Changing the Rules

Dr. Mike Stierstorfer Website:  podcast.stopmyibs.com

Transcription:

Intro00:02

Welcome to changing the rules, a weekly podcast about people who are living their best lives and advice on how you can achieve that too.  Join us with your lively host, Ray Lowe, better known as the luckiest guy in the world.

Ray Loewe00:17

Good morning, everybody. And welcome to changing the rules. Changing the rules is a weekly podcast where every week we try and highlight what we think is one of the luckiest people in the world. So the luckiest people in the world are people who redesign their own lives, under their own terms and live them the way they want. And they're usually people who think outside of the box when they address problems and issues. And they don't, they're not constrained to the rules of life. You know, one of the things that we find is that all through our lives were given rules that we're supposed to live with. And we're given them by our parents, and then by the schools. And sometimes we get saddled with so many rules that they become barriers to doing what we want to do and what we need to do. And we have with us today, one of the luckiest people in the world, and you're gonna see that he just attacks problems in an entirely different way. He doesn't let himself be constrained by the norms. And because of that, he has successes that other people don't have. So, Mike, Mike Stierstorfer did I pronounce that right today, Mike? You did. That's amazing in itself. Okay. But welcome to changing the rules. And let me give people a little background on you. I found out something unusual. I live in a little town called Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And I asked Mike if he had heard about it. Then he said, Well, I have to go to school there. He went to Franklin and Marshall. So he knows more about this place than I do. And then he went from there on to Temple to get his MD and set up his own practice as a dermatologist, which is really interesting, because of the work he's doing is an entirely different area. And he's been on the staff at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital for a long time teaching interns, teaching residents, is that correct? Mike? Dermatology residents? Yes. Okay, so so he's got incredibly great credentials for what he's doing. And so let's start off, Mike with an event that occurred, I think, was on July 3, 2008.

Dr. Mike Stierstorfer  02:39

That was the exact day that it happened. And I remember it so well because it was a beautiful day, the day before Fourth of July. And I had lunch at a Mexican restaurant. And within an hour or so after lunch, I started getting an upset stomach, some nausea, and belly pain. And I assumed it was from something I had just eaten and that it would go away by the next day like things usually do. Turns out those same symptoms persisted for the better part of the following year, accompanied by some other symptoms that pretty much qualified for criteria that are used to diagnose irritable bowel syndrome. And that's where everything started. That day, I remember it well, because that night I was walking around, everybody's having a nice time and I'm walking around with an upset stomach, not too happy that I was missing out on all the fun.

Ray Loewe03:35

Okay, so let's take a minute and talk about this thing called irritable bowel syndrome. It's not it's not something we enjoy talking about on the air. But it is a problem that many, many, many people have, and is not easily diagnosed and solved. So give us a little bit of the background and then we're gonna go into some of the unique solutions that you've been able to come up with.

Dr. Mike Stierstorfer  04:01

Yes, so irritable bowel syndrome is extremely common. It affects 10 to 15% of Americans or 30 to 45 million Americans. And over 50% of those people with IBS report that foods aggravate their symptoms. It's been felt to be what's called a functional disorder. In other words, one of the in which there's nothing physically wrong. There are several criteria that make up the diagnosis of IBS. You have to have belly pain at least once a week for the past three months, once at least six months prior to that. And it needs to be accompanied by things like onset of the symptoms being associated with changing the way your stool looks either looser or harder. Also, or accompanied by the pain getting better or worse with a bowel movement and also, the bowels moving more or less frequently. Um, upon onset of the symptoms, so there's very strict criteria that are used to make the diagnosis.

Ray Loewe05:06

Okay? And the cure for this is a traditional process is you go to a gastroenterologist, and they have a process for diagnosing this, which is not necessarily the most pleasant thing in the world to go through right?

Dr. Mike Stierstorfer  05:20

Yeah, they pretty much want to rule out other things that could have a more detrimental long-term consequence to your health. They want to rule out things like inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, gluten sensitivity, celiac disease, things like that even colon cancer. So they want to make sure you don't have that. And sometimes they can do that just clinically by asking you questions and examining you. But often these people go through a lot of testing with various types of scopes, and blood tests and radiographic tests, even CAT scan. So there's a lot often that goes into the evaluation before they come to the conclusion it's just IBS. I shouldn't say just IBS, because it can be a serious problem, too. Yeah.

