show notes as well as on my website. Christine, thank you so much for joining Boot Camp for the Mind and Soul. Christine Handy Thank you. Good to be here. 
SUMMARY OF THE SHOW
Sonny Von Cleveland is a survivor of sexual abuse and also served 18 years in prison. And, he is living proof that anyone can turn their life around and forge a path forward to achieve anything you set your mind to. He believes we can all achieve success in life and change the world by working together and holding the rope. Sonny is a YouTube personality, a Motivational Speaker, Twitch gamer, Musician, and so much more. Through his music reactions and live streams to his talk shows and speaking events, he uses his platforms to involve individuals worldwide to see the beauty of life and inspire people to stretch themselves and live in their purpose. Today, Sonny is here to share his personal story and has graciously told me that he is an open book and that nothing is off-limits because his goal is to help people. TOPICS THAT I DISCUSS WITH SONNY:
LIST OF RESOURCES AND CONTACT DETAILS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
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SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Claire Rogers I'm Claire Rogers, and you're listening to Boot Camp for the Mind and Soul, the podcast that gives you an inner workout. Before we get started, remember, just like in a gym where you may not be able to use all the equipment. Pick up what you can in this episode and leave behind what you can't. Your Inner workout starts now. Sonny Von Cleveland is a survivor of sexual abuse and also served 18 years in prison, and he's living proof that anyone can turn their life around and forge a path forward to achieve anything you set your mind to. He believes that we can all achieve success in life and change the world by working together and holding the rope. Sonny is a YouTube personality, a Motivational Speaker, Twitch gamer, Musician and so much more. Through his music reactions and live streams to his talk shows and speaking events, he uses his platform to involve individuals from around the world to see the beauty of life and inspires people to stretch themselves and live their purpose. Sonny is here with me today to share his personal story and has graciously told me that he is an open book, and that nothing is off limits, because his goal is to help people. Welcome to Boot Camp for the Mind & Soul Sonny, I've really been looking forward to this. Sonny Von Cleveland Thank you so much for having me. Claire Rogers Sonny, your life started down a tragic road at around age five when you were sexually molested. Can you tell me what was going on in your home life and how this appalling situation started? Sonny Von Cleveland Looking back on it, it was pretty much a typical family life at that point; I was from a single mom home; it was me and my brother and I look back to as early as I can remember when I was probably four or five years old. She was a single mom and we used to go to my Grandmother's house all the time. She lived pretty close in Michigan, we're in a small town in Michigan and we would all get together for every holiday - typical family thing, you know Thanksgiving, Christmas. We'd all go over and Grandmas there, Grandpa's there, Aunts and Uncles, Cousins and everybody comes together. It's a typical household. And we kind of grew up that way from as early as I can remember, but my Uncle was the first victimizer to start molesting me and I was five. And I remember being at Grandma's house for whatever holiday it was, and Uncle Mike has the Atari up in his room. So, I'd go upstairs because I wanted to play the Atari, and this is where he would take advantage of me. And then we'd come to find out he did it to a lot of our cousins, but over the course of time now - he victimized me for like five years, and there were three other men in those five years that all this happened. When I was 10 and it finally came out, I told my mother. My mother called the police and it shattered the entire family; there was no more get together's, there were no more... nothing. So, we lost all that and I want to say that it was even before I was 10 that that happened but I think it was around 10, and it just shattered the entire family. And a lot of people didn't want to believe it in the family, and this is why it shattered because people thought that we were lying - that I was lying. Until years later, several other cousins finally come forward, well Mike molested me too, he molested me too, he molested me too. Well, now we're all not lying. And people start to see that, but it totally destroyed the family. But other than that, it was very typical up to that point. Claire Rogers I'm guessing it destroyed you as well. Sonny Von Cleveland I just became a reclusive kid when it happened. After Mike and then after Tim Clinger who is one of my mother's friends, Darryl Hall who was one of my mother's boyfriends; after these men started to molest me, I started to think it was me. There's something about me so I would just be reclusive, and I was not very extroverted; I was a very introverted kid. Music was a big part of it, I would just listen to music a lot, and play in the woods. I felt like most men wanted to touch me or I was somehow sexually attractive. At five and six years old, a child should not be having the thoughts of I am sexually attractive. You know what I mean? You shouldn't be having these thoughts and wondering why these thoughts are happening. So, at the age of seven, I broke the law for the first time, and I had an interaction with police. And it was an attractive thing to me because here's grown men that don't want to hurt me. They want what's best for me. And so my life, then became - I'm an introverted kid who has this natural charisma and ability to entertain and make people laugh because I was goofy kid, I was funny, but at the same time, I'm introverted and the attention from the Law men and the Judges and the Prosecutors was so attractive to me that I just continued to break the law. So, this is my life. I don't have any friends, I'm a nerd, I'm an introverted kid that gets molested constantly, and during the whole time from 5 to 10 this happens all the time. This is a weekly occurrence for me because my mother doesn't know. We go over to her friend Tim's house; he takes me out back and molests me. We go home, Darrell is over, she leaves, Darrell molests me. I go to the other guy Roberts house; he molests me, and it became normal. I expected these things to happen. Claire Rogers And so, you started to break the law to get the attention of men that wouldn't hurt you. Is that right? Sonny Von Cleveland Yes. I fell in love with it because, here they are, the Judge, the Prosecutor, the Policeman - they don't want to touch me. And these are the guys that I know are right…they're just trying to discipline me. The problem is once the discipline is gone, once they arrest me or they take me to court or we leave the courtroom, they don't talk to me. So how do I get their attention? How do I talk to them so more? The only thing I know is to break the law again. And so, I did. A lot. And that's how I ended in most of the circumstances in my life. Claire Rogers Last time I talked to you, you said to me that you were sent to prison at 16, which to me as an outside observer sounds horrific because you're placing effectively a child in an adult situation during your formative years. Now I appreciate, perhaps there's a need for that sometimes, but as an outside observer, it doesn't make sense to me. Sonny Von Cleveland No, it doesn't make sense to me on any level. Claire Rogers I appreciate crime has to be mitigated; there has to be a form of punishment, but I don't understand putting a child with adult predators. I don't understand that. Sonny Von Cleveland Well, it shows the uncompassionate nature of the law. Some Judges and Prosecutors, they look at it as a job. They don't take the human existence into consideration when doing these things. For me, when I was 15 years old, I already had 10 or 12 felonies, on my record, and they’d never taken me away before. It was always a slap on the wrist, always, probation or some other crazy thing. So, when I'm 15 I stole some money from my High school. And the judge was finally sick of it and said you know what, I'm bounding you over to adult court because of the extensiveness, because by the numbers, by the books, they're allowed to do this. So, it went from trying to help a kid and trying to change a kid's life to, well this is what the book says that I can do so I'm going to do it because I'm just sick of dealing with you. So, he bound me over to adult court. When adult court see me, they see this extensive record and their like you're a lost cause kid based on your past, I don't even have anything to do except put you in prison. So, for stealing a pedal bike and breaking into a home and chipping my name into a wall and having a stolen cell phone, they sent me to prison for two to five years at 16 years old. Claire Rogers Sorry to interrupt you, but why again... maybe this is something bigger than me and I'm not informed enough but why don't they have a child psychologist, or somebody say well let's look at Sonny's life as a cumulative... what's happened... why is this kid doing this? Why is there no process for that? Sonny Von Cleveland These are the questions I look at now. I have a brother as well, an older brother who's 19 months older than me and when he was 12 or 13, I think they took him away. They put him in foster homes, juvenile detention facilities, and he was gone from the time I was 13 until I got out of prison at 21. But they never tried it with me... you may have been able to reach me and changed my life, had you tried some of these things. But they never did. It was just probation, probation, probation...next time... next time...next time. My mother always used to tell me, one of these times, the next time is going to be over, and they're really going to come at you, and she was right on that department. I don't to this day understand why. My mother was always there with me to see the lawyers and go to court, but she never advocated for any of these things. It's almost like she never even put up a fight. You know, and I was too young, my lawyers obviously didn't give a crap, they just never put up a fight. It's here, you're gonna plead guilty to this. This is what you're gonna do. Looking back on it now I don't understand why nobody stepped in and said hey, this kid.. something's going on with this kid; we need to get to a deeper problem here. And they just didn't, and then they put me in an adult prison, a level four facility. It's called Thumb Correctional Facility in Lapeer Michigan level four facility with murderers, rapists, drug dealers, gangbangers everything. And I had no choice. What are you going to do? Mom's not here. Nobody's here to help, they put you in the yard and they say good luck. Claire Rogers Which is horrific. so what happens? You're 16 years old, these are your formative years. How do you adapt because you don't have any positive role models (in prison)? Sonny Von Cleveland Right, I did not. I was a skinny white kid from the country. And I walked into quarantine and I almost shit my pants. I walk in, like, what is this? The only thing I know about prison are the movies that I've seen where Hollywood, does their best to either glorify it or make it look so violent and scary that both of them are way off the mark. And so, I come in and I'm like well I'm going to either be a victim or I'm going to be an apex predator, and I'm done being a victim in my life. I've been victimized my whole life. So, what's the worst you're going to do to me because pain doesn't bother me. I've been through more pain in my life, because of the molestations and the loneliness and the introversion. So physical pain doesn't bother me. Go ahead and whoop my ass but one thing I won't be is a victim. I'm not going to be that guy. And so I fell in with the gangbangers really hard because they have the sense of brotherhood and community in there where they watch each other's back, and as long as you're a stand up and violent dude, you're gonna fit in wonderfully with them so I took that route. And, I fell in with some gangbangers and they showed me the ropes of how to be really violent. I knew that I had to get a bunch of tattoos. And that was the sole purpose for my tattoos when I started getting tattoos at 16 was just so I didn't stand out like this skinny white kid victim. I just started putting tattoos on me and half of them had no meaning. I just wanted to get tattoos so that people thought that I looked (tough) because I was a big kid. I was 6ft 5 when I was 16. So, I started working out and I started fighting people. I became what was known as a shooter. So, I stabbed people for the gang. That was my go-to, and I learned how to just stop caring about everything, and all I wanted to do was impress the gang. I wanted them to be impressed by my ability; to see me not as a victim but as a predator. I wanted to be seen that way. I wanted to be feared. And because I thought that was what was going to propel me to success in life because that's what you're taught, when you're in here with gangbangers. It's not about who is the most motivational or who's the smartest or who's the wealthiest, it's about who runs the yard, who's the toughest dude out here. If they fear you when you walk out of that yard, you are successful in prison. And that's what I shot for. And the problem with that was, it's very easy to do. And then, I'm 21 years old at this point - I went through the five years it. I have been stabbed, fought gang fights, riots, it's craziness, and then they open the door and say, by the way, you're done. And let me go. Claire Rogers Yeah, go be a functioning human being now. Sonny Von Cleveland Right, no parole, no oversight, nothing. They give you $75, three condoms or like you're free. And I'm like, okay, I don't know anything else, I don't even know how to fill out an application. I don't know how to apply for a driver's license, I don't know how to do anything. So, I'm going to do what I already know how to do and that's be savage. So, I did. I started robbing people. Instantly I started hurting people. I started hurting people towards me because I'm very charismatic and I can draw people towards me, my leadership was always really good, so I mean I have the ability to build an army around me of people, and I did. And I then I went across the entire country I just started travelling all over the country causing chaos and wreaking havoc because I didn't care about anything. I had this goal in mind of being like the new Scarface or something. This is how twisted your mind gets when you have no direction and no leadership in your life. This is what I thought my goal in life was, was to be like a new mafia boss or something. I look back on this and think damn, that's twisted. Claire Rogers But I'm imagining, if you don't mind me interrupting, I'm imagining as well, joining gangs in prison I'm guessing would be just like in the outside world, perhaps is also a way of belonging to something. Sonny Von Cleveland 100%. 100%, and then you feel like you belong. The problem with it is, when in a gang, the loyalty and the community only last as long as you're providing something. The moment you stop providing something, they don't care anymore because it was never about family. It was never about community or any of that, it's just about the gang’s agenda. And I don't know about how the gangbang relationship works in the world because I've never been in a gang in the world. I didn't participate. Disenfranchised youth constantly go to gangs because of that community, that sense of family and brotherhood because they’re good at making you feel that. They're filling a void that you don't have in your life because human beings are naturally social people and especially when it comes to familial obligations, we love to be part of a family. And, so it was... it was bad. It was a train wreck and I mean I lasted 22 months, and we were robbing people and hurting people and I got caught again in Michigan and I ended up getting another sentence and they were like oh yeah yeah you're one of those guys and put me right back to prison when I was 23. And gave me a 12 year sentence this time. And I went back in. And it was comfortable. I'm comfortable here. I was never comfortable in the free world in those two years. I just always felt like a caveman, I always felt out of place while I was leading people and living this crazy life with drugs and sex and violence. I was still empty because I knew in my heart that this is not what life is about, but my mind was stuck in that mentality. And so, I'm still empty. And then when I go back to prison then I'm like okay I'm comfortable here, I know who I am, I have an identity, I have a place here. And then, that was a really rough time, because I'm back and now I have two kids. I got two women pregnant in those two years that I was out. And it starts to impact you a lot different. You know the recidivism rate is so high for repeat offenders. But the third time, the tertiary offenders are so low, because that second time, impacts you so much differently than the first time, because now you're like I did it, I was free, and I just lost it again. What an idiot. And then it really starts to impact you differently. But it still takes a while. The first seven years of that bit were rough. All gang banging, still violent, still just crazy, just ruthlessly running around. I ended up getting a long five year sentence in the hole behind a very violent altercation, which is solitary confinement, the hole, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me because I met a man named Mallory Bay, who was a Muslim man who was across the hall from me in the hole, and the man changed my life. Because he talked to me, he showed me what empathy was, he showed me what compassion is, show me what happiness truly is, how to have a purpose in life, how to let go of all the hurt and anger that you're facing in life and dealing with, and how to rebuild yourself because when you're absolutely alone, rock bottom, there's not one person in the world that gives a shit if you're alive or dead or hungry or cold or scared or tired nothing. There's nobody you can call, nobody's going to help you. You're absolutely alone. That is such a pivotal moment in somebody's life, because you have the choice of either letting it consume you or conquering it and building up to who you want to be. Being in that hole in that moment, nobody knows me. I have the ability right now to process and deal with everything in my life, and then start from a foundation of building myself who I want to be character wise, morals, everything you can build it from the bottom. So I started reading self-help books, like Mark Sanborn and Napoleon Hill, and you know these just great people that write books, the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, The L factor, Personality Traits, all these things that I started reading and he showed me, you can build whoever you want to be. Any human being has the ability at any moment to become whoever you want to be, because yesterday, doesn't mean anything. You can turn around right now. Take the five people that you idolize the most in your life and adopt their qualities. Just do that. And then you're gonna be that person. Claire Rogers He comes along, if he hadn't been there, would you have had that innate knowing or that gumption to know to do this? Sonny Von Cleveland I doubt it. I doubt it. Claire Rogers To a degree he is savior. Sonny Von Cleveland No Doubt. No doubt. 100%. I've been to the hole many, many, many times in my life and all I would do is sit there and yell at each other in the door, raise a fit, throw fit, get gassed.... Claire Rogers Can you describe the hole for me so just so I can imagine what that's like? Sonny Von Cleveland Yeah, it's usually a 9 by 10 cell that has a bunk in the back, a toilet over there, a mirror and a little window with a bar in the middle, and in the door there has another bar in the middle of the window that you see out in the hall. Claire Rogers Again, outside observer I've listened to that and again I appreciate that we have to prosecute crime and we have to punish, but I question, putting someone in that situation for five years. I don't understand how that rehabilitates anyone. Sonny Von Cleveland It doesn't. It doesn't. It's absolute savage. The penitentiary system is a) a cattle farm and b) a glorified babysitting job. It's all it is. The only time that the penitentiary is going to help you is if you take advantage of it. The programs are there, but you have to pursue it. There's nobody in there that's going to push you; nobody on the administrative side that's going to push you to do it. There's plenty of other inmates that will motivate you to take care of it and to change your life and take advantage of the programs that they offer, but if you don't do it, it's never going to happen. And the hole to me, it's like the babysitter putting a kid in a timeout. Claire Rogers Five years is a pretty frickin long time out. Sonny Von Cleveland Right. I was able to thankfully because of the help that Mallory Bay gave me, I started writing essays, because he told me you know writing things down is the best form of self-expression. So, I started writing these essays and I would shoot them over to him because this was the kind of the homework, he would give me. He was like man this is really good, I want to submit this up to the administration for the Special Activities Coordinator and maybe they'll, you know, share it with some other people. So, we started doing that and then several months afterwards The Special Activities Coordinator Director came in saw me and was like, I love the essays you've been writing. And then she brought to me this new program that they are instituting called Thinking for a Change and she asked me to learn the material, and would give me the opportunity to teach a class, and if I'm successful in teaching a class, she would help me get out of the hole early so I didn't have to do all five years. So, I did, and I went at it with absolute gusto. And I went and taught a class, it’s majorly successful, and she got me out of the hole. So, I only ended up doing 19 months in the hole, which is still a significant amount of time to be sitting in one room. Claire Rogers Are you ever allowed out of the room? Sonny Von Cleveland Very rarely. To go out and teach the class. You get out for a shower, three times a week; 15 minutes take a shower. They do offer, they have like these dog kennels that are out back that you have the option for an hour a day if you want to go and stand out there and walk in circles, you can, but they generally do it at like five in the morning, and it's freezing, and your like yeah, I'm not .I'm just not. So, I probably went a good 14 months without ever feeling the sun on my face. Claire Rogers No light in your eyes. No vitamin D... Sonny Von Cleveland I got the light from the window but just, no fresh air on my face, not being outside feeling wind on your face at all, I think it was like 14 months. Claire Rogers So, it sounds to me like you basically put yourself through your own therapy - you broke down your ego and rebuilt yourself back up again. But even doing all of that in that environment, how do you keep that positivity, of I'm going to change? because I'm imagining you're gonna have days that just absolutely suck. So how do you pull yourself out of darkness, and continue to see the light? Sonny Von Cleveland It got rough. I think it comes from self-love. It comes from self-awareness. When Mallory Bay broke me down to my absolute core base - I’m not a good person, I'm not a bad person. I'm just an existing human being. I now have the choice to either build a good person or a bad person, you have that option. You start to discover the self-love first, you start building the pieces of what makes me feel good, what brings me passion in my life. And when you discover those, then that propels you into what characteristics you want to take on to help other people to change others, how you want to interact with other people. And the first incidence of me writing that essay and seeing the impact it had on somebody else became a passion for me, because I suddenly had this desire to make somebody else feel good about their life. I looked at all the shit I had been through up to that point and said if I can make somebody else feel as good as Mallory Bay just made me feel about being who I am, that feels really good. That feels so much better than everything else I've ever done in my life. So, let me see if I can, it becomes a passion. Now I'm passionate about helping somebody else to overcome something they've been through in their life because you know I'm depressed and, and I hate my life, and I have suicidal thoughts, and it's like bro your life is so beautiful, so valuable. You have so much purpose and so much value in this world. If you look at how bad life can be, you would change your perspective. And so you help them to find out that life is not so damn terrible and get over that and when they have that moment of realization, when somebody sends you a message or send you an email or calls you and says dude you just saved my life. It's the most impactful thing I've ever felt in my life to save somebody else's life in Dublin. It changes you. It changes. Claire Rogers So, I want to know, again I'm using my words, so you tell me if I'm wrong or not, but you basically crush your ego and you build yourself back up again – They then let you out after 19 months, but back into prison or you're not out the door of the prison, you're back into prison. So how do you have that amazing, I'm gonna change my life mindset, and then go into that awful environment? how do you do that, and go back to gangbanging? How do you do that? Sonny Von Cleveland It’s absolute passion. In order to be somebody that can impact the world or somebody that can make a difference, you have to be authentic. Authenticism is the most appealing thing in the world. When you see somebody as authentic, it draws you to them. So, the only way I'm going to be able to reach millions of people and help millions of people in the world is to be authentic, they have to be drawn to me. And if I'm fake, then, we have natural things within our psyche that will block us from fake people. You'll see it, you'll smell it, you'll intuitively know it, and you won’t follow them. So, being authentic is the key to that and sticking to your guns is part of being authentic. So, when they released me from the hole, the very first thing I did was went to the gang like yo, I'm done. I know what that's going to entail. I know I'm going to have to get my ass kicked. I'll take that. But then I'm done. So, I took it. Except they didn't want to just do it once, so for the next year I was getting jumped several times a week, you know, constantly getting messed up, but I didn't, I didn't run away from it. I didn't shy away from it. And I think that just made them even more really wanted me to like try to break me, and I wouldn't break. And that's it. You just have to know that what you're doing is right. And you have to feel it, and it's a passion. It's like, the more angry you guys get at me, the more I know that what I'm doing is right because that's why you're so pissed off. That's why you're so mad, is because I'm holding up that mirror that we spoke about. I'm holding up that mirror and you're seeing what you're incapable of be, because you haven't figured it out. And so now you're going to attack me because you want me back on that side. You want me to keep validating your life by being part of what you're a part of. And I'm not going to do that. I'm validating my own life and my own existence by setting an example by sticking to my guns and holding my characteristics, because I'm going to show you how to be a better person, and people in prison don't like to be better people. They'd like to be the same people that they are - and that's not everybody, that's the majority, it's not for everybody, there are great people in there that figure things out but sometimes it's too late. But, like Mallory Bay was doing natural life in prison, he’d never get out, and he had no reason to help me other than an authentic passion to want to help change somebody's life. And so that stuck with me that resonated with me so hard with him, because like why do you want to help me, you have no reason to want to help, except for that authentic passion to want to make a difference in somebody else's life. So, I stuck to that gun. And it took a couple of years of back and forth in a really violent altercation with the leader of the gang, for them to finally leave me alone. But when they did that, I was then able to focus on everything that I had learned to teaching and helping everybody around me. So, I started and I'm very good friends with some of these inmates, the convicts that were in there with me. Some of them are my best friends to this day I see them frequently, we talk constantly, you'll see on my social media a lot like Mike Ruud, Brian Cornell, Jeremy Powell, these boys were there with me, and we walked through that together and to inspire them while we're here, we're in the shittiest place in the world. Let's be shining examples of what good people are, no matter what it says, no matter what we're at, we have this stigma that we're in prison, we're tattooed, we're rough looking, let's show them that we're still great people. And I just inspired everybody around me to do that. I mean we were, I always had 40 convicts doing yoga around the yard. And it's awesome. Like, there's a stigma that comes with that - gay people do yoga in prison, guess what? so do we. And we did it. I don't care what somebody is gonna think, there's always gonna be negative people, always going to be somebody that hates always if you're doing something positive you're always going to have somebody that hates you, always gonna have somebody that tells you you're doing something wrong you have an ego. You're conceited, you're narcissistic, you’re self-centered, they're always going to do it because you're holding up that mirror of what they want to be but don't have the balls to do it, because they're afraid people are so afraid of rejection. And that's like the biggest deterrent to people becoming their authentic self - they are afraid of rejection. I'm afraid my mother won't accept me, I'm afraid my friends won't like me. I'm afraid that my father, he'll reject what I'm trying to do. Rejection is like one of the biggest things that hold people back, especially in the digital age of social media, the dislike button has destroyed people's lives. Claire Rogers So, do you feel, I'm kind of jumping forward now, we'll go back, but do you feel, talking about rejection… Do you feel rejected now by society; do you feel as though people judge you? You know, hey this guy's been to prison. We need to reject him. Do you feel that coming off people or do you just live your authentic self and go hey I can't worry about what you think about me? Sonny Von Cleveland I feel that I don't give a shit. I don't care if you reject me or not. You can reject me all you want because it doesn't bother me. I don't know you; I don't know who you are. It does not bother me if you reject me. And even if I do know you and you reject me that's fine too. Because I'm gonna be alright. Trust me, I'm going to be okay. Claire Rogers You start being a positive role model in prison, then eventually you're released. What's life like when you're released? Sonny Von Cleveland It’s a little intimidating at first because I'm a caveman out here, and I still don't have a grasp. I've only been free for about four years - a little over four years and it's a lot to catch up on, especially technology and social media. I just went out and I started working, I got into a demolition company, and I started working hard, but my passion is music. That's always been, it's been a mainstay in my life since you know that introverted six year old who would hide in my mom's closet with her cassettes and listen to her music. Music has been the mainstay my whole life, and I knew I wanted to pursue music. I started learning a little bit of guitar at the end of my sentence, so I taught myself to play guitar and write music. So while I'm working on that , I'm networking with people out here that I meeting and put a band together and started playing music which really took off really well. It was really well received. But then there were pitfalls with that too… you know being that I had served most of my life in prison I've never had the temptation of drugs, rock and roll or women, or any of those things in my life so I fell susceptible to those things, because I'm not perfect, just because you learn things doesn't mean that you're perfect - which led to a lot of, you know, cheating on my ex, and doing a lot of drugs and just bad things. But the things that are fixable because the difference now is I'm able to see that I'm going down the wrong path and stop it and learn a lesson and say okay, don't do that, but do that. I can't talk to you about how to overcome something if I haven't done it. To me it's like the alcoholic who goes to listen to the kid who's 22 years old and has a degree from college and has never had a drink in his life, tell you how to not be an alcoholic anymore. To me, the connections not there so it doesn't work, you know. I mean like you're, if you've never been molested don't come talk to me about what it's like to be molested. I don't give a shit what degrees you have, you cannot empathize with it because nobody's ever molested you, so you just you don't get it. You may have a firm grasp, an understanding of what the book taught you, but you don't understand what's actually going on. So, I feel like I had to endure a lot of this stuff in order for me to be able to talk to people about it. And so maybe that was why I went through that and again every day is a learning process. Everything we go through is experienced and it's all learning. So, I went through that. I ended up with a really good job at Just in time staffing which is a staffing company. I had an office, I had a suit and I'm like, look, nothing can stop you in life. I've got 35 felonies on my record with 18 years in prison. My life was shit until I was 35, and I just landed a $100,000 gig in a corporate office. Claire Rogers Tell me how did you do that? Sonny Von Cleveland I walked in to get a job, and I was authentic with the owner. Claire Rogers It resonates. Sonny Von Cleveland It does resonate. It's like dude you're a motivational guy. I want to hire you to talk to people. And let's go. And then I paid attention and I grind, and I hustle, and I don't have any limitations for myself - I'm a fearless goal setter. I think that anything is accomplishable. Anything I want to do in this world I can do. If I put my focus into it, so you gave me the opportunity, I'm going to show you that you picked the right guy and I found myself headlong into it, and was successful at it and then COVID hit and destroyed all that. So, I can either lay down, I know that we have a global pandemic going on, let's lay down and just, you know, boohoo. Or, do what you always do. Get up, figure out a way to overcome and adapt. So, I started a YouTube channel. And if I saw a reactor named No Live Shack, and I watched him, I'm like, that is cool I'm entertained by this, and I can do that. I can do that. So, I sat down in front of a webcam and watch the music video. And it started to take off. And then I was just my authentic self, you're not going to put me in front of an audience, and I'm not, there's no circumstance where you'll put me in front of an audience, and I won't try to motivate somebody. I won't look and say, Okay, I know there's somebody in here that's unhappy with their life. Let me give you just a little bit of experienced knowledge of how to fix that. I mean, it's just, it's what I do, it's part of who I am, to try to motivate people. Claire Rogers And it definitely comes across. You're very passionate and very inspiring. Tell me, how you get to… I want to talk about two things 1) Do you get lonely now? So I'm imagining in prison, it's gonna be lonely, you're stuck in your own thoughts, even if you like yourself, I'm imagining it's a pretty tough situation to like yourself or not be lonely so I just want to know, how did you deal with that in prison and also, do you ever feel it now in the outside world? Sonny Von Cleveland Well, in prisoned you don't have a choice. You loneliness is just a thing. You don't have a choice. Some people have friends and family and, you know, they get mail, they get pictures, they get visitations and are wonderful things for those people that have that support. But I think being absolutely alone does something different to you. Like out here in the free world I have 1000s of fans all over the world. But I'm lonely. I'm alone and I'm learning for the first time to deal with loneliness here in the free world, I've never had to deal with that in my life, except when I was a child, and it's hard for me to try to recollect how I dealt with loneliness then because I would just run into the closet with the music. Can't do that out here, I got bills to pay, I have obligations I have to meet. I can't just run into a closet with my music, that doesn't work anymore. So, I pour myself out, I'm an open book. I am lonely, I will admit that. And I will come out and do a live stream, because I'm lonely. I want to interact with somebody, so I'll click on and do a live stream and now there's you know we got 50 people around the world right now let's rock out and jam music so I'm still going to the closet with the music. It's just the closet is actually very public and open and across the world. Claire Rogers I want to ask about loneliness in the sense, one of, how would you define it? Are you lonely because you just don't have people around you or is it that you can feel alone? Sonny Von Cleveland My loneliness is right being at home, because at the end of the day if I'm not on the camera, I'm generally just here at home with my kid, because I have a son who's three years old and we're kind of working out custody because our relationship didn't work out and it was recent - a couple months ago. And one of the bad things about being so social and so public is that people are going to report, everything that you do. So, if I go out to a party or if I go out to a bar, if I go out to a show, my ex hears about it almost immediately. And that puts her into a negative state of mind and affects the relationship. Our ability to communicate about our son, and in shared that communication, so I've come to find that now I have to be a hermit. I just have to block everybody out and not go anywhere and sit in my house because anything I do is going to get back to her which is going to affect the ability of me being able to see my son. And for the first time in my life and I get a lot of flak for it but like my two older sons they mean the world to me, I love them to death. My father sucked I didn't know who he was, I swore I'd never be that to them but then I went to prison for, you know, the first 12 years of their lives. And now I have a great relationship with my second son who's 16, we have a great relationship we talk a lot, we play video games together, he lives in Arizona, my older son who he calls my brother Dad because my brother had an affair with his mother and raised him basically, he and I have more of a rocky relationship because he already has that family structure and I'm kind of not there, and then he may see that I'm here with my family that I had here and we haven't really broke down that barrier yet but we'll get there and I'm trying. Roman is my three-year-old and I've been there every moment of his life. I was there the moment he was born, I held him. The first couple minutes he was out of the vagina. And there's a bond there; there's such a huge strong bond. I worship this kid. And so I will block everybody out if I have to in order to see him. Claire Rogers So, when you're at home on your own, do you like your own space? I personally like my own space. I I love to hang out with people, but it can be a bit sensory overload sometimes and I need to be on my own. Do you ever feel like that as well? Sonny Von Cleveland I do appreciate having time to myself, but I think I've had enough alone time to last me a lot of time. I like having company. I like being in the company of other people. I've been alone enough. So, I don't mind it being alone. So, when, when I'm here by myself, I don't really mind it. But then I would rather interact with somebody, for sure. Claire Rogers So how have you gotten to a place where you feel comfortable sharing your story? You know you've said to me very graciously before that you'll talk about anything and nothing's off limits. How did you get to that place? because I'm imagining some people are going to want to hide their past but you're like, no, let's talk so how do you get to that place of being open? Sonny Von Cleveland I no longer fear rejection. If you're going to reject me, I just don't care. I don't care. I know in my heart of hearts that there are people on this earth that have experienced the same thing I have, even worse, and are afraid to talk about or don't have somebody they can relate to that does talk about. It's not typical to see somebody that looks like me talking about being molested. I mean, a lot of people, especially boys - One in three