Ray Loewe06:04

So so here you are in an entirely different field. Okay. And unfortunately, you're having these symptoms. So what happened here? What did you do you know, what's the new way you look at this thing?

Dr. Mike Stierstorfer  06:21

So for the better part of the year, I had these symptoms, I had the big evaluation that didn't find anything. And finally, about a year later, I was trying to determine whether foods are playing a role I avoided gluten, I avoided lactose things that are known to cause GI issues. Nothing helped about a year into it, I got a lucky break, really, I ate Indian dinners at the same restaurants twice within a week of one another. And both times, my symptoms flared up severely worse than normal, but they're the same kind of symptoms I was usually getting. So I knew it was something in the food I was eating for the first time. And I knew it wasn't the Indian spices because I in general, don't eat them that often. And I was having these symptoms, on average, probably half the days. So the thing that I thought about because it's in pretty much everything we eat unless we're intentionally trying to avoid it was garlic. So I just stopped eating garlic. And literally the next day, my symptoms were completely gone. At that point, I felt that this had to be a new allergy to garlic because you can become allergic to something at any point in time, it doesn't have to be something new, repeat exposure, you could come allergic to it. So I set out to try to determine what type of allergy this was. I didn't really know much about IBS, I wasn't really interested in GI as a medical student, I'm a dermatologist. So I first tried a blood test that would look for a peanut type allergy, which everybody's pretty familiar with. And that test was negative for garlic. That's the same kind of test that the allergist says with a prick and scratch test. So that's called a type one allergy, that was negative, I still was convinced it was an allergy. And in Dermatology, we do a type of allergy test called a patch test, frequently for people who have a rash called eczema and we suspect that their Eczema is being caused by something that's touching their skin, in other words, an allergic reaction causing their eczema type of rash. So that's a different type of allergy than the peanut allergy completely different. It's called a type four allergy skin kind of allergy just causes poison ivy, and I decided to do a patch test on myself to garlic. And the patch test was positive I got a red itchy spot on my skin after leaving the garlic there for two days. So my thought at that point was likely the same type of inflammation I was getting in the skin from the patch test from the garlic was occurring in the lining of the intestine when I ate any foods containing garlic. So another point I should mention is that until the early 2000s IBS was felt to be something where there was nothing physically wrong. But in the early 2000s, inflammation has been identified and a lot of people with IBS, both with biopsies of the intestine and with blood tests that show that there's inflammation going on in the body. So most of the time though this inflammation, they don't know what's causing it. So my thought was likely this allergic reaction caused by the garlic in the intestine was causing inflammation causing the IBS symptoms. At that point, I wanted to figure I wanted to find out who else had looked into this. So I googled it and I found that no one ever investigated patch testing the foods for irritable bowel syndrome. So that's when I started with the research on it. I've done several clinical trials now that have been published. And the conclusion of these studies was that by identifying specific foods not just garlic-like but because to overwhelm 80 things now was in the studies up to 117 or 120 Different foods, that over 50% of people we test get either moderate or great improvement in their IBS symptoms by limiting the foods that they identify are identified by the patch testing. So this was completely new information. If you ask the gastroenterologist about food allergies, and IBS, they say they don't play a role. And the reason for that is that it's been taught to them because of other studies that have looked at type one food allergies. And there's another type of allergy called a type three allergy to but those types of testing are not helpful for IBS. So it's ingrained into gastroenterologists that food allergies don't play a role with IBS type four allergy testing by patch testing had never been done for IBS before. So essentially, those prior studies looking at the other types of allergies were like, barking up the wrong tree looking for the wrong type of allergy, you wouldn't be able to check my garlic allergy by doing a type one allergy test.

Ray Loewe11:06

Okay, so now we have a whole new series of ways to investigate a problem that people had. Now there. First of all, let's talk a little bit about your successes here. So you are telling me when we did our prep call about an 11-year-old girl that you had some success with. And once you go through that particular description, and let's find out what happened.