boys are molested in their life. It's such a tragic number, and most of them don't talk about it because we have this societal stigma that we don't talk about. And it's not fair. And so, I'm going to be the guy that does talk about it, because at the end of the day, I've already been to the lowest loneliest point of my life. So if you don't like me because I wear my past on my sleeve, guess what, I've been lonely, your opinions not going to make me any lonelier. You're not going to do something to me by you rejecting me. It’s not going to make me any lonelier than I've ever been. So what do I have to lose? What do I have to lose by putting everything out there? What do I have to lose? What are you going to take? Claire Rogers So, it sounds to me like you've got a deep, deep sense of self love. You've gotten over your past, you've arrived at a place of forgiveness. Is that correct statement? Sonny Von Cleveland For sure. Claire Rogers So how do you get to a place of forgiveness? Sonny Von Cleveland You can't change anything. Anything that's already happened you cannot change it. It's already set in stone. So what is the point of of hurting over it? what is the point of giving it any more headspace? I don't know if it's so much forgiveness, as it's just letting it go. So, what's the point, what is the point of harboring that anger? because me being angry about it, sad, depressed, upset, it’s not going to change it, it's not going to go back into, oh well then that this didn't happen. It happened. You can't change it. So what's the point. I just I give it no headspace whatsoever. And I guess it's a form of forgiveness. Sure. If you want to say that and some people are so hung up on the word forgiveness that it's, I have to forgive myself but how do you define forgiving myself? How do I forgive myself? Because at the end of the day, it's just letting it go, you'll have people that want to hear the words, I forgive myself. But in its practical application, it's just letting it go. It's forgetting about. That's it. Just let it go. If you can't change it good or bad you can't change. Yesterday, does not exist. No such thing. Claire Rogers So, what do you do now to - I've done something similar to you where I worked on myself for almost two years, broke down my ego, rebuilt myself back up again. But I wasn't just instantly fixed. I find that it's a constant practice every day, I'm like okay is that an ego reaction or is that a natural reaction and so forth so I'm wondering what do you do now to keep your ego in check and make sure you're living what you preach. Sonny Von Cleveland It's legitimately just an awareness. I don't allow anything that just happened to affect me. And that's how I live. It's kind of a double-edged sword because it comes off as unempathetic and uncaring. It's sometimes looks conceited. It looks like a narcissist like you don't care. You don't have any feelings. And that's the double edge of it, they'll say oh well if you don't care about this because you don't care about anything because you're heartless and you're cold and blah blah blah. And that's clearly not the case because I wake up every day and I spend two hours of my life every day trying to help people. And I pay for it, financially, because it's not making any money. So that action in and of itself speaks so much more than words do. But it's just an awareness. You can't hold on to anything, good or bad; just be in that moment, relish that moment, if it's a tragedy, express it. If something's wrong, cry. Let it out, express that emotion, express how angry it makes you, express how hurt you are, express, whatever the emotion you're having, express it to its fullness, and then let it go. Because, five minutes from now things are going to be different. And you can move forward with your life. And if you're holding on to it, it's only going to make you regress from moving forward. You just gotta let it go. Claire Rogers So, I love that. So before we wrap up, I want to ask if you, if you were talking to young Sonny or somebody who's like you, a younger version of you, who is in that depths of despair and doesn't have a Mallory Bay person in their life, to give them that little kick to wake up, what would you say to them? how do they start? Sonny Von Cleveland Become self-aware. You know who you are and talk about it. Don't be afraid to say something. I think that being afraid to say something has been the absolute dumbest decision of my life. Not saying something. And that's why I say so much now, because not saying something enabled those other men to molest me when my Uncle Mike touched me. I should have immediately come down and said something immediately. And it would have prevented anybody else. My mother may have become an overbearing protective bear at that point. And I would have never been put in a position for other men to molest me. To express that when I got arrested, to say it to the police like I don't have a Dad and every other dude touches me. I don't want that. That in and of itself, saying something could have prevented a lot of it but at the end of the day, I would not go back and say anything to Sonny, because everything that I've been through is worth it. Every piece of hurt and tragedy in everything I've ever been through, it has been worth it to me, because I have helped so many people in their life. And if I had not gone through every single thing that I've ever gone through, I wouldn't be right here in this moment. And right here in this moment I'm happy as hell with my life, and I help people. So, to me it's worth it. I wouldn't change a thing about whatever has happened in my life, not one thing because everything has led me to here. Claire Rogers Beautiful. So, one more thing then because I love this, I could talk to you all day… Someone wants to change their life. They’ve had a shit background, whatever's happened to them, and they can't even see a way out of how to let it go, what tip would you say is the first step to learning how to just let it go? It's not about denying the past, but it's how do they, what's that little nugget they can start to move forward? Sonny Von Cleveland Lock yourself in a room for a few days and cry until you can't move. Let every emotion that you have out, let it go, hate yourself, cuss yourself out. Love yourself, make love to yourself, make yourself hate yourself, hate everybody around you and then love everybody around you, go through and work and process every emotion possible. Be honest with yourself, sit down in a room and just let it up, and record it, put your phone down and record it, go through that shit and be honest because you're the only person in that room, so express everything that hurts you, everything that makes you angry express it. Say it out loud. And then you'll understand that it doesn't affect you, it only affects you if you acknowledge it and give it that headspace to affect you. So, go into a room and write your own obituary from the perspective of five people that's closest to you. Your mother or your parents, your siblings, your kids, your coworkers and your friends. Write that down thoroughly and honestly - this is what these five people are going to say at your funeral once you're dead and gone. This is what they're going to say about you. And once you get that done, you will know exactly what you want to achieve in life, you'll know who you want to be. And you have a blueprint of goals to pursue in your life. Now all you got to do is make it happen. Claire Rogers Amazing. Sonny, thank you so much for joining Boot Camp for the Mind & Soul. You are so inspirational; I'm so glad you joined. To our listeners, if you want to connect with Sonny or learn more about him or find his social media channels, then please visit www.sonnyvoncleveland.com Sonny Von Cleveland Thank you so much Claire. Claire Rogers That concludes this week's episode of Boot Camp for the Mind & Soul. Don't forget to rate and review and subscribe. Tune back in next Wednesday for next week's episode. 
SUMMARY OF THE SHOW
At 18, Ryan Shekell was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, a debilitating and incurable lung disease that only 70,000 people worldwide have. Doctors told him that the average lifespan for people with cystic fibrosis is 35 years old and he was told that he would never be able to have biological children. Since being diagnosed, he has built a successful management career, married the love of his life, fathered two amazing sons through invitro fertilisation, and has achieved a multitude of athletic endeavours including an ultramarathon. Ryan is joining me now to share his story as well as his aim to build a world where every individual sees themself as the hero of their story and, have the confidence to turn that story into reality. TOPICS THAT I DISCUSS WITH RYAN:
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SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Claire Rogers I'm Claire Rogers, and you're listening to Boot Camp for the Mind & Soul, the podcast that gives you an inner workout. Before we get started, remember, just like in a gym where you may not be able to use all the equipment. Pick up we can in this episode and leave behind what you can't. Your inner workout starts now. Claire Rogers At 18, Ryan Shekell was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, a debilitating and incurable lung disease that only 70,000 people worldwide have. Doctors told him that the average lifespan for people with cystic fibrosis is 35 years old, and he was told that he would never be able to have biological children. Since being diagnosed, Ryan has built a successful management career, married the love of his life, and fathered two amazing sons through IVF, and he's also achieved a multitude of athletic endeavors, including an ultra-marathon. Ryan is joining me now to share his story, as well as his aim to build a world where every individual sees themselves as the hero of their story and have the confidence to turn that story into reality. Welcome Ryan and thank you for joining Boot Camp for the Mind and Soul. Ryan Shekell Thank you so much for having me Claire, I'm looking forward to this. Claire Rogers Ryan I'd first like to start out with you tell me what your life was like prior to your diagnosis. What was your family and your childhood like? Ryan Shekell I grew up in a small suburb outside of Rochester, New York, and I had an amazing childhood. My parents were married and supportive. And so I grew up playing sports, playing outside, doing everything that every normal child grows up to do. I generally really loved playing baseball and basketball; they were the kind of the loves of my life going through high school. I loved watersports and swimming. It honestly was a very normal childhood. The only thing that was interesting and unique to me was, I would sometimes cough. So when I was playing basketball or baseball, I'd have these little coughing fits and I remember this one time playing CYO which is this Catholic Youth Basketball League. I had this really bad coughing fit, enough to where they had to take me out of the game, and at some point, I was diagnosed with athletic induced asthma as a child and they thought I had lactose intolerance. So it was a really a normal childhood, and I had a really supportive family. Other than some, you know, little health issues, it wasn't too crazy. Claire Rogers So then as a high school senior and captain of the varsity baseball team, you receive a phone call from your doctor who tells you, you've got cystic fibrosis. Now before we carry on with that, can you explain to our listeners who may not be aware as to what cystic fibrosis is? Ryan Shekell Yeah, so I kind of tell that backstory of having this quote, asthma, because it provides a little bit of context. Cystic Fibrosis is a debilitating lung disease and like you said only 70,000 people in the world have it. And there's a lot of medical information out there about it, but essentially what it is, is that your lungs produce a bunch of mucus that makes it difficult to breathe. And at the same time, there's also some enzymes, we don't have, which don't allow us to absorb fat in our diet. So, in a way, it's this disease that makes it difficult to breathe and also difficult to gain weight. So going back to being diagnosed in high school. It was interesting because I had always had this persistent cough. And when I was getting ready to go to college, I ended up having to get a physical. And I went in and my pediatrician that I had had my entire life ended up retiring. So I had this new pediatrician, and she's kind of fresh out of med school, and she's going through my chart and she's like okay you know you're good for this, you're good for this, and good for this, but I see you have this interesting persistent cough, and your weight is a little bit lower than what we would expect for someone of your height. So it kind of sounds like this thing I learned about in med school called Cystic Fibrosis, can I send you in for a test? And at this point you know I’m 18 years old and I'm going off to college & I kind of think I'm on top of the world, it doesn't matter what you test for, so sure. I'll go in. And sure enough, they do this thing called a sweat test, and with cystic fibrosis you end up creating a lot more salt in your sweat so the way that they determine if you have cystic fibrosis, is they hook up this little probe, or not a probe, it's a coil actually, and they put it on your arm and they make you sweat, so run on the treadmill or run stairs and they collect sweat to see how much salt is in it. And that test came back positive. So here I am in high school looking to go into college, and they're saying okay well, you just tested positive for cystic fibrosis, so we need to now look at your future and determine how we're going to approach this. So, that's a long way to tell you, cystic fibrosis is a lung disease. It affects your digestion, as well, but that's kind of how I got to that diagnosis going into college. Claire Rogers And so then when you receive that phone call, which I'm imagining is quite scary. What's your reaction? And what's your family's reaction as well? Ryan Shekell Yeah, that was an interesting day. I remember sitting in my kitchen. At our countertop. And we knew the call was going to come, because it was planned. We just didn't know what the answer was going to be. So, when I got that call, I remember sitting with my mom. And I'm sitting there and they're explaining the disease, they're explaining that I was positive with it. And to me, 18 years old, you're not thinking, the implication of the disease, necessarily, you're more or less just thinking how it's gonna affect you know today, tomorrow. At some point I believe I actually asked if he know what's the long term implication of this, and that's when they said, the average lifespan for someone with cystic fibrosis is between 30 and 35, years, and it took my breath away. That's less than half my life away. At this point, and it was shocking, and I said you know what, forget it, I'll be able to beat this, not really understanding what that meant. And then it's, okay well what about my future having a family? and at that point, they said, well, the average lifespan it is what it is but one of the things that people don't understand about cystic fibrosis, is that 99% of males that have it have this other issue, called absences of that difference. So, you can't get anyone pregnant, you're never going to have a family and kids. And I remember sitting with my mom at that point and thinking, okay, you know I can wrap my head around the fact that you're telling me that the lifespans 35 years, but now you're guaranteeing me that I'm not going to be able to have my own kids. And that to me was the most devastating news that I could have got from that. Claire Rogers So just going back slightly where you say you're 18 years old and you're told the average lifespan is 30 to 35, and you can wrap your head around that. What do you put that down to, is that just youth, you know because we all think that we're kind of superheroes at that age? Ryan Shekell Yeah, that's a good insight because I think teenagers in particular had this naivete right, I don't even know if that's the way you say that, but you're young, you're naïve, you kind of think you're on top of the world, and I had that, I mean I was really successful. I was, captain of my baseball team, I was a varsity basketball player, I was an all-conference volleyball player, so if you were telling me that I had this physical disease, I couldn't believe you, because it hadn't hindered me at that point, I was already successful physically. So, I think I was naive to the fact that 18 years is a small portion of life. And while for 18 years I was able to maybe, I don't know if compensation is the right word, but I was able to, to achieve a certain level of physical success, and so I just didn't believe that another 18 years would be detrimental. So I believe that probably has something to do with that. I also had, like I said I've really supportive parents, so I did have high confidence, and I think it is because I was successful in certain areas. So I think that had a lot to do with it. Claire Rogers It sounds to me like you were more devastated by the fact that you wouldn't be able to have children. How did you wrap your head around that at 18, because I'm imagining at 18, you're not thinking about having kids, but you know you want them in the future, so how do you wrap your head around that, to kind of build a plan for going forward? Ryan Shekell So, that is one of my goals in life. It's funny, you know a lot of kids, they're asked, what do you think you want to be when you grow up. And a lot of people, you know, have their answers… well I want to be in the NBA, I want to be a professional football player, I want to be whatever, maybe a police officer. Because I had such a great childhood. I really wanted to just be a dad and I wanted to have a family. I love – one of my favorite things to do growing up was to get together with family. We had these big family parties…my grandparents were like the matriarch and patriarch of the family and we would celebrate all of our cousins birthdays and uncle's birthdays etc., and we would do these big parties. So birthday is in April, and every April we would have one day where we'd all get together and I think I had two uncles that had April birthdays, my mom had an April birthday, and I had some cousins so there would be a big April birthday celebration, and I wanted to give that to my family. I wanted to have kids and I wanted to share in that, and I wanted to experience that from my parents perspective. So, it was always a goal of mine to have a great career, but my passion was really family. And I really wanted to start a family so I don't know that I really wrapped my head around it when I was told I couldn't have my own family. It was devastating…there was some time that had to go by to kind of realize what that meant. But again, being a teen and being naive. My initial reaction while being devastated was also No, no, that's not gonna happen, that's not going to be the way it is for me. And honestly, have been diagnosed at an earlier age, it may have changed my outlook on that. I am grateful for 18 years of not being diagnosed, because I do think it provided some context, and some normal life, to really gauge my response with. Claire Rogers So my sense is that you have a lot of perseverance. Is that innate, or is that something you've had to actively cultivate since being diagnosed? Ryan Shekell 12:17 I'd love to think it's an insight. I think everyone likes to attribute traits to themselves that they want to have. But I actually have a little bit of an opinion on this, and I think, perseverance is like a muscle. Just like any muscle in your body. And I think it needs to be worked out. I at a very young age, understood that I was not going to be the best athlete in the world. I just wasn't built for it - I was a tall skinny kid. So, I understood the amount of effort needed to put into something. So, I was always very into effort and it was exemplified in sports. And I think baseball is a great way to learn perseverance because you fail so much, and I failed a tone. So, I think you kind of get used to failing, and you understand that you have to have failures, to have growth. So, going back to perseverance being a muscle I think you have to put yourself in situations to fail often so that you practice persevering, and my childhood did allow me to do that. And it's something that I carry with me in my daily life. Now as well - I truly feel like you have to prioritize fitness at a daily level, and I try to get up and do something really difficult every morning, so that I practice persevering because I know that if I start my day getting over something difficult throughout the day, you're actually going to be able to continue to do difficult things. Claire Rogers So are you like most people, where sometimes we can lose our perseverance, for whatever reason life takes over, we stop exercising, we stop with the healthy habits, you know, things just change. Do you ever fall down on your perseverance and if you do how do you get that grit and determination back? Ryan Shekell Yeah, I do often. I think the most important way to continue to persevere, is to really understand your purpose and your goals. And I think if you have clarity in where you want to go and what you want to be, I think that perseverance comes a lot easier, because I think that provides the context to the difficulty that you're having. So, in my mind, I want to be at this point in my career, I want to be at this point in my life, well, to me, that point is like this distant point out in the future, it's this focal point. I like to think about it in terms of mountains in the distance, right. So if your goal is this focal point out in the distance. Then, all this other stuff in the foreground of your life is kind of blurry. Right? And I think of all this blurriness is these little obstacles that we have to overcome to get to that point in the future. Well if you stumble, and you have some failures along the way. You may lack that perseverance, or you may take a step back, but as long as you understand that you're moving in this forward direction for this goal in the future, I think it provides context in that that was just one little stumbling block, and you can get back on track and move forward. You don't have to be defined by any one individual failure because you're always moving that forward direction towards your goal. Claire Rogers So then talking about goals, you're 18 years old diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis and told that you have a lifespan on average to 30 to 35, did you start setting goals then at 18? Ryan Shekell (laughs) No, no I was a young dumb 18 year old. You know, like I said, I did have these aspirations right, I knew that I wanted to have a family, and, you know, the great thing about being diagnosed with cystic fibrosis is that it kind of labelled my adversity. And I think that's really important. I knew what I was up against. And when you know what you're up against. You have a better idea of what it's going to take to defeat it. So, one of my goals was obviously to have a family, well to do that I was going to have to obviously get married and figure out a way to do that. But I was going into college, so I had to declare a major and I had to figure out what my career was so there wasn't this long term goal. At this point, it was more or less just tackling new things as they came, so I knew I wanted to go to college. I committed to college. I ended up actually majoring in education. So I had a long term goal of being a teacher, being an educator and being a coach, and just giving back. And I worked towards that. And I think along the way my career goals changed. And that was okay, because I did have this overall goal of trying to give back and help. And, you know, I have this mantra that I want everyone to be the hero of their own story, and to do that you have to be the hero of your own story first, so I understood that I was going to have to earn some sort of success. But, in general, no, there wasn't any sort of crazy goals that I had at that point, I think the more life experience I had, the more I was able to home in on some personal and career goals. Claire Rogers So then, did you ever have a sense that you are almost trying to run out of clock? Does that make sense? I'm trying to imagine if I was in your situation and I'm told that’s my lifespan... you know we all think that we're going to live to be 100. Did you ever feel as though you now have to try and run out the clock? Ryan Shekell I've definitely felt like it was almost like a race. Again, I didn't really believe that that timeline was going to be accurate. And so I definitely thought that I was going to beat it and that was some of that overconfidence. However, it was always lingering in the back of my mind, and this age of 35 always kind of hung there. So, you're absolutely right about running out that clock, because I think what it allowed me to do was, it allowed me to say, Okay, well, I want to live a full life, whether it's in the next 15 years, five years, three years, so I'm gonna make the most of what I have. And I think that's a really important perspective to have because we really don't know when our last day is going to be. I mean you or I could walk out of our house right now and get hit by a bus. So I think it's important. So what do you do in that time before now, or between now and the front of that bus. I think it's a great mentality to have, because it exemplifies it better than anything. I mean, no one expected a pandemic and all these deaths, but I think it's important to live your life in a fashion that if you are taken by surprise that you're prepared, and you've lived the fullest life you can in that amount of time. Claire Rogers I'm imagining, I think most people probably think that we have an infinite amount of time. Without being given a diagnosis, you never realize that you don't have the infinite amount of time that we all assume that we have. Can I ask, do you, did you or have you ever had that fear of death… that it lingers over you or how do you make peace with that? Ryan Shekell So, yeah, I'm scared of death. I'm think scared is an interesting term though. I've been able to wrap my head around the fact that we're all gonna die at some point. Do I want to die? no., no I mean I've got young kids and I want to be here as long as possible; I think having the perspective that it's going to happen no matter what is good. But I think the most that I fear is, I fear not living every day to the fullest more so than I fear death itself. And I don't know that that's the best perspective, but I just think, it's almost like an opportunity cost right like, what did I do today to kind of maximize my time here? And I think that that's probably a pretty healthy perspective to have about it. Claire Rogers So then moving on, I saw that when I was researching you, you're quite the athlete, you actually completed an ultramarathon, which I think is amazing with a reduced lung capacity, and you've already admitted that you weren't the most super athletic kid. What made you get into doing an ultra-marathon? Were you trying to prove something to yourself or was that going back to your point of living your life to the fullest? Ryan Shekell It's probably both. So, this year has been crazy. So we talk about this 35 year old number, right, and I'm told that 35 years old is this age that I'm not supposed to be here anymore, well, I've passed that. But I will say that over the course of the last 19 years my lung function has declined and that's kind of the way the disease goes. So when I was diagnosed 18, I had 70% lung function, which it's like an algorithm where they take my height, my age, my weight, and they say okay well the average person is at 100. This is where you are… and you kind of blow into this tube and it gives you all this information. So at 70% lung function… well over the course of those 19 years, it ended up decreasing to about 40%, and at the lowest point kind of dipped into the 30s. To provide some perspective. The doctors start talking about double lung transplant right around 30 -35%, so I was starting to push that number and anytime you're looking at a double lung transplant, or organ transplant that's kind of where you're getting nervous because you say, well, who knows what your body's gonna do. That's a big procedure, taking someone else's lungs and putting them into my body, you know your body could reject it there's so many factors. So that was a scary and eye opening kind of realization for me as well, understanding that this disease is kind of taking its course. Well, this past year, there was a medication that was approved. And this medication actually reversed, some of the damage that was done to the lungs and it's this amazing medication and what it does is it flips the patient's genes and actually counteracts the disease itself. So it's a very novel medication. Well I went on that medication. In February I went on it, and it wasn't a cure, but it felt like a cure, because my lung function just skyrocketed from 40% back up to 70% which is where I was when I was diagnosed at 18 years old. So, here I am. And I'm thinking, I've just been given a shot of life, I've just been given this second opportunity to take advantage of this life that has been, you know, not declining, but it was becoming more of a struggle. So I wanted to take full advantage of it, and ultra-marathon was something that I was inspired to do by a lot of different people that I've looked up to in the past. And I always thought that was the one thing that I would never be able to do with Cystic Fbrosis, is a long endurance event, because of my lungs, and I said you know what? given this new opportunity, that's exactly what I want to do. And I've always wanted to run a marathon and for whatever reason I said, well, we'll just do a little bit more. Yes, so I trained for a long time for eight or nine months and ran the ultra-marathon in October and it was an amazing experience. Have you ever ran a marathon? Claire Rogers I've done two marathons. So I'm curious, I don't know if you know my backstory, but my backstory is, I had some mental health challenges with panic attacks about seven years ago and I started running to actually overcome anxiety and depression and I’ve often said, it saved my life. And what I noticed in training for marathons or running marathons is that anything you want to know about your emotions you learned in 26 miles. And I'm just curious when you were training, and you were running, did you learn anything or did you get new perspectives, or some aha moments? Ryan Shekell Oh man, so many, and it's interesting you say that, because I learned a lot in those 31 miles, so 50K is what 31.1 or 31.2 miles? Yeah, I learned a lot in those 31 miles and when you talk about perseverance, I mean it was required. It was required because I felt the worst I've ever felt, but I think more interesting than how I felt in those 31 miles are kind of the lessons I learned for the nine months leading up to it. And I bet you would say the same thing about the 26 miles of a marathon or the 31 miles of an ultra-marathon. You know it's this, it's the small amount of time…it took me six hours and 36 minutes to do my ultra-marathon, and I did learn a lot in that, but I think I learned more about myself and my dedication and my discipline in the nine months leading up to it in the 1000 miles that I ran in preparation, because it was a lot harder. A lot of days I had to get out of bed at four in the morning to run 10 miles, and it was harder than it was to finish 31, I mean, what do you think about that? Claire Rogers No, I 100% agree with you. My marathons I ran in springtime, and the autumn time so you're running usually in the winter, when you're training and I found running on your own in the snow in minus two, Celsius - I don't know what that is in Fahrenheit, but it’s cold and getting your butt out of bed and running, and then you've got the mental monsters telling you that you can't do it and it sucks. And then other days you feel like a champion and you feel like Usain Bolt ; your head is all over the shop. But I did notice training in the six months leading up to the marathon it was harder than running a marathon because when you're running the marathon for me it was just another training day but now you got 5000 people cheering you on. Ryan Shekell Yeah, I agree. So the interesting thing for me and you'll probably appreciate this having ran a couple marathons is obviously with COVID this year, the race was cancelled. So I had signed up for and trained all this time, and I was in touch with the race director, and I kept talking to him.. hey, I'm trying to raise money for Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Do you think this race gonna happen? And he was like I don't want to say yes or no, but we do have all the not barriers, but like, we're taking all the precautions we need to take for the state to allow it to happen. And, and he was optimistic cautiously optimistic. But then, two or three weeks before the race happened (Covid) spikes started to happen and they had to cancel it. So, here I was, running 1000 miles for nine months and saying, well the race is cancelled. So I said, you know what, I'm gonna do it anyway. And I'll bring my own support staff, so I brought my wife. And, and two bottles of water, and I learned a lot about myself. I learned that a lack of preparation is a terrible thing when you're running 31 miles through the hills of the Finger Lakes and, and I learned you need a lot more water than you anticipate on a warm day running 31 miles. I ended up having to actually have my wife run to the store and get a case of water and real food, and she had to meet me a bunch of times and bring me some extra water and get me some extra food, but I ended up having to drink nine extra bottles of water, from what I brought with me. And some oranges and apples and stuff too. That was a fun experience. Claire Rogers Would you do another one? Ryan Shekell So I don't know if I'll ever do it again. Part of me is thinking, maybe at some point. But I’ve got a lot of other things that I want to do, and I don't know that I want to necessarily dedicate that amount of time to running. But I wouldn't cross it off. Claire Rogers It definitely requires a lot of discipline and time and actually what I think maybe people don't realize is, it actually takes up a lot of your family's time as well. You know, every Sunday, you have to go missing for three or four hours consistently and so forth, so you definitely family buy in. Ryan Shekell Yeah, and they understood exactly what I was planning and doing, and my kids understood, and they were really supportive. But I think you're right about that because one of the things that I had to prioritize was my family during that time. And the way I did that was I just said, okay, I'm going to train, as much as possible when they're asleep. Because I don't want to miss out on time because there are a lot of long runs. So I would get up early on a weekend and try to you know, if it was going to be a two hour run and try to do it before my kids got up so that I was there for them to have breakfast when they got up and that's where a lot of that discipline came in, but it's interesting because I talked to a lot of people about my experience. And you hear from a lot of people who aren't runners and aren’t really into working out. And they'll say, well, I don't know how. I can never do that, but secondly, I don't know how you've been trained for that. And I think it's a little bit surprising for people to hear that the training is not crazy. You know, a lot of days it's an hour or less. So, it doesn't really get in the way of work, per se. There's quite a bit of long weekend runs but even a long run is, you know, max usually like three or four hours and that's pretty rare. So, I think, a good takeaway from that too is, you can do it if it's a goal of yours to finish a marathon or you don't think you can. I would definitely urge you to give it a try. I think it's not as difficult in terms of time commitment, as you might expect. Claire Rogers I 100% agree with you. I've heard a lot of people say I could never do that. Or I'm not a runner, that's my favorite one that I've heard, and I'm dying to say, I don't think any of us came out of the womb running. I went from the couch to learning how to run, and now is my lifestyle, and I say to everybody, if I can do it, you can do it, I don't have any special running superpowers and I don't think most runners do, so just get a good training programme and just start small. Ryan Shekell Yeah, I don't know anyone that feels like a natural runner, there's people that run fast and there's people that were in track in high school and as a kid, but even they would say an hour of running sucks. No matter how good you are at it. Whether you're running 7 minute miles, 10 minute miles, it's not fun. Claire Rogers I'd like to segue to your journey of being told that you couldn't have biological children. Now you've got two beautiful boys that I believe you had through IVF. I think you did five rounds, if I'm not mistaken, and I was just wondering if you could share that journey with me and the reason why I'm interested in this is, from my perspective, I've heard women tell their journey of IVF, but I haven't actually heard male versions, and I thought maybe that will be helpful for listeners to learn about that. Ryan Shekell Yeah, so, you know, in a way, I understood what I was getting into, or I understood my situation when I was diagnosed, so I knew right at 18 years old that if I was going to have kids, it was going to be one two ways, it was going to be adoption, or it was going to be IVF. And to be perfectly honest with you I didn't really understand IVF or know about it when I was 18 years old, so I thought it was going to be adoption. Luckily, I've got an amazing wife and, and one of her superpowers is research, and she looked into all these options for IVF. So, we were living in Atlanta, Georgia at the time. And she was able to find a clinic up in New York, near where we were born and raised, and we tried it there first. And a lot of our decision on where to go, was based a lot on outcome but also based on cost. It's a really expensive journey and it's great when people have coverage for it. So she did a lot of research and we looked into a bunch of clinics and their success rates and took everything into account. And we didn't really truly understand what we're getting into. We understood what it was, but we didn't understand how it was going to impact our marriage, our psyche, her hormones. And I don't think it's really easy for anyone to understand until you start going through it. So she did shots and watching her was amazing – a mother to be with that drive and that passion. So, I was really excited to see her go through the journey. Just to see that passion come out. But at the same time, it was also devastating when it didn't work. And it compounds because of the hormones. I don't want to say obviously, but I'm sure it was worse because of those hormones. But we both had the same end goal in mind, we really wanted a family. And not, being able to be successful in the first time was a kick in the gut. It took another year for us to kind of get the courage to try. But again, it's kind of like how I was talking about earlier. You know, we had that distinct goal in mind, so failure once was just a roadblock on the way to that goal of having kids. The problem with IVF and having that mindset is that it doesn't work for everybody. So, even though you may have that goal of having a family, unfortunately, it is what it is, and it doesn't always work, and I can empathies with anyone who's going through this. And there's not a lot of advice that I have for anyone in that regard, except for, just continue to live your life to the fullest, no matter what the outcome is. And just know that the people who are there supporting you, they love you and they care for you and they're as much family to you as kids. So, I empathize. We had this one experience where we're supposed to go to a cabin with all of our friends in the mountains. We ended up hearing that morning, that it didn't work out and I think that was the second time. And I remember lying in bed with Lisa. And we were both like we're not going to go, you know we just want to stay home. We ended up getting a phone call from our friends. And they were like, you know, just come, even if we just sit there, we'll sit with you. You don't have to be alone, come and be with us. We don't have to go do anything. We don't have to go to the wineries, we don't have to go to the hot tub, we will just sit here and be depressed with you if that's what you want to do. We'll go for a ride in the car. And hearing that was great, and it did encourage us to get out of bed and go. I think that's a good takeaway. You know, you can sit around in the depression of that particular failure. But if you do have a support system, and, if you do have the tenacity to move forward, you will heal, you will live to achieve the goal. That's what it is or try it again. Claire Rogers So what was it like from your perspective? So you explain how your wife felt but I'm just curious how did you felt, watching someone you love to go through that process. And do you have to almost, to use a British expression, have a stiff upper lip and be the strong person? What's your outlet for you to actually