Dr. Mike Stierstorfer  11:35

This was one of the most gratifying experiences I had using this testing. This girl was missing school two or three days a week. And her mom somehow learned about this testing that I was doing. And later, she mentioned that she didn't really think it was going to help but she thought I tried she tried anyway, because it was such a desperate situation. And this girl was allergic to benzoyl peroxide, which is used to bleach flour and some cheeses. And she was also allergic to something called pining alpha, which is a naturally occurring chemical that's found in parsley, carrots, parsnips, and celery. So these allergies were identified, she went on to eliminate those foods from her diet and she's 100% Better, she hasn't missed a day of school. And her mom said that when the girl gets sick, she would make her vegetable soup with all those vegetables. And she said I was poisoning my daughter. So yeah, this is an example where like, for me, it was, I was lucky because it was garlic. It was something I could figure out by the process of elimination just from what I had eaten and what I knew I didn't eat that often. But something like pining alpha, you would never be able to figure that out just by the like elimination diet or process of elimination. So this is where the patch testing really becomes useful.

Ray Loewe13:01

Okay, so so we have uncovered largely by chance, because you were the patient, right? You had a series of issues, and you wanted to solve them for yourself. So how does this figure it out into where the medical community is going with taking care of IBS?

Dr. Mike Stierstorfer  13:23

Well, this is really very early. We're just trying to get the message out there to doctors and to patients about this. That's not an easy task. The goal is that eventually, we hope that the first thing that we've done with people with IBS is this patch testing before subjecting them to all these invasive procedures and radiographic studies where they get radiation and not to mention the cost of those procedures and then putting them on all these different medications that may or may not help at some are quite expensive. Some of them are up to $1,000 a month. So we feel that this testing should be a first-line option for patients with IBS. It's a very simple solution, it identifies specific foods, it's much easier to typically avoid foods found here than doing something like the low FODMAP which is a popular diet for people with IBS, which is very difficult to fall involve lots of different foods here with the patch so you can avoid one or two specific foods or three or four whatever we find and potentially get better. So the goal is that this will be a first-line option for people with IBS and save them a lot of aggravation, testing, and treatments that don't work and expense that goes along with it.

Ray Loewe14:43

and this isn't stuff that has to go through FDA approval and stuff because the tests are, are approved. It's just a question of getting the medical community to look at this as an option for treating and cure, right?

Dr. Mike Stierstorfer  14:57

So the tests are done with what are called compounded allergens and compounded. And these are considered medications by the FDA So, but because they're compounded, there are a set of guidelines using compounded medications for patients where they don't actually have FDA approval, they have to be prescribed for a specific patient and a patient's name. And they have to the manufacturing of these allergens has to be done by a licensed compounding pharmacist following what are called USP guidelines. So it's accessible to properly licensed doctors and other providers now, as long as they do it in a specific patient's name.

Ray Loewe15:41

Yeah. And what percentage, you know, IBS is caused by a whole lot of things, right. But when you look at the kinds of things that you're trying to address here is do you have any idea of what percentage of the IBS community or what communities are the wrong word, but,the problems that can be fixed by this?

Dr. Mike Stierstorfer  16:04

Well, yeah, you're right. IBS probably is caused by a lot of different things. But our studies have shown that a significant percentage of these people have these food allergies. In my studies, within the patients who have long-term follow-up, were getting an eight to 10 improvement on a scale from zero to 10, of about a third of the patients and moderate improvement or five to seven on a scale of 10 and another 25%. So I don't know the exact number, but I would venture to guess that probably at least 25%, if not higher than that conservatively, have food allergies that are contributing are completely causing their symptoms.

Ray Loewe16:43

Well, cool. You know, we're unfortunately, we're near the end of our time already. And I find it fascinating to talk to people like you because you think outside the box. And that's why you are one of the luckiest people in the world. You're not constrained to normal things. You know, you're thinking outside the box, and you're making progress. So where are you going to go from here? What's the next step?

Dr. Mike Stierstorfer  17:08

Well, I do, I do want to just follow up on that comment, right. And I do feel in a lot of ways that I have been extremely lucky to make this discovery really was a very lucky setup circumstance, I pretty much followed my nose. This was not an epiphany that I came up with. But it involves a lot of luck. To make the discovery IBS has been described since 1944. And no one ever before recognize this connection between this type of allergy type four food allergy detectable by patch testing and IBS symptoms. So the luck involved. The fact that first of all, I developed irritable bowel syndrome, some people may call it bad luck, but in a lot of ways, for many people with IBS, it was very good luck. And even for me that I was able to find something that relieve my symptoms. Also, it was lucky that it happened to be garlic and that I ate those two Indian dinners within a week of one another was able to make the connection to garlic was also lucky that I was a dermatologist and I had the tools and the knowledge and the resources to pursue this further. And was also lucky that it turned out to be a type of allergy that in Dermatology we deal with all the time, like for allergies, for allergic contact dermatitis. So there was a perfect storm of circumstances that created this lot that involve that enabled me to make this what I feel is a significant discovery in medicine.