share your experience? Ryan Shekell Yeah. I always do kind of feel like I have to have that that stiff upper lip. I've never heard that phrase, I like it. And almost to a fault. And I think my wife would agree with that. Sometimes she's like, it's okay to show emotion, you know, it's okay. You can cry, or you can show emotion, it's fine. I think I want to always kind of be the rock foundation. For me, it was emasculating. In a way, here I am. There was nothing physically wrong with my wife to the point where she couldn't have biological children. This was in a way my doing or my responsibility, it was my physical ailment that was causing us to go through this. And for a man that can be emasculating. I mean, another man could get you pregnant. Why can't I? So, it was another thing to overcome, and it was something to wrap my head around. And you know I had to go through a lot of this process as well. A lot of times for a normal man, going through IVF, the way that they get the semen out, is you would go into a room, they give you a video and you provide a cup at the end, well for me I had to have a biopsy. So they had to go in there to make an aspiration, it's almost like getting your ears pierced. So they take like a core, which is as painful to think about. And they also do a biopsy, but I've had a couple of those procedures done. So I did feel like I was a little bit more a part of the procedure, then maybe some men would. But again, I think other men would relate with this going through IVF feeling emasculated. Not being able to contribute not being able to do what you need to do to start a family, and I’m not saying that it is, it's just, we're all different. We're all different. We all have different issues. You know that maybe something for me that I can't provide, but I can provide in many other ways. And I think it's important to understand the value you have, and I think if you have that confidence, then you're not I guess going to be put down by it. Claire Rogers You've now got two beautiful boys and I'm curious, have you told them that you've got Cystic Fibrosis and if you have, how do you give that information to them without scaring them to think something might happen to dad? Ryan Shekell Yeah, so they know, they know that I have Cystic Fibrosis. It's hard to hide. I take a handful of pills with everything I eat. I do a nebulizer therapy, daily; I mean they grew up with it. So they've known me my entire life and their entire life. And they know that Daddy takes pills when he eats. Daddy works out. Daddy does medicine, and they don't need to understand that I guess at some point I will die from Cystic Fibrosis, they just need to understand that it's something that I'm living with and I'm dealing with, and it's an adversity that I'm overcoming, and I think it's a good lesson for them to see. Again, I think it's a great teaching point to show, we all are going through something, and you have to find a way to beat it, and you have to have that perseverance, like you said, and it's a great way, not just to tell them, but to demonstrate to them. So, that they understood the reason that I was running my ultra-marathon was because I could breathe better, and I wanted to raise money for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, and they were really proud that they were my biggest support. My biggest support group -you know they brought little posters and came and cheered me on with posters and are saying my dad's my hero and I think it's good. I think it's good to demonstrate that to them, and we're very transparent about everything and if they asked me any question, I'd answer it. I just don't think you have to tell them all about detail. Claire Rogers So my perception is that you've got an amazing perspective on life. I believe it's because you've had that diagnosis at 18, you've grown up a lot faster than most of us would have done at 18. In the last year with COVID and the restrictions and the pandemic it feels like the world has gone on one great big timeout. And I'm just wondering has your perspective changed at all or did you already have the great perspective or has the perspective enhanced with this great big timeout we find ourselves in? Ryan Shekell That's a great way to put it. It's definitely enhanced. I think it exemplified my perspective. No one knew that we were going to die of a rare disease this year or were expecting any sort of pandemic. So I think it underscores the fact that you need to live every day to the fullest because you don't know what's going to happen the next day. And look, I understand that it's difficult. It's really difficult for people. I think the one thing that it really does also demonstrate is the importance of a support team. And I think it's been really hard for people, not having their family and friends around and the one thing that I feel like I miss more than anything is just complete access to my friends and family. And that's what I miss more than anything; I've got a grandfather who's in his 80s and I haven't seen him since March. And to me that that's a travesty. And I think it really proves that when, God willing, this is all done, just hug people. Just be interactive, make time for that happy hour. Get out to dinner, roll around with, your little kids and just make the best of every single day and just live to the fullest because you just never know, you never know when you're gonna see someone again. Claire Rogers Ryan, you have an aim to build a world where every individual sees themselves as the hero of their own story. Can you share a little bit more about what that aim is all about? Ryan Shekell Yeah, so I think a lot of that came about as a parent, in kind of trying to teach my children about their future and about what they can be and who they should be. And you know, I've got boys that are growing up right now and I have kind of taken a step back and said, how do I teach them to be men? One of the things that I always tell them is, you have to be the hero of your own story. There's a lot of people in life that look to others for inspiration as role models. Matthew McConaughey did a did a great commencement speech in the past couple of years and he said my hero is myself in 10 years. And I think that's a powerful message saying, look, you should be looking to yourself as your hero and yourself in the future. I think that you can be someone special. And you don't need to look up to someone else. Yeah, take lessons from other people. I think that's really important. I think you can learn a lot from others. But at the same time I think you want to live a life where you're proud of yourself and I think that's more or less what it distils down to, is be proud of who you are, if what you're doing doesn't make you proud and make you want to say, yeah, this is me, well then, take steps to change that. And have a goal and achieve that goal. It could be a small goal. But you know what, achieve it. You'll feel really good about yourself, and then move on to another goal, and hopefully all those goals will add up. And through incremental positive change, you end up in a much better place when your story is ultimately done. Claire Rogers Wonderful. Ryan, thank you so much for joining this week's episode of Boot Camp for the Mind & Soul. Before we wrap up, if anybody wants to reach out to you or get in touch, can you share with them how they can get in touch with you? Ryan Shekell Yeah, sure. I'm on all the social medias, Ryan Shekell for Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Tik Tok whatever the kids are doing these days. And then I also have a newsletter that I send out about leadership and management... it’s kind of my mission… so you could go to my website it's https://www.ryanshekell.com Claire Rogers Awesome, thanks for joining the show Ryan. Ryan Shekell Yeah, well thank you so much for having me Claire I really appreciate it. Claire Rogers That concludes this week's episode of Boot Camp for the Mind & Soul. Don't forget to rate and review and subscribe. Tune back in next Wednesday for next week's episode. If you have any questions about this episode, or anything about the podcast, don't forget to visit https://www.itopiacoaching.com 
SUMMARY OF THE SHOW
Karen Andrea Campbell is a humanitarian and a storyteller for women inmates and author of the book Falling: Hard Lessons and the Redemption of the Woman Next Door. Karen lived the American Dream; she was a married mother with two daughters in high school, had a career as a physiotherapist and led an active outdoor lifestyle in Oregon. However, the dream changed into a nightmare when she was convicted of manslaughter for driving intoxicated, causing a fatal car crash which killed her husband and an innocent woman. She served six years in a full custody women’s prison. TOPICS THAT I DISCUSS WITH KAREN:
LIST OF RESOURCES AND CONTACT DETAILS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
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SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Claire Rogers I'm Claire Rogers, and you're listening to Boot Camp for the Mind & Soul. The podcast that gives you an inner workout. Before we get started, remember, just like in a gym, where you may not be able to use all the equipment, pick up what you can in this episode and leave behind what you can't. Your inner workout starts now. Claire Rogers Karen Andrea Campbell is a humanitarian and a storyteller for women inmates and the author of the book, Falling: Hard Lessons and the Redemption of the Woman Next Door. Karen lived the American dream. She was a married mother with two daughters in high school, had a career as a physiotherapist and led an active outdoor lifestyle in Oregon. However, the dream changed into a nightmare when she was convicted of manslaughter for driving intoxicated, causing a fatal car crash, which killed her husband, and an innocent woman. She served six years in a full custody women's prison. Having read Karen's book, which took me on a raw and emotional journey through guilt, the prison system and redemption, I reached out to Karen and asked her to join the show. Welcome, Karen and thank you for joining Boot Camp for the Mind & Soul. Karen Andrea Campbell Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Claire Rogers So Karen, I'd like to start by you walking us through the fateful day when your American dream turned into a nightmare. Karen Andrea Campbell Yes, it had been a beautiful spring day, I'd been skiing up on Mount Hood in Oregon. I was skiing with my husband, Tom. And he got tired. And he said, I'm going to go into town, and I'll meet you at the bar. And I wanted to stay out. And I took off skiing with a group of really good skiers, and there's a run from this beautiful lodge all the way down to town, which is 6.3 miles, which sounds like you have to be really good. The truth is, it's an easy run. But it's just long. And the spring skiing, if you're into skiing at all, gets warm in the sun. And suddenly you could be zooming along, and you hit this patch of what we call peanut butter which stops you in your tracks and hurts your quads. It's just really difficult. And that was what was happening to me. And I think I must have fallen 10 times. And it was one of those kinds of experiences. When you're so exhausted that you just lay there and cry. It's very difficult. I needed food and water. And I needed to get off the mountain. So I made it through finally and met up with Tom at the bar. And from here on out now, everything started coming to me in snapshots. My memory of that day is only in snapshots. And I walk into the bar and I have the snapshot of him in profile and all these people sitting around looking at him and kind of listening to him. And that's it, then it goes blank. And then my second snapshot of that day is there's a cold glass of wine coming toward me through people's hands and then blank again. And then the third and final snapshot I had of that day is Tom has loaded me into the car. And always the gentlemen, he is walking around the front to go to the driver's side. And I could see he's struggling. He's slipping, and I figured it was the ice. But by the time he got to the door, I realized he's drunk. And he was behind the wheel. And we started backing out and there was this rap on the door. And there was this little face in the window, and he rolled down the window and there was another Tom, a friend of ours from town peeking into the car and he said to us I want what you have. I want someone to love me. And Tom chuckled and started backing up. And my last vision of that day is we're backing up and I'm looking at this sweet face and he's waving standing under a streetlight and the snow is falling on him. And I wouldn't know that six months later, he would die of an aggressive brain tumor and Tom my husband would die that day on the way down the mountain. Somehow somewhere we switch drivers. Claire Rogers So, before Karen answers the next question, I want to mention to our listeners that due to Oregon State law we cannot discuss the details of the car accident. Which is why Karen won't be including that in her response to my next question. So with that said, Karen, can you share with me when and how you realized that you had been in a serious car accident, and how you learned that your husband and an innocent lady had been killed? Karen Andrea Campbell Yes, I was given the information by my family members because I was so tragically injured. I was life flighted from the scene. And I, to this day, I have no memory of that accident. But what I was told is that my family had arrived. And at the time, my daughters were 16 and 13 years old. And Haley, my youngest had said, Oh, Mom, you I couldn't stand it. You were broken and bloody and hooked up to lights and machines. And I, I fainted. And I struggled to kind of bring myself into the world. And I knew, I knew I was close to death. And I have, again, the snapshot images. I see through the bed rails; I could turn my head just a little. And I see the torsos of my daughters. And you can tell by their posture, that they're just bent in pain. And then again, blank. And later on, as I started to gain consciousness, it was my father who told me that Tom was dead. My daughter said all along, I kept signing with my hand, T o m, and I didn't know. At the time, when my father told me about Tom, he also told me about the other woman in another car who had died. And I begged God, I was raised secular, but I begged and pleaded, just please let my daughters not lose their mother. Claire Rogers So as you work tirelessly to recover your health, and my understanding from reading your book was that it was over the span of two years, you were at the same time navigating the legal system. The district attorney was pressing for a sentence of manslaughter; two charges to be brought against you, which would bring 10 years in prison for each victim, meaning you're looking at spending 20 years in prison. Can you walk me through this period of recovering your health while at the same time in parallel you are navigating the legal system? Karen Andrea Campbell Sure. I really was broken. It took a long time for me to get back to health. I broken over 20 bones, I ruptured my insides and punctured out a lung. And the doctors said, look, there's only so much we can do. This is as good as you're ever going to get perhaps. And I was walking with a big hip halo around me, like people when they break their neck, they have a big metal structure around them, I had one around my torso. And I just was worried I wouldn't even survive. But we went ahead with trying to negotiate - neither party, the woman in the other car, or my lawyers wanted to go to trial. And so we were going for an out of court settlement. And actually, there were there were charges of manslaughter I which would have been 10 years each, or manslaughter II , which would have been six years each, and there were the options of running them concurrently. So there was all sorts of different ways. I could have 20 years, I could have 10 years, I could have two sets of six years for 12 in total, and the least amount I could really do was six years, three months. So prison was inevitable, and it was just a matter of how long I would serve. And in our back and forth, what we learned and discovered why things were so difficult to negotiate is there was the wrong Karen Baker's criminal worksheet in my file. She was a hooker and a thief. And she had done all kinds of nefarious things, and this is who they thought I was. And I guess this was before facial recognition or whatever was going on during those times of identification. But they wouldn't believe me, and I had to go through a session with a criminal psychiatrist. And he kept on trying to trip me up to see if I was this Karen Baker - so when you were working the streets he’d ask. and I’d say this is not me. It followed me through my whole entire experience. But finally the victims and my lawyers agreed that I would do one six year three months sentence for both victims. Claire Rogers And how did you navigate that while at the same time your body is physically broken? I’m trying to understand - your body is physically broken; I'm imagining your mindset is also broken from what happened. And you're also in parallel trying to navigate the legal system. So, how did you? How do you have the strength to fix your physical body to move forward, but also have the physical and emotional strength to have those conversations to navigate that that legal process? Karen Andrea Campbell That's a good question. I think that I had two things going for me; it was eyes on the prize. I was a mother. And I had to survive. They needed me to. And the other is that I knew I'd go to prison. And so I had to get strong. And it was kind of like, you know, that scene from Forrest Gump where he's being chased by the kids. And he runs out of his braces, I had to too - I was losing time. And the fact is, is that I had to get strong and I had to be able to face a horrible experience and get as physically strong as I could. Claire Rogers So reading your book, am I correct in understanding the timeline of recovering your health was two years and then you went to prison? Is that correct? Karen Andrea Campbell Yeah, it was a little under that. It was more like a year and a half. Claire Rogers So did the negotiations take that year and a half? Or did they wait for you to physically get better to then send you to prison? Karen Andrea Campbell Oh, no, they would have sent me to prison with the big cage around me or whatever there was. No, they didn't care about my personal health, I would start my time in the infirmary if that was the case. Claire Rogers So you describe in your book that despite an agreement being reached through a pre-sentencing agreement, which would see you serve six years and three months rather than 20 years, at the last minute, and on the day of sentencing, the District Attorney decided to disregard this agreement and push for 20 years. The judge asked the victim's family what they thought was fair. And they pleaded for your clemency and said that six years was long enough for you to be without your children. You write in your book: Given the choice to punish, they chose compassion for my children and the entire family. I turned to see my daughter, sister, nephew, father and friends, embracing and crying with this family. I witnessed this family's grace and forgiveness. At that moment, I felt a shift deep in my being, down to myself, it was a sense of rising up. There was no other direction to go except toward a life worthy of their grace. It was the moment where everything stopped sliding downhill. Instead, there was a chance for all of us to move in another direction. Karen, what you wrote really moved me. The power of this family's grace and forgiveness was quite literally transformational for both you and your family. And my sense is that they actually arrived at forgiveness before you arrived at forgiveness for yourself. Can you walk me through how you felt in that moment when they chose compassion for you and how that changed you? Karen Andrea Campbell It is still unbelievable to me, their grace. And I was hoping somehow that this was the sign that they were beginning to heal. I was. I still think about them. I can't believe that they did it that way and their courage. I had done the math when we discovered that morning that I might get all 20 years. And my daughters would be 37 and 34 years old. And my father for sure would be dead. And you wonder if you would even still be a member of your family. Would you be like some nutty Aunt that you've got to send a card to every now and then. And so when they made that amazing gesture, I was so moved and so purpose driven. And I really just girded myself to just go forward and honor them. It is such a rare, rare thing that a victim actually gets to choose a sentence. And the fact that they did, made my sentence completely my duty and I had no trouble accepting and feeling that that punishment was fair and to get on with it and go serve. Claire Rogers Moving on, and you began the harsh introduction into prison life whereby you meet fellow inmates who begin to teach you the ropes. I actually found this a really interesting part of your book; can you describe this to our listeners? Karen Andrea Campbell With pleasure. You would never imagine my fear. The number one fear was the women - who are the women? And what did they do in there? And I figured murderers, and how do you separate the murderers from you know, say, the inmates with theft, crimes and things like that. And I just wondered if I would even survive them. And so I started researching who was in there by looking at books and Orange is the New Black hadn't been out yet. Although that's kind of a different experience, with a minimum, she did open a great door for people to understand what goes on. But there was men's books, and my goodness, Claire. They had descriptions of these perversions and shivs, and something called a fecal boomerang. And I, I didn't know what was coming. And so I was prepared for the worst. But what's really interesting is that maybe that fear is what drove me to stay motivated to, to just kind of keep my head down and keep moving. So that healthy fear that I had of the women, I didn't have to deal with it right away. When I first was incarcerated, I started in jail. And they put me in solitary because I still had a wrist splint on and I learned that well, they have to protect their property and you are now property of the state. So it wasn't like they were trying to make sure I was okay. And I understand now why solitary is inhumane. It makes you kind of crazy, the lights are on 24 hours; you don't know if it's morning or night. And if you get oatmeal, you even wonder if they're kind of messing with you. And the noises. Finally, I just took that wrist splint off and practiced a little speech, pacing back and forth in my little cell, what I'd say to the nurse to try to get out of there. And I said, well, I think the doctor said I could on this date, I could take this off. She looked at me like she couldn't care less. She said, alright, and we started walking toward the general population unit. And you could hear the sounds of the women and the voices from way down the hall. And we entered this long room. And it was like a hive. And all these women were walking back and forth and shouting at one another. And there was an unmistakable scent of unwashed women. And I was intimidated. And have looked it. I met three women right away. And I must look to them like Snow White, they probably thought oh boy, here come Snow White. Let's go over, keep her out of the forest. And the three I met were Tizzy, silver and Buzz Cut. And when I think of these heroes, I couldn't believe how kind they were they were generous to me. They were great. They grabbed my arm, and they said don't ever turn your back to the room. And from the beginning they schooled me in prison life. Everybody wants to know what you've done. That's the most important question you get asked when you get in there. And I told them there had been a car accident. And people had died and my children this and that. Tizzy just cut me off. And she just said, Look, don't think that you're any cleaner than the rest of us. You killed people. That's what people will say. They'll look you right in the eye. They might have hooked, and they might have, you know, stolen but they they'll say right to you: at least I didn't kill anybody. So the other inmate said just get over yourself. And I was shocked. And so Buzz Cut says, look, here's what you got to know. You got to learn your speech. I'm Karen. I'm here for manslaughter, DUI, gotten no good time, no programs. And that speech was devastating for me because all along I had called it an accident. I never called it manslaughter. It was a word I just wasn't even familiar with. But they held that mirror up to my face. And yet they stood by me. This was incredible. And we went together in a van, from jail to prison. And the night before, I can just see that Tizzy standing out in front by herself, and she shouts down, Hey. Look, Karen we will keep an eye on you. But if you fuck up, you're on your own. Claire Rogers Fascinating. You built friendships with a few of the inmates. And what struck me when I read your book is that there seemed to be a shared common humanity if you like, or a lack of judgement for each other's crimes. Can you talk me through some of these friendships and, how does that common humanity and lack of judgments become arrived at? Karen Andrea Campbell It's hard to figure out the common humanity when you're trying so hard to keep yourself separate, and you're not really into the culture yet. You're so concerned for your safety. Friendship is the furthest thing from your mind. And I was hoping that they'd put you know, the thieves with thieves and murderers with murderers. That’s not how works in there. You're just thrown into the soup. And over the long days, people start sharing their stories. And I was really amazed at how open these women were compared to me. Their stories of tragic childhoods and abuse was something they talked about. Easily they talked about their crime. And maybe that was because the crime was a matter of public record. But I really had empathy for them and was not surprised that they ended up in their situation. My very first one that I really had a great fondness with - I called her Celly. And Celly, she was a beautiful Latina, and she took pride in herself, and she could sing, and she could draw. And I was fascinated by her. And one day, I had been doing some laundry and I checked my wash and I realized that my pajamas were missing, which is the only decent piece of prison clothing I had. And I came back, and I told Celly, and said to her let me try this out. I think somebody jacked my jammies. And she rolled her eyes, of course. And she's slipping down the bunk, and the line movement, which means doors open, and she walked over to the washing machines. She was there for about 10 seconds, and she came and strolled back in and picked up her drawing again. And not moments later, there was a knock on the door and there was this snaggletooth young girl in front of me holding my pajamas. Here's your pajamas. So make sure you tell her. I picked up those pajamas from her and I walked over to Celly. And I stood there until she could feel me staring at her. And she looked up and I said, who are you? And she gave a backward nod of the head, it was magnificent. And she was my Celly. And there was nothing I wouldn't do to protect her and her stories. And that's just how things happened in there. These women and their vulnerability surprised me, and we got closer and closer. There was another who, was all strut for the show. And she had a tough, tough way of presenting herself, but I could see her hurt. We all were just laid bare underneath. And maybe that gave us some common humanity. But what I did learn from those wonderful women was that they were loveable. And I learned to love them. Way sooner than I ever learned to love myself. Claire Rogers So did you have to learn to check your judgement at the door? Or was that easy to let that go because you were already judging yourself for your own situation. Karen Andrea Campbell You mean regarding my safety around them? Or what they did? Claire Rogers I just try to imagine if I was in that same situation. The fear of crimes of what may have committed. Some of it, I'm guessing could have been premeditated, and so forth. I believe the natural reaction would be to judge someone. And it sounds like you didn't judge your fellow inmates. So how did you learn to drop those feelings of judgement? Or did you just not have judgement at all? towards anyone regardless of what they said they had done? Karen Andrea Campbell You know, most of what I learned I did not know in the early days. What I learned over my time, that if anybody had committed a heinous crime, there was probably domestic violence behind it. That's just the way women women's crimes are. I did not discriminate base on crime. There was an exception, most people did not do well with child crimes. They were in a separate category, and they were ostracized. But no, there was no sort of hierarchical friendship categories based on your crime. Claire Rogers Can you walk me through a few of the stories of your fellow inmates? I found that fascinating reading about some of them in your book. So can you share some of those stories and how learning some of the other inmates stories may have changed any preconceptions you've had about prisoners? Karen Andrea Campbell Yes, I can take you on a walk in our unit. And I'm staring up at this kind of this semi-circle of cells. There's two floors up and down and up. Walking along the row of cells, I'm going to tell you about three of them. I can hear the first woman in this little baby voice, irritating, just a really irritating voice. And that woman became pregnant at 9. And she just never matured. And she had a very difficult time making adult decisions. And as I'm walking past her door, I'm going down further. And this is where Mittens lives. And she was made to eat food out of a dog dish; she was held her down by the back of the neck by a male family member, because all women were bitches. And that girl became a fighter. And as we go further down, this is where the lifers live down in front of the one window. And I could walk you past about seven rooms of people who committed murder, with two in each. And of all those people, I can only think of one who was not a victim of domestic violence. And that's who were locking up. Claire Rogers I'd like to now segue to two other themes that were threaded throughout the book. The themes are guilt and forgiveness, which from my perception, reading your book, you seem to oscillate between the two. Can you talk to me about this? Karen Andrea Campbell I'll try, you know, I still struggle with forgiveness. I did something horrible, that cannot be undone. And every now and then there's this layer that reminds me that I have guilt. And self-forgiveness is not even something I deserve. It's a hard, it's a really hard process. But it's never more evident than when your daughter's come to visit you in a person. And that first time I saw Nikki in the visiting room, which is a chaotic scene, it's amazing, when you live in beige, and blue, and all of a sudden, you're in the colors of the free world, and you walk into this room, and there's all these people and faces. In the middle of it all, my daughter just rose - this tall beauty with blonde curls. And she was standing in the middle of all that with her hands tucked really close in front of her, like maybe she didn't want to touch anything. And I walked over to her and it was just agony and ecstasy at the same time. And we sat together and talked about inconsequential sort of topics and things. And it was just so painful. And so wonderful. Because for a moment, I was a mother again. And toward the end of the visit, she reached for my hands and I saw my hands on hers and I didn't even recognize them. They were red and raw from working in the kitchen. And she looked me in the eye and said, I forgive you. And we didn't talk, and we didn't cry. We just stared at one another and it was like this moment where I had peace and trust and faith that things were going to be okay. And it was just for a moment and this beautiful like vortex and we just held each other's hands. And it was something that you need to heal from something that deep. Claire Rogers So I remember reading in your book about you learning how to navigate guilt and your Zen group. Can you share that with us? Karen Andrea Campbell Oh, yes. You know, when you have a visit like that with your daughter, you best start looking inside just a little bit to start figuring something out, some sort of pathway. And I became a seeker. I went to anything they had in the chapel. I went to every religion they had and one of the groups was the Zen group. I saw it through the through the windows – it was a room where they had a meeting, and they were all sitting so peaceful. And I thought I want that peace and I want in that room. Because maybe if I can feel safe somewhere, I can begin to think about things. And so we always started in the group with a check in. And I chose that week to expose my experience with Nicki coming to visit and how guilt ridden I was. And I really sang about that. And the teacher looked at me and said, do you happen to know the literal meaning of remorse? I said, no, of course not. And she just held my gaze and she said, it means to bite again. And I want to read you two or three sentences here, because she says it's so well. She says conscious is as important as remorse. Together, it leads you to a new life instead of drowning and guilt. And she sat like this. And she said, if we're humble and contrite and atone for our errors, we can begin again, when our thinking is corrected, and so is our road. And I remember thinking, I have got to write this down, and I'm scrambling for my little scraps of paper and in my pockets, and I looked up, and there she is still staring at me. But now she's got a little playful mischievous look on her face. And she says, guilt is the ultimate arrogance. And it was like, she slapped me in the face. I kind of stared at the floor. And I started going through my mind. And I thought, my guilt me mine, I did this, I did that. Imagine people having to listen to that, and all that stuff. I mean, at first, I was mad for about three seconds. And then I looked at her and I said, I won't do anyone any good. If I'm stuck there. And you know, the sage nod. And I had a whiff of something that day, I knew that there would be a way to walk forward, somehow, some way. But right after that, what greats you as you walk out of that room is such hurt and such loneliness and isolation and uselessness. And you just pick that mantle back up again, of your shame. And this is who we are. And this is where I am. So it was a definitely a door opener. But it took many years to have anything really sink in to make any kind of change. Claire Rogers Tell me and our listeners about your visit from Tom. Karen Andrea Campbell Oh, well, I was in the midst and the grip of what I just described about guilt and the shame. And I didn't dare think of him. I really didn't, I was afraid one day that maybe the memories would return and maybe I'd remember the accident. And so maybe if I didn't remember him too much, I wouldn't fall apart while I was there. And I had been working with some religious groups and you know, my Zen people. And I thought, I've got to start looking at this. And so it was in the back of my mind. And I was thinking about all this as I was walking about how am I going to resolve this. And maybe that just putting it in my mind like that might had brought it up. But all of a sudden, there he is. He is he's standing in front of me on the prison yard. And he's in his funny old purple shirt, and he's got a ski pass around his neck. And he's looking at me and he's a little bit ticked, a little bit amused and he says, what are you doing? What are you doing? Don’t waste a day. I said You're not mad at me? He said get out there. I wouldn't waste a day. And then he was gone. And it was like this breeze. And that's exactly what he would have said to me. And that's exactly how he would have looked. And I know it sounds crazy, but it was real. It was. I could smell him and, and he talked to me in a way that I needed to hear that he was okay. And I could start maybe moving in another direction. And I went back into my cell and I opened up my tank drawer and in the back of a folder, I kept some pictures of him. And there he was, and, I started, from then on to shift and get over myself, I guess. Claire Rogers Beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. I want to segue. I think this personally is one of the most shocking statements I read in your book. It certainly shocked me because I hadn't thought about this myself. But you said that one of your fellow inmates had said to you, life as an inmate is filled with unknown deprivation, the average person has no idea to deny a person the sun or the night sky is cruel and inhumane punishment. And you wrote of that exchange, I will never look at the night sky again, without remembering when I could not. The other day, I looked at the night sky and this beautiful red gorgeous sunset, on the River Thames in London, and your words from your book circle back to me, and I mentioned your quote to my husband, and I said, you know what? we need to look at the sunrise and the sunset for the people who cannot, we need to look at the moon for the people who cannot and the stars for those that cannot. And that's actually something that I will take forward from your book - to remember that there are people locked up, who are locked up because of their personal tragedy or tragedies that have actually occurred. I know there's a different category for people who have done premeditated things, and so forth. But there's a lot of people in prison for a variety of reasons - perhaps they weren't even born into a chance or needs must. I'm not condoning, I'm just saying we have to as a society, I guess think about how we want to deal with tragedy and how we want to deal with people who are not born with any opportunities. And it leads me on to critical yet important subject, which is prison reform. Neither one of us are well versed to have an articulate and meaningful conversation about it, so I'll leave it there unless you do have an opinion you want to share. But my impression reading your book is that there were a few key Department of Corrections staff who were instrumental in helping you transition from being an inmate to being released and reading your book. They seem to actually lead you to think about a path forward, which to me speaks to a bit of prison reform. So I was wondering if you could kind of share those experiences with me? Karen Andrea Campbell Yes, I'd be happy to talk about that, like you said, we're not good with prison reform. And there was no prison reform for me when I was in there unless you took your own initiative, and sought out different ways, you know, reading books, whatever. But one of the great sources for me was the staff, which was at the heart of the reform that you seek for yourself. Also, I never forget the victims, who helped me. And I do believe my sentence is fair, and they needed some justification for the crime that happened. And for me to do that sentence, and if that means that I am locked up for a while, and that makes peace for others, then that's what needs to happen. Where we have the trouble is, we lock up people and don’t tell them how to change. We don't give them ideas about maybe taking atonement or, you know, inventory or things like that. And so I tried to do that kind of work. And especially with the staff members, I found a couple that were so helpful. And it just takes one of them to see you as a human being. And your experience becomes more bearable. You are motivated, to be a better person. And to come out of there, the least you could do is leave prison a better person than when you went in despite all odds. And there was one there was two fellows that I would point to and the first one is called Big Buck. Big Buck was my maintenance boss. Huge, enormous cowboy of a fellow and what he did was astonishing. He looked you in the eye with a bullet stick and he would spend time with us every morning and every night, kind of like a Zen check in. He never preached, he never told us what to do. He just asked us questions. Like one of the things he might say is, so how's everybody's budget? who's got a bank account on the outside? and he’d go around the table, simply just staring at each individual, never asking them to speak, just letting them talk, letting them think their way through starting to problem solve things like that. And he was the only one who did that, while I was there. That was the only so called reform that the group of women were lucky enough to get. And I wish there was a way maybe he can get this book in his hands. I just wish there was a way I could thank him. There was another one, the Captain. And he was rumored to be a very fair man, a good man. And one night, we had a blizzard, and the snow was coming down. And I was lucky enough to be able to go out and shovel to make the sidewalk safe. And he and I were on a team together. And we got to work. It was coming down heavy. And it was it was astonishing to me that he just turned around and started working and had no thoughts whatsoever that I could take the shovel and brain him. He just went right