Ray Loewe18:35

Yeah, but it takes some knowledge and it takes some effort and it takes some you got to follow the luck. Otherwise, the luck never materializes. So, you know, thank you so much for being with us. If people want more information, where can they go to find out more about you and more about what you're doing? And we'll post this, by the way in the notes on our podcast, so they'll be able to see it. But where do they go?

Dr. Mike Stierstorfer  19:01

Thank you. There's a URL. It's podcast.stopmyibs.com. And patients will be able to get and doctors get a lot of information there. And if they have questions beyond that, our contact information is available there on the website. So we're very happy to talk to anybody who'd like to discuss this further.

Ray Loewe19:24

Oh, cool. Well, thank you so much for being with us. And continue your great work. And maybe we'll uh another six months or so we'll have you back again. And we'll find out what's happened and where the progress has been. So have a great day. And thanks so much for being with us.

Dr. Mike Stierstorfer  19:41

Thank you very much.

Outro  19:45

Thank you for listening to changing the rules. Join us next week for more conversation, our special guest, and to hear more from the luckiest guy in the world. 

Alexandra's Website:  https://lightenarrangements.com/

Transcription:

00:03

Welcome to Changing the Rules, a weekly podcast about people who are living their best lives and advice on how you can achieve that too. Join us with your lively host, Ray Lowe, better known as the luckiest guy in the world.

Ray Loewe00:18

Good morning, everybody. This is Ray Loewe. I feel like the luckiest guy in the world today because we have a wonderful guest. We're going to welcome her in a minute to Changing the Rules. Let me remind everybody that through our lives, we are saddled with rules. They come from everywhere they come from our parents, they come from the schools, they come from the church, they come from jobs. The next thing you know, we have rules and rules tell us, you're allowed to do this, or you're not allowed to do that. So you don't get any freedom out of rules. So the luckiest people in the world are those people who have figured out how to choose from this set of rules that we've been put together and choose which ones work for them, and which ones maybe they want to get around. Every week, we feature one of the luckiest people in the world. We have one today and Alexandra Koys is one of the luckiest people in the world because she has designed her own life, and she's taking control of it. She's living it under her terms. So welcome to Changing the Rules, Alexandra.

Alexandra Koys01:28

Thank you. It's great to be here.

Ray Loewe01:30

You're out there in the sunny city of Chicago. Right?

Alexandra Koys01:34

That's right. 

Ray Loewe01:36

So you have an incredibly interesting background. But it was rather mundane, in the early years, you were doing what you were supposed to do, weren't you?

Alexandra Koys01:46

That's right. So it was quite different from the entrepreneurship path that I'm on now. So I started off studying foreign service at Georgetown University in Washington DC, you know, more traditional path that I'm on now. Right out of college, worked for Deloitte Consulting, doing primarily government work for a couple of years. And after that, I kind of followed the path to Blue Cross Blue Shield. At the time, the Affordable Care Act was being implemented and there was a lot of regulatory and operational work to be done in healthcare. I liked the field and liked the work I was doing, so I made the transition from Deloitte to Blue Cross Blue Shield. As you can see, I was kind of someone who took things one step at a time, followed where the path led me, and where the opportunities that were open to me, went. Someone who was very comfortable working in large organizations, having a stable steady job, a predictable role. Someone who is comfortable operating as one piece in a very large puzzle. A couple of years ago, as you mentioned, I took control and sort of dove into the world of starting my own business. So that has been quite a change, but an exciting one.

Ray Loewe03:16

You had salaries before, and now you don't have salaries, right. But that was a clue here. See, when you studied foreign service, we knew maybe you didn't know, but we knew you're going to be a spy. We knew you're going to take off on your own, it was just a question of time. So we had an event that occurred. The interesting thing about the luckiest people in the world is usually they start in a mundane kind of a thing. And it's not that they hate where they are. It's just that there may be a "I'm not excited where they are". And then something happens and that event creates an opportunity. So tell us about that.

Alexandra Koys03:58

Yeah, I would love to. For me, the spark for making the switch was an experience I had that prompted me to start my business. My business is in the funeral services industry. Were in the business of creating celebrations of life and transforming the traditional somber funeral home, or somber funeral service into an uplifting celebration of life. The spark for doing that was my uncle passed away. It was about five years ago. He was the type of guy who was always the life of the party. So the traditional somber funeral environment didn't feel like the right place to gather for him. My family and I gathered in his favorite restaurant and we had more of a celebration of life. But that was a lot of planning to take on, while we were grieving. It occurred to me after that experience, I realized that there really weren't services out there for families who were looking for a non-traditional environment or experience to celebrate their loved one. So I created that service.

Ray Loewe05:14

Most people don't think about this, they don't plan. I've had two interesting events that kind of play on this. I was at a memorial service not too long ago, and it was a pastor of a church. He was a friend. He died over the age of 100. I didn't know this, but he had planned his own memorial service. He had decided which hymns were going to be played, he decided who was going to be the singers in the group, he decided on everything. It made it a whole lot easier for his kids because everything was thought out in advance. The second thing is, I live in a place right now, it's a senior citizen community. A lot of people are here because they wanted to make their health care choices so their kids didn't have to make them. It's a similar kind of thing. All of a sudden, somebody gets sick, and everybody's got to run around and figure out what to do with us? I find what you're doing amazing. I never really thought it through. It just makes sense to do this. Tell us a little bit about how you help people plan. Then tell us about some of the events that you've created and how you do that.

Alexandra Koys06:36

I would love to. I love that example that you gave about your friend who planned his own funeral, memorial celebration. Talk about taking charge of your life. That's really defining your legacy when you pre-plan for yourself and define how you want to be remembered. So I love that. That's exactly what we work with families to do. We help them curate and design their own celebration of life experiences unique to their life, their identity, and their values. So I'd love to give a few examples of things that we plan to help paint the picture of the variety of services that we help bring to life.

Ray Loewe07:21

Before we go there, go back a little bit. When you are doing planning, are you doing planning with the relatives of a deceased person? Are you doing planning with the people that haven't died yet, and are thinking ahead?

Alexandra Koys07:34

It could be either one, some families approach us after a loved one has passed away, and others approach us wanting to pre-plan for themselves.

Ray Loewe07:43

Okay. All right.

Alexandra Koys07:46

To give a little bit of background about what our offerings are I mentioned a little bit earlier. We're in the business of transforming the funeral into an uplifting celebration of life, and we help families gather in non-funeral home environment. We offer an array of packages that help people gather in parks, theaters, museums, and live music venues, and we help them curate a unique celebration and a unique ceremony that celebrates who they are; which is often a unique fusion of their personal identity, cultural identity, and spiritual identity. Some of the ways that we've done that in the past, and one that comes to mind from a recent service. We planned a celebration of life in a local history museum and this was for a woman who loved art, culture, and history. We created a museum exhibit focused on her life. We brought dozens of items from her home into that exhibit. Furniture, she painted journals that she wrote in, clothes she wore, pillows she sewn, photos from her life. Each item had a sign next to it just like you would experience in a museum gallery explaining the significance of that item in her life. Another example is we've held a number of ceremonies in local movie theaters. We like to say that these are for larger-than-life personalities fit for the big screen. The guests are sitting in theater seats instead of sitting in funeral home chairs. The speakers are at the front of the theater giving their remarks while photos and videos are playing on the giant movie screen behind them. We've also done outdoors celebrations of life for people who loved the outdoors or want to be surrounded by the peace or the beauty of nature to honor their life. Those have sometimes involved; balloon releases or waterside ceremonies. We've done some really beautiful things that really helped surface the unique elements of the person who passed; their identity, and how they or their family want to remember them.

Ray Loewe10:08

You have a wide range of things here. Somebody can plan this thing relatively inexpensively, and have a party in their backyard in a sense. Or I hate to even think what it might cost to rent out part of a museum to display all of your work, but I'm sure that I don't have the budget for that one. But some people do. Okay. Yeah. I think it's interesting because it's the final thing you do. Otherwise, you're remembered as a date on a gravestone, right? So here's a chance to go wild. How did this idea develop? Go back to the death of your uncle a little bit. I understand that your mother needed help and taking control? So you got involved much more than you normally would have? How did you envision what you wanted to do? What was kind of the brainstorming that went through?