to work. And we were working along, and he said, you know, you are doing a good job here, Baker which was my married name at that time. And I said well yeah, I'm from Minnesota. He says, well, you you've done a good job to get this, they don't give this job out to just anybody. And I said, and I’m a little indignant. So you know, I've had good jobs before, I paid taxes and, you know, had medical insurance. And he stopped working, I can picture it. It was not unsimilar to Tom in the snow on the last night of my memory of the accident, I can just see this Captain standing there saying, you know, I've got a good job too. And he said, I've got to follow the rules, Baker, you know, I've got to pay taxes, I've got to drive 55. That's just the way life is. And I've made peace with that. And I want to live in this country. So that's what I do. And I wake up in the morning, and I do it every day. And I thought it's just that simple. Could someone just please say this to us, you know. And I watched him walk away and snow just falling on his bald head. And he really inspired me. Just that gentle, positive path forward. Claire Rogers It sounds to me like he recognized your humanity. There was a common humanity there. Karen Andrea Campbell I was so touched, I was so touched that someone - it's kind of like, being the freshman and the senior gives you a nod. I know that trivializes it. But you do become more childlike there because you're not really allowed to think for yourself or take initiatives on things. And so when someone of authority, or a higher up recognizes you in some way, it's really something and it does inspire you. Claire Rogers So what would you say to someone who's listening to this conversation? Who may struggle with the idea of prison reform? Or perhaps has even been a victim of crime in the past, and so would find listening to our conversation uncomfortable and perhaps would even go so far as to say that prisoners get what they deserve? What would your response be to that? Karen Andrea Campbell Well, you know, I think what we have to do is, we have to go forward with something called restorative justice. And that way the victims are heard. I'm not an expert at it, but I do know it starts with repairing the harm that was done in the first place. And the offender to take responsibility for things even before they have a chance to re integrate. And there are people I hope are working on it right now. But it's, I think everybody's entitled to have anger if they've been harmed. And remorse is appropriate if you have offended and we just needed find a way though. I don't know. I fully don't know. I really don't know. Claire Rogers No - I think the answer of I don't know is good. Karen Andrea Campbell All I can tell you is what happened to me when I was there, there was no parole prep classes. By rejoining society, you got a handful of condoms, you got your medical record, you got a bus pass and a $50 grocery card. And then they asked you one question, and they said, how are you getting off the property, are you're going to take a bus, or do you have a ride? because they didn't want you to be their responsibility anymore. So needless to say, we have a long way to go to have some sort of solution and prison reform. Claire Rogers So prior to this experience, did you have any thoughts on prisoners and prison reform? Or did you never think about it before? Or how have those perceptions changed? Karen Andrea Campbell A prisoner to me is someone I would have never met. A prisoner to me would have been someone dark and terrifying. And probably dishonest. I to this day of respect, especially in this time of craziness, have respect for the law enforcement people in my town. And if there's something that happens at my home, and I need their protection, I wouldn't hesitate to call. I think that they go above and beyond as first responders. I have all the respect in the world for those people. And I would have seen inmates as less desirables. I didn't know, I really had no idea. And I don't think I was a very compassionate person before I went to prison. I'm sure that prison taught me the compassion I needed in order to be just a better human being. If you can believe it, I became a better human being and citizen by being a prisoner. Claire Rogers I'd like to touch on that what you just said. So looking at your journey, in its entirety, from guilt, to forgiveness to redemption, you say that it's changed you in the fact that you become more compassionate. How else has it changed your life since being released? Karen Andrea Campbell You know, I'd like to answer that question, Claire, in a way that's relatable to your Boot Camp for the mind & Soul and anybody who's a seeker. You think about a prison experience as something unrelatable, kind of fantastic, and something that will never happen to you. But, I mean, is it really that different? And I think about all the people out there who build their own walls around themselves, keep people out to keep themselves in, maybe they hoard, maybe they overeat, you know, maybe they are a victim of sexual or domestic abuse, and there's great shame. It takes purposeful study and behavior changes to look forward, and to maybe get counselling to make an attempt. But it's horribly, horribly hard. And that's why it took me nine years to write that book. I just could only go so deep; it was just too devastating to admit all the pain that was inside of me. And with each revision, I would just go deeper, and another layer of deeper and there were times when I would just be weeping, typing it the book, and I just had to take those layers off slowly and slowly. And I noticed that I would feed my shame. I would purposely self-isolate and keep myself away from people. Because I had this horrible secret about myself. I was back to work again. And I wasn't allowed to talk about my crime and be open about it. So I never made friends because I was afraid, they'd find out one day and all this secretiveness would make me a false person. And so that was a really difficult path upward. When you are isolated, and you're self-isolated, and you talk yourself into that, I had not really forgiven myself, I just wrote about it. But I hadn't done the deep work, I was too afraid still. And I was sick and tired of writing the book. I wanted it over Claire, I wanted to just be a normal person. And there was a day that I'd written the end, but I didn't like it. And I remember, there was a thought of how to end the book, and it started coming at me, I didn't know what shape it was taking it was, Oh, it was so dark. And I never said it out loud. The prison was really, really bad. I was just so freaked out. But that's what I said. I said, it was really bad. And I remember I had to hang on to the desk, I almost fell over. And I said, I'm damaged. And yet something shifted. And kind of like that scene where Tom appeared to me on the prison yard. My young self-appeared to me. And oh, my goodness, I was such a cocky child, Claire, I had these long, skinny legs. And that day, I was wearing plaid pants. And my hair was curly mess. And I was holding Winnie the Pooh far past the time when any kids should be carrying that thing around. And I just thought, she's good. And she's still in me. And maybe, maybe damage happened to me, maybe that was a horrible experience, and horrible for the victims and my family. But I am not a damaged person in my essence. And I needed to sink all the way down. Just so I could see my way forward and find a way to finish that damn book. And that's what I did. Claire Rogers So if people were to read your book, what's the one thing you would want them to take away from it? Karen Andrea Campbell I've thought about this so many times. And there's only one answer for me. I was put in a place to listen to stories. And I wrote them all down. I never could have done that. Without doing that. I had scraps of paper all over my floor. And my golden retriever used to put her paw on one slip, like, let's talk about mittens. And I had this precious gift of the stories. And when I wrote about them, I could see them and wondered how they were doing. And if people could read this book and see them the way I saw them. That is my job. I have to humanize these people. And that is the step that comes first in any sort of discussions about prison reform. Who are they? Can we see them as a human being? And then I think I would punt it to people who are smart and understand who could work with laws and things like that. It is my job to write those stories and tell the stories. Claire Rogers I think that's a great way to end. Karen. Thank you for joining Boot Camp for the Mind & Soul. I very much appreciate you and our discussion. Karen Andrea Campbell Thank you. Claire Rogers You can purchase Karen Campbell's book Falling: Hard Lessons and the Redemption of the Woman Next Doorthrough Amazon. And you can learn more about Karen by visiting her website, https://www.karencampbellwrites.com I personally highly recommend Karen's book. It is raw, emotional, authentic and informative and opens the door to challenge our views on both forgiveness as well as the prison system. That concludes this week's episode of Boot Camp for the Mind & Soul. Don't forget to rate and review and subscribe. Tune back in next Wednesday for next week's episode. If you have any questions about this episode or anything about the podcast, then don't forget to visit https://www.itopiacoaching.com 
SUMMARY OF THE SHOW
This is the first episode of Boot Camp for the Mind & Soul, and it features my story. Each episode of Boot Camp for the Mind & Soul will feature a guest; however, I felt it was important that for the very first episode, I share my own story. Because how can I expect my guests to be vulnerable and authentic about their pivotal moments if I don’t share my own? I tell my life story and the pivotal moment of when I went from being a passionate, tenacious and resilient person to a fragile and fearful person that suffered from panic attacks, anxiety and depression, which lasted 18 months. TOPICS THAT I DISCUSS IN MY STORY:
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SHOW TRANSCRIPT
I'm Claire Rogers, and you're listening to Boot Camp for the Mind and Soul, the podcast that gives you an inner workout. Before we get started, remember, just like in a gym where you may not be able to use all the equipment. Pick up what you can in this episode and leave behind what you can't. Your inner workout starts now. Hey there, I'm Claire Rogers and you're listening to the very first episode of Boot Camp for the Mind and Soul. So, this episode is going to be a bit different from all the other episodes in the sense that this episode is just about me. It's my story, because I figure I can't ask my guests to be vulnerable and share their story, if I don't share mine. Okay, so let's start with the highlight reel, because that's what we do in society, we sell airbrush lives and perfect faces don't we? So here it goes. Here's my highlight reel. I was a professional model for five years, where I lived and travelled around the world surrounded by beautiful people. During that time I partied with Skid Row, Ice T and Body Count and Jane's Addiction to name but a few. It was a wild and super glamorous ride. Last time I counted, I've been to close to 70 countries, most of which I travelled to on my own. I've backpacked and camped in pup tents across nine countries in Africa. I've trekked through remote villages in northern Thailand where villagers were so impressed that this lone blue eyed blonde girl showed up that they showered me with a celebratory dance and fed me with their delicacy of charcoaled rat. I've seen the Kirov in St. Petersburg, Russia, swam with manta rays in Hawaii, watch the beluga whale migration in the Canadian Arctic, climbed volcanoes in the Galapagos Islands and been awe inspired by the underwater world in Bora Bora and the Maldives. I've travelled extensively in the Middle East and been to most countries in Asia, some of which I lived in for years. I've got a mom, stepdad and husband that love me. And all of this sounds pretty badass right? Let me keep going, I'm on a roll. Sell it baby, sell that perfect life! Okay so here I go. I've got a college education, professional science certificates from UC Berkeley and Harvard, I've worked for corporate America for 20 years where I made loads of money, and received, tones of rewards and recognition. Over the years I've run 1781 miles and I have two marathons under my belt. Running is my religion. And overall I am one cool chick who's had a very cool life. So that's my highlight reel. That's what I'm supposed to tell you right? Because that's what we're selling in society. But hang on a second. Let's rewind that highlight reel, shall we. Let's remove the airbrush and take the filter off. From the get-go, I was told I wasn't wanted. The exact words I remember are I should have used a condom, and then you wouldn't be here. I've been kicked into walls, down the stairs, had large kitchen scissors held to my throat and told my tongue would be cut out for speaking. I've been beaten. I've been left in a dark forest and told that nobody wants me. I've begged and pleaded to call and be allowed to see my mother, who was used as a bargaining chip. I've been suffocated more times than I care to recall, and I try not to recall it, because those scars are deep. I was a scared and terrified kid who sucked in school. I was a C student at best and usually got D's in mathematics. I've been held up at gunpoint with the barrel pressed right up against my chest, while the guy cocked the gun, ready to click the trigger unless I gave him what he wanted. Modelling wasn't glamorous at all. It was a toxic environment where young insecure girls are thrown in environments with hot older male models that are about 10 years older. Because ironically guys get better looking as they age. In modelling you're continuously told you're not good enough; not pretty enough, not the perfect face, not the perfect shape, your boobs aren't big enough, and you're given bags of speed by modelling agencies to keep you looking skinny and gaunt. I’ve frantically flushed those same bags of speed down the toilet when the police showed up unannounced to check on my work visas for the countries, I was in. One of my best friends died of a heroin overdose. Despite all of this tragedy I kept going. I kept getting back up again. I was resilient and tenacious. One determined feisty go-getter of a chick. Nothing was going to stop me from achieving what I wanted out of life. You could knock me down, beat me up and I would always get back up again. Until I couldn't anymore. It happened in a blink of an eye. I didn't see it coming. It happened on a Saturday morning. It was grey outside, and I was exhausted. I couldn't seem to wake up. I felt like I had jet lag. I was dazed and confused, and I had to get my shit together and head to my five year old nephew's birthday party with my husband. And I really didn't want to go, but I did not have a choice in the matter. And so I walked into this dingy Town Hall, an hour outside of London, where I was greeted by 15 hyperactive kids running around playing with their Nerf guns. And I looked the part. I was dressed up pretty and I played the part. I put on a big beaming smile and brought my extroverted personality out. But inside something was wrong. I could feel it. I didn't know what was wrong, but something was off, and that off feeling was making me feel really unnerved. Despite this, I somehow managed to keep it together. I shined my bright light on all the parents in the room and I engaged, and chit chatted with them like nobody's business. A few hours later we could finally escape. Thank God for that. My hubby and I started to drive home. And that's when it happened. That's when everything changed. We're in the car, and we're talking about random stuff, nothing too serious. When all of a sudden, I felt like someone had put a tight elastic band around my chest and was slowly squeezing the life out of me. My arms and legs started to go numb, my hands and feet start to tingle with pins and needles, and I started to hyperventilate. I could not breathe. I remember frantically trying to pull air into my chest. I looked down at my chest where I could quite literally see my heart pounding away frantically in terror. My body and mind were ravaged with overwhelming mind blowing feelings of terror. I've felt fear before, but this was next generation level of fear. I remember thinking, oh my God, I am going to die, I am going to die right here in this car. I don't want to die. I've got so much more I want to live for. I can't believe it. I am going to die right now. I looked out of the window in a state of utter stupefaction like I was seeing cars for the very first time. And I remember wondering how I got there; how was I in the situation that I was going to die. And then something clicks in my mind; something inside me tells me I'm having a panic attack. I don't know how I know; I just know. Something has told me inside what is going on, but that doesn't take away the overwhelming feeling of fear and terror that's washing and flooding over my body. I'm ravaged with overwhelming feelings of terror and that terror lasts 30 minutes. By the time we get home, I am a broken fragile wreck, and I can't snap out of it. That tenacious, resilient, passionate girl who I was. She'd left the building and is not coming back. I couldn't find her. I could not dig deep and get her back and pick her back up again like I had done so many times before. She was gone. She was gone for 18 months. Instead, a new chick moved in. And this new check is terrified. Every day I wake up terrified. I shake uncontrollably. My heart is constantly pounding in overdrive. My body and mind are constantly flooded with overwhelming, mind blowing feelings of fear, and I'm perpetually terrified of when the next panic attack is going to strike. And because of this, I develop a fear of fear itself. I go from being the girl that camped under the stars in Zimbabwe and heard lions prowling around outside my tent in Zambia, to becoming a girl that scared to walk into Starbucks, for fear of not been able to open my mouth to speak, and for fear of collapsing in a panic attack right there in the middle of a coffee shop. I become so scared that I don't even want to leave the house. I have to leave the house, but that is a song and a dance in itself. I'm thinking where am I going? how am I going to get there? How long is it going to be until I get back home? My mind is ravaged with these feelings of what I call What if? disease. What if I have a panic attack in the grocery store? What if it happens in the middle of the street? what if it happens in front of my clients? What if it happens in front of my staff? What if it happens in front of my friends? what if? what if? what if? my mind was constantly screaming at me that there was fear everywhere. And besides my hubby and my mum. I didn't tell anyone what was going on. Because I thought that what I was going through meant that I was weak. I didn't tell work because I was pretty damn convinced that I would be fired or pushed out, because in my experience, mental health challenges in the workplace is normally in Corporate America something that's talked about once a week during Mental Health Awareness Week. It's a tick the box exercise. I definitely kept my mouth shut. Nobody had a clue what was going on at work and I didn't share it with anybody else in my private life. And so I hid that private road of hell I was living in. Emotionally I was in so much pain. Mentally, I was so depressed and so, so fearful. As I say, I've had a rough life, but this fear was next generation level compared to what I had been through, and I could not make that fear stop or go away. Spiritually, I was so stressed. I didn't have a God. I didn't have a religion. I did not have anything to help me crawl out of it. But physically I smiled. I dressed the part. I acted the part. I deserved an Academy Award, because none of you would have had a clue what was going on. And so every day I wake up to a world of hell. Every day I wake up and I'm trembling, and I was shaking, and my heart is just pounding away. I'm small framed. I'm 5'7 about roughly 120 pounds. And so it's easy to see where my heartbeat is, and I was constantly fixated on looking at it because it looked like it was just pounding out of my chest. And I’ve got to somehow function, and work, feeling like this. And what I noticed as well as while I've got those overwhelming feelings of fear going on, I develop a fear of speaking. I've got the gift of the gab, I'm an extrovert. Put me in a room and I will chat up the room, no problem. But now all of a sudden, I can't find my voice anymore. I'm scared of my own voice. I'm scared I'm going to open my mouth and garbage