Alexandra Koys11:13

I was really thinking about what would my uncle have wanted? What is the atmosphere he would have wanted? Who are the people he would have wanted around him? What are the hobbies, passions, interests, beliefs that he had, that he would want to be remembered by; because, the alternative, what a lot of us are used to thinking of a funeral is, dressing in black, standing in a funeral home room, standing in a line and talking in hushed tones, and that didn't feel right. For his memories, we wanted something that he would have enjoyed if he were there, and he would have been glad to be remembered by those things.

Ray Loewe11:57

There's two parts to this, there's the planning piece, where you got to sit down and visualize who this person was, and what's appropriate for them. Then you gotta go out and get the venue, and get the space, and set it up. Right?

Alexandra Koys12:14

That's right. For our particular offerings, we have some preset and pre-ready to go, venues that we work with regularly. If they feel right for a particular family's gathering, or sometimes we develop custom experiences for families that want to create something from the ground up.

Ray Loewe12:36

So if I were going to plan my own memorial service, what are the things that you would coach me to think about?

Alexandra Koys12:46

First, whether we're working directly with an individual, or whether we're working with their family. We always start off with an open-ended question, tell me about yourself, or tell me about your loved one. What comes to mind for different families is a little bit different. For some people, it's the love for their career. For some people, it's the love of their family. For some people, it's aspects of their personality that they want to bring into play, or it might be a hobby. Different families have different experiences or different elements of their loved one's identity that they want to surface. So we always start off by getting to know the person whose celebration it is so that we can then take those and curate experiences or create events that celebrate those unique aspects of their personality.

Ray Loewe13:43

Then once you get this planning done, and you figure out what this concept is going to be, then you got to start to put together the pieces. If you pre-plan this, how does one do this? They sit down with somebody like you, get the plan set now, who knows when we're gonna die? Hopefully, it's a long way away. What do you do to pre-fund these events? Do you not worry about the actual event, you just kind of leave the instructions and then dump all this on your kids? Or what do you do?

Alexandra Koys14:18

That can actually be done either way, when it comes to pre-planning, there are some people who choose to just complete the planning portion now and leave the actual implementation of the plans, and the payments of the plan, for when they do actually pass. As you mentioned that could be one year, five years, 10 years, 20 years down the road, none of us really knows. Or there are some people who do choose to pre-fund the plan so that they have that money set aside already. As you mentioned it doesn't have to be something that is a stress to the family members when someone does pass away,

Ray Loewe15:04

So you have a website, and people can go to this website, and you have all these examples of things that you've done. So what is the website for everybody?

Alexandra Koys15:13

It is lightenarrangements.com. At our site, as you mentioned, there are examples of both our in-person celebrations of life. And we also have examples of our virtual gatherings. So another interesting thing that we do is we also help families gather virtually, this was something that started during the COVID era. But we're still seeing even as things open up, a lot of families choosing to gather online for that ceremony and for that celebration, because so many people, so many families are spread out across the country, or even around the world. So virtual tends to be a way that those types of families can come together in community for healing and for celebrating their loved one's life. We also hear that virtual can sometimes be a more manageable planning and gathering experience for people who are juggling multiple things. I had one woman, one client say to me, I am trying to work a full-time job, be a mom to my kids, bereave my dad, and I need help with this. The idea of doing this virtually is something that feels more manageable to me than in person. So that's another example that you'll see on our site of services that we can offer.

Ray Loewe16:44

Now you've built this business already, you have eight people that work for you now. So you're doing this for lots of people. That's where we are now. I think it's a great thing for people to think about. What about the future? Where are you? Where are you going with all this? What's the dream, what's the plan, what's going to happen?

Alexandra Koys17:05

The dream is to create the next generation of the funeral industry and to make Lighten the gold standard for what it means to plan and hold a celebration of life for a loved one. There are two ways that we're doing that. One is awareness. Two is modernizing the planning experience on the awareness side; it's about educating families and raising awareness that the funeral home isn't the only option. If that doesn't feel right for you, and you're looking for something more uplifting, there are options for you. On the second side of things, we're modernizing the planning experience. We do that with a blend of personalized care and innovative technology. So we currently have an online planning portal that allows families to make arrangements from the comfort of their own homes at any time that's convenient for them. We also offer video conference consultations and planning sessions. So that families don't have to come to an in-person environment as the traditional industry is run, they can plan at the place, in the time that's convenient for them and still have the guidance that a professional planner can offer.