is going to come out or I'm going to lose my words and I'm just going to ramble or I'm just not even going to know how to speak English anymore, I'm just going to speak gibberish. And so, I've lost all of my confidence literally overnight. And every day I had to try to function with this overwhelming fear that’s just racing through my system. So for those of you who are listening who have never had a panic attack and do not understand what I'm describing, imagine this; it's like you're jacked up on drugs. It's like you've had 50 cups of coffee. You're just jittering and shaking. And then you've got to try and function that way, on this overdrive of adrenaline and cortisol that's just pumping through your system. And it's such an awful terrifying feeling. And during this time while am navigating this awful world of hell that I'm living in, literally the only thing that I wanted to do during that time was sleep. Because sleep meant a bit of a reprieve and meant I didn't have to be scared for five minutes. But then you'd wake up again and that hell would start all over again. And I remember fighting it. I was just white knuckling it so badly. I didn't ask for help. I need help, and I cannot crawl out of it. I cannot find who I used to be. I cannot find where that strong girl that you knock her down and she gets back up again. I couldn't find her. And then I got some news that absolutely finished me off. Long lost friends have been trying to track me down for years to tell me the news. And then one friend did track me down, and he wrote to me. And he said, Hey, Claire. I don't know how I'm going to tell you this. So I'm just going to come right out and say it, Ang's dead. He died of a heroin overdose. And what kills me about it Claire is that he knew he had to get clean. But he didn't make it. He's dead. Getting that note and reading it, learning that my friend died, was a dagger to my heart. It cut deep; it still cuts deep. I deeply loved this guy. He was one of my soulmates, one of the greatest loves of my life. Not in a romantic sense been in a deep I see you; I know you; you are my person sense. He was such a beautiful soul, and he believed in me before I did. And hearing he died, absolutely crushed me to my soul and finished me off. I was just couldn't believe it. I thought my God, I have been flitting around the world and climbing the corporate ladder and one of my peeps has somehow got into heroin and died from it. Like what the absolute fuck has gone on? And my already wrought, twisted and terrified mind was reeling, I just thought, what in the absolute fuck, is the point of all of this. One of my people is dead. One of my guys is dead. How in the fuck did he get into heroin in the first place? I raged and I cried to God... why, why, why on earth would you take that guy? I didn't know who God was, but I was pretty sure he hadn't been looking out for me and now losing one of my guys proved it to me. And so now to compound those overwhelming feelings of fear that's ravaging my body and mind, now I've got grief on top of it, and as I say, this was a soulmate. This was a soul crushing grief that I was going through. And the funny thing with this grief, was that I loved him, I missed him, I was grieving him, I was so sad, but at the same time, my God, I was pissed off at him. I was pissed like a tiger. I would be raging at him one minute going,how in the hell did you get into this? what the hell happened? to the next minute being crushingly soul destroying sad, and so upset and floods of tears. And then, also, at the same time, I'm ravaged with feelings of overwhelming terror and anxiety, that's been ravaging me for at least a year by this point. And that's when the depression hit. I was so broken. I was crushed. I was devastated. I just gave up. I didn't have the energy for the fear anymore, and I didn't have the energy for the anger and the rage. I just thought I am done. And so I went numb. I started sleepwalking through my days and I would oscillate from feeling overwhelming terror that I can't get rid of to just crushing sadness and depression. And the worst part about it was that I had no one to go through my grief with because everyone in my circle of people back home had already gone through their grief because my friend had died a few years prior. So they already gone through it. So I was alone with it. And so I tortured myself because I didn't know how to handle it. My mental capacity was not in any way shape or form in a good state to be able to handle it normally or how normal people would handle grief. I was already crushed. I was already broken. And so I tortured myself. I was trying to get memories of my friend back and so I was digging out old photos and letters that I had that were in a box in storage. And I would play Pearl Jam's 'Ten' album, over and over and over again because that's what my friend and I used to listen to back in the day. Anything to just try to grasp and hold on to those memories still. And so I raged, and I cried for him for about a year. And then I noticed something. So while I'm in this deep funk of a depression and I'm thinking that the old me, that happy girl, that passionate girl with lots of tenacity and resiliency, I'm thinking she's well and truly gone and she's never coming back, like apparently this is my new reality, I'm just doomed to be living in these overwhelming feelings of fear and anxiety and depression. And I should also caveat here I didn't actually go for help either. I didn't ask anyone for help. I didn't tell anyone because I thought that that meant that I was weak and so I white knuckled all of this anxiety and depression, didn't get any help, which now in hindsight I look back and think my God I made life difficult for myself. But anyway, I suffered in silence. I suffered on my own. But here's the interesting thing when I was going through this grief; is that the rage that I started feeling for my friend, that pissed off, I can't believe that you got in a situation.... It actually started to help me. It actually helped me get out of my funk. I'm so mad at my friend that a spark lights in me and I start to wake up. And I want to know why I'm constantly and chronically feeling terrified. I want to know why I keep finding myself curled up on the bathroom floor shaking with these insufferable panic attacks. I want to find a way to pick myself up again and I actually think, losing my friend and being so pissed off at him, that anger and that rage actually lit that fire in me to start waking up again, because 18 months of grief and anxiety and depression is such a long time to be in pain, and intense fear and sadness. It's such a long time to feel so bone crushingly alone, and not understood. And so that's when I started to pick apart the life I'd built. Initially I blamed Corporate America. It's their fault. I'm working stupid long hours and it's totally their fault. I'm working 12 hour days, I'm working weekends, I'm working every freakin hour under the sun. I've got a $3 billion a year target for me and my team and if we don't meet those targets, I'll be gone and so will some of my team. So it's high pressure. I am working to accommodate multiple time zones with untenable workloads; it's just not sustainable for one person, but I've got to grind it out. I got to put everything I've got into it because I don't want to lose my job. I don't want my staff to lose their jobs. And I want to climb the corporate ladder because that's what we're supposed to do right? We're supposed to make lots of money and buy lots of stuff and buy the house the car and have the holidays, you name it. And that is what happiness is about right? And that was fun. I blamed them for a while, I kept working there, I kept blaming them, it's all their fault. But I knew that wasn't entirely the case. Corporate America has got a lot to be blamed for, they churn and burn employees and discard them easily without thinking twice about it, there's no doubt in my mind. But I had to be honest with myself. It's not Corporate America's fault that a scared people pleasing kid seeking approval, who turned into a people pleasing adult seeking approval came to work for them. Corporate America is the perfect place for someone like me with my background. I am a grafter. I will work my ass off to get ahead and get some of that approval that I wanted when I was a kid. Shower me with praise and give me awards and recognition and tell me I'm special? I'm going to lap that up like a cat who's got the cream. I won't set boundaries; I will let you walk all over me. Just so long as you keep telling me that I'm special, and you keep giving me praise and you keep giving me rewards and recognition and telling me how amazing I am. I'm totally your girl. I'm going to do it to that lap all of it up, just to get that attention. I'm going to lap it all up until I start swimming in a sea of anxiety, anguish, sadness, and intense grief. I'm going to lap it all up until I hit rock bottom. I'm going to lap it up until I realize that it's all bullshit. And I realize it's all bullshit. I remember being in a meeting in Madrid. I'm bored out of my brain. There's 30 of us Directors in the room and we're all talking about next year’s sales targets and what the goal is for the year and yada yada yada. It's the same song and dance that you hear every single year in corporate life. I remember being so bored and for some reason I looked down at my shoes and I caught attention to the shoes that I was wearing. And then the penny dropped...Oh my God, you are trading your health for your wealth, you are sitting here so that you can wear a pair of $500 shoes and you don't even care about this stuff innately. You do not even care about all this designer crap that you've been buying. You've been buying your feelings because you're freaking miserable. And that's when I started to wake up. I started to wake up from the funk I was in. I still had the overwhelming fear that was running through me. But that tenacious girl was on her way back. I started to unpick, pull apart and dissect every single moment of my life up to that point. I went to those dark places that I did not want to go to in my mind. I shone a light on all of the darkness, all of the sadness, all of the fear and I called myself out on my own crap. I read hundreds of books in self-help, personal development, neuroscience, philosophy, mindset, business, success to spirituality and everything in between. I took courses. I studied. And I put myself through my own therapy to get better again, and to build a new me. My ego was already crushed from the anxiety and depression and so I was a sponge. I was soaking up all the knowledge and I was applying it. I was not just reading and studying it. I was mastering it. I was building myself back up again to be a new and a better person. And that better person that I was becoming didn't want to climb the corporate ladder anymore. I don't think I ever did. It just kind of fell my way. I'm a grafter. I'm a grinder. I work really hard and so people noticed that. I didn't actually have to apply for many or if any of my jobs. I was kind of headhunted, hand-picked and kind of told you're coming up the corporate ladder. And so I did because I like that recognition, but in hindsight I looked at it and thought, I have spent 20 years of building a career that I do not love. All in the name of getting approval and I guess I'm addicted to the money. I'm addicted to the status. I like the name. I like the identity that I have cultivated for myself. But fundamentally, none of it actually made me happy. And that's why I think the panic attacks started. I had to wake up and realize that 1) the ladder that I had been frantically climbing was leaning against totally the wrong house; I didn't know what house it was supposed to be leaning against, but it definitely was not supposed to be against Corporate America's house. And 2) I realized that the panic attacks that I was afflicted with and that depression was like an explosion in my psyche. I had to deal with that scared gid that I'd been dragging around the world. I had to deal with that scared of kid that was people pleasing that didn't have any boundaries that was constantly seeking approval. I had to deal with that scared kid, and that's why I believe I started having panic attacks, anxiety, depression, etc. And so as I got better, the depression lifted. The panic attacks went away. The anxiety went away. And I built a brand new me. A happy me. A very secure me. And I quit corporate life. That was five, six years ago. I'm out. I'm done. I'm giving up the high paying job. I'm giving up the cool sexy title that I had. I'm giving up everything. I don't know what I want to be when I grow up, but it's not this. And so after I gave my four months’ notice and I had to work every single freaking day of those four months, they weren't going to let me go a day sooner. After I finished my four month notice period, still not knowing what I wanted to be when I grew up, I remember reading in the Financial Times I think it was, and it said that one in every three or one in every four, I don't remember the exact stat of employees suffer from corporate burnout. And I remember thinking, shit, I went through 18 months of absolute hell, holding it together, acting like everything was fine. And as I say, I deserved an Academy Award. You wouldn't have had a clue what was going on with my mental health. I remember thinking, oh no, I hid that so well, and if the numbers are one in every three or one in every four, that means my staff could have been going through it. That could have been my boss, it could have been my boss's boss, it could have been my clients, it could be my friends, it could be my family. It could be everywhere. And that's how I came to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. I thought, I hid it, and that means that I've missed the signs and everybody else's because I've been so absorbed in my own world of hell. I haven't enlightened anybody by hiding it. I haven't helped anybody by hiding what was happening to me. If anything I made it worse because if you'd seen me, I looked like I was living the perfect life, I looked the part. I acted the part. From the outside, it looked like things were going well and so I did a disservice by hiding it. Not long after that, I saw an ad from an event, and they were looking for people to talk about anxiety, depression, and burnout in Corporate America and so forth. And I applied to speak up at that event, thinking, I'm never going to get it. They hire New York Times bestselling authors to talk about this kind of stuff, they're not going to hire me. But wow, they did. So hey, go bigger or go home. The first speech I would ever do is in front of 500 people, and I've got to go stand out there and say exactly what I have hidden for 18 months. And I walk out on that stage and I'm scared. I'm thinking to myself, oh my god this is career suicide. You are never going to work again once you admit what you were going through. But I remember looking through that audience thinking one in every three or it's one in every four and there's 500 people here. So my people are in the crowd. There are people in here who are going to recognize what I went through. So I went out there fearlessly, and I told my story. And after I gave my keynote, I think it was an hour long speech, I was mobbed. I had so many people come up to me that I couldn't possibly talk about it with everybody. And they all said thank you, because you just shared my story. And that's where my new career began. I've gone from a place of hiding what happened to me with my mental health, and with the grief that I went through. I've gone from hiding it to now I want to scream it and shout from the rooftops, because I don't want people to go through what I went through and feel so incredibly alone. And I have no fear anymore. The new me that I built after that intense therapy of one, meaning I didn't go and see a therapist, I put myself through my own therapy by myself. Once you put yourself through that and you shine a light on that darkness in your life; once you have been in rock bottom, curled up on your bathroom floor, willing a panic attack to go away and feeling like you're going to die every single freaking day, you become fearless. Because nothing can be worse than that. So the new me that I created and built up again? She's awesome. I'm passionate. I'm resilient and tenacious. And I'm a deeply kind and compassionate, empathetic person. I think once you crush your ego - and I've talked to a lot of people about this who've done the same thing, once you are able to crush your ego, once you lose your self-confidence, once you get to that place where you think nothing matters and nobody cares about you, I think it changes you. It makes you a stronger person. It definitely did in my case. It made me a kinder and more compassionate and empathetic person. I was always kind and compassionate, but I feel deeply now. I feel deep, deep love for people. I deeply love the people that are in my pack and I will lay down in traffic for them. I freely tell people that I love them now. I no longer seek approval. I no longer fear rejection. My boundaries are like a fortress. I've thrown all of the awards that I got from Corporate America in the bin, in the recycling bin. They went years and years ago. I figured I don't need that ego wall and that external validation to feel good anymore. I am deeply, deeply grounded in who I am. I'm deeply grounded in spirituality. And, again, I'm going to go back to that soul crushing feeling of lying on your bathroom floor thinking that you're dying and that you're losing your marbles and you're never going to feel good again. When you can pull yourself out of that, you learn what the meaning of life is. Certainly I did. I came away thinking the meaning of life for me is no longer working every hour under the sun to chase rainbows that society is selling me. Now for me the meaning of life is 100% to be kind, compassionate, authentic, share my story, shout it from the rooftops, I don't hide a damn thing. And it's to serve people. And actually I now say I look back on that private world of hell that I lived in as being the best thing that ever happened to me because I came out on the other side of it a much better human being. And I now know the meaning of life. My meaning of life is definitely to help people and so for that I have to be grateful for every single thing that happened in my life. And I no longer need to dress and act the part. If you see me all dressed up to the nines and give a speech or I'm presenting in corporate workshops, and I'm all dressed up in the fancy shoes and a handbag and a cool dress, it's because that's what I'm expected to look like. Know this, when I am not in that environment, when I am not in a professional setting, the first thing that happens is I wash that crap off my face, my hair is pulled back in a ballcap, the jeans and T shirt come on and if I'm not in the great outdoors, I'll be rocking the house with my air guitar like nobody's business. Because, once you've been to that absolute soul crushing rock bottom, you no longer care what people think about you. And you definitely do not think about or care about what does not matter in life. So that's it. That's me. That's my truth. That's the real highlight reel. So, if you've got questions about my story, or if you want to know more, I'm cool with it. I am a total open book. I don't hide anything anymore. I'm more than happy to share it all if it helps. So if you want to know more about me and you've got questions, then drop me a note, you can find my details at my website https://www.itopiacoaching.com/ . Let me know your questions. If there's loads of questions, then I will probably have a guest co-host come on and asked me those questions and we can go through my story if you want, or if there's only a few then I can answer them on future episodes. Finally, I want to say this episode I'm dedicating to Ang, Adrian Umlah. That's my guy that I lost, because his passing helped me to find my fire again and so for that I'm going to be grateful. I love that guy so much. I can now listening to Pearl Jam, and I don't cry anymore. I know he's in a good place, which I can tell you all about that another time. And also, I want to dedicate this episode to all of those ducks out there. The ducks that are smooth and calm on the surface but are always frantically kicking their feet below the surface. Know this; if you are a duck, you do not have to kick so hard, and you're not alone. Take it from a fellow duck. I have discovered that although I'm very good at kicking my feet, I'm also a really good swimmer. And I have no doubt that you are too. |
CLAIRE ROGERSHost of the Boot Camp for the Mind & Soul Podcast Podcast Categories |
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