Ray Loewe18:18

Well, it's a very interesting way of looking at a phase of our life that we're all going to enter at some point in time. You're a perfect example of one of the luckiest people in the world. I think you've showed the enthusiasm of doing something you love to do,  something you're excited about doing. Thanks for being with us. Unfortunately, we're at the end of our time here. We're going to have to have Luke sign us off. But thanks again for being with us. And again, the name of your website is

Alexandra Koys18:51

lightenarrangements.com

Ray Loewe18:53

People can get in touch with you through there, right?

Alexandra Koys18:55

That's correct. Our phone number for those who are phone friendly is 312-373-0847.

Ray Loewe19:01

Okay, thank you so much for being with us.

Alexandra Koys19:04

It was great to be here. Thank you.

19:09

Thank you for listening to Changing the Rules. Join us next week for more conversation, our special guest, and to hear more from the luckiest guy in the world.

Transcription:

00:04

Welcome to Changing The Rules, a weekly podcast about people who are living their best lives and advice on how you can achieve that too! Join us with your lively host, Ray Lowe, better known as the luckiest guy in the world.

Ray Loewe00:18

Good morning, everybody. We're here in our brand new studios in Willow Street, Pennsylvania. We're here with our engineer, Luke Cagno. If Luke weren't here, this thing wouldn't come off. We have a special guest today that we're going to introduce in a minute. But I want to take a minute before we start and remind you of why we're doing these podcasts. Every week, we try to interview one of what we think are the luckiest people in the world. Now, the luckiest people in the world are those people who have pretty much-taken control of their lives; they live them under their own rules, based on their own purpose and what they want to accomplish. When they do this, it allows them to live the way they want to live. They live more exciting and more fascinating lives. So we're showcasing somebody every week with a hope that maybe those of you who are struggling to find where that is for you. You'll find a role model here. And again, the name of our show is Changing The Rules. One of the things that we find is that the people who are the luckiest people in the world deal well with rules. You know, we're filled with rules, right? Our whole life. When we're born, our parents give us rules. Then the church gives us rules. Then the schools give us rules. And before you know it, we have all these rules that are trying to determine what it is that we do. It was Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, that came up and said, 'if you're living your life under somebody else's rules, you're not living your own life'. So there's a time when we have to sift and sort through these rules and decide which ones are going to be important and which ones are going to be the guiding principles for us. We have a young man here, I emphasize young, who has been all over the world, and who has certainly find out found out what's important to him. I want to introduce Phil Schwab. I met Phil actually in a swimming pool, believe it or not, and Phil is a fourth-generation missionary. So Phil, say hi to everybody. Tell us a little bit about being a fourth-generation missionary.

Phil Schwab02:34

Hello, everybody. My grandfather was an elder in the Presbyterian Church and taught a men's Bible class and did ministry for many, many years. Then my father after being in the Navy, just four years, he went to Japan with my mom. By then I was I was around. So the four of us, my younger brother, and I, and my mom and dad went to Japan in 1948. So I grew up there.

Ray Loewe03:03

So you were kind of preordained with where your life was going to go early, weren't you? You had you had a lot of direction. 

Phil Schwab03:04

Yeah, that's right. 

Ray Loewe03:04

Tell me a little bit about your early life in Japan. I think one of the things that you mentioned during our pre interview was that missionaries were very welcome to Japan after the end of the Second World War. So tell us a little bit about that, too.

Phil Schwab03:32

Well, the atmosphere in Japan had changed a lot after they lost the war to America. And it's like they were thinking, hey, you know, maybe the American God is stronger than the Emperor and all of our worship of Shinto and everything like that. So General MacArthur said to have made a request that 1000 missionaries come to Japan because the doors are wide open. So I think that's what you're referring to. A lot of people that were in the military, and fighting the Japanese, they had a heart to go and reach their enemies with the gospel. So that's my dad. That's what Dad and Mom did.

Ray Loewe04:22

So you were dragged along at this point, you're not old enough to make your own decisions, right? At age three. You were actually born in the United States?

Phil Schwab04:31

Yes.

Ray Loewe04:32

You're a US citizen that was born at a Naval Hospital. You moved to Japan. So I think obviously, Japanese is one of the languages that you speak.

Phil Schwab04:43

Well, I picked it up as a kid. I was three and for two or three years in the neighborhood, I played with Japanese kids. Then I taught English later when I was in high school, and it ended up that my students, who were university students, they taught me more Japanese and I taught English. Because I had to explain a lot in Japanese. So I picked up kind of a little grasp of Japanese, which I still have, but it's very informal and conversational. 

Ray Loewe05:11

I bet you can get along pretty well over there if you have to. So the first 10 years, or maybe a little longer of your life, was living in Japan. One of the things that you mentioned is that you learn to love the Asian culture.

Phil Schwab05:29

Yeah, well, it's almost like wherever you grow up, you tend to appreciate your surroundings and so forth. Here I was, most of my time with Japanese people riding Japanese trains to go to school, it was an American school we went to, so I grew up knowing English. But surrounded by Japanese, and of course, Japanese are very serious people. Kissinger once said that the Japanese are people that have no sense of humor. It's a very serious society. So I almost grew up being very serious, but I somehow overcame. I appreciate having grown up in Asia.

Ray Loewe06:11

So this set a structure for where you're going to go in your life. We talked briefly about your choice of college and where you went to college. So what formulated all that?

Phil Schwab06:28

I was having to make a choice, of course, and I was offered a full scholarship to a liberal arts college. At the same time, I felt I should start preparing for the ministry because that was what was on my heart. I wanted to be maybe going back to Asia or somewhere. So I chose to go to a Bible college where I graduated with a bachelor's degree with a Bible major. That's where I met my wife, actually. Okay. My wife is a missionaries kid, too. Her parents were missionaries of Bolivia. I was talking to her this morning and she said, [well, actually, we're both third generation. And then our daughter is a missionary in England working with young people.] So she was saying, 'I'm a fourth-generation too!.

Ray Loewe07:17

So we need to get her in here. We'll get the whole South American approach later. So you're done with college now? How did you decide what you want to do? How did you formulate your plans? Where did you go?

Phil Schwab07:32

Well, I actually went on to graduate school, a seminary graduate level. When I was there, I met a lot of Chinese that were overseas students. My roommate for a couple years was from Hong Kong. We got along very well. I don't know as long as time went on, I thought, Man, I, I relate well to these Asians. And if possible, I like to go back to Asia.

Ray Loewe08:00

And you did.

Phil Schwab08:01

I did. We did.

Ray Loewe08:02

So where did you go now? You were married by this time and everything. So where did you wind up? And? Where did you wind up? Let's start there. 

Phil Schwab08:11

We wound up in Taiwan. I was interested in a ministry with Chinese people. So we wound up in Taiwan with a daughter, three months old, and starting language study in Taiwan. So we studied Taiwanese full time for two years, part-time for two years, and got going on that Asian language. And then later, 10 years later, we studied Mandarin as well and spent two more years. Anyway, that was our start. We had to learn culture and language.

Ray Loewe08:48

So we have you down with four languages. We have some Japanese, and then Taiwanese, and then Cantonese,

Phil Schwab08:57

Actually Taiwanese, and only two sentences of Cantonese, and Mandarin. I like to tell friends you know, I've been in Asia so long now my English have some problems.

Ray Loewe09:09

We have English too. So when somebody becomes a minister or a missionary, what's the process? I mean, you just don't go to a foreign country and say, 'Here I am. I'm a missionary'. Do you get a sponsor? How do you do that? What what happens here?

Phil Schwab09:30

No matter what, how you go out, who you're with, you have churches behind you; whether you're with the denomination or you're in a big program with the denomination. In our case, our mission is interdenominational, which means that we have churches, from different connections that supported us. So you've got the church, sending you out basically; but, then you need to go through an organization that can lead you, and train you, and also accept you in the first place. Well, actually the church is fun to you. But the organization has work going on in that country. So they have a program going. So you come there, and they help you get the language and then get into ministry. So it's a combination of the church and the sending organization.

Ray Loewe10:26

So here you are in Taiwan now, what was your primary mission once you got to Taiwan? And what were your responsibilities?

Phil Schwab10:37

Well, twofold. I for a number of years, we were in what we call "church planting", which means starting new churches, and Taiwan, which is only 2%. Christian, today, maybe a tiny bit more, but there's a need for as we looked at it a need for churches. So we did that. Then toward the latter time, latter part of my time there, they elected me as field chairman. So I was responsible for about 60 people for a few years. Those are the two things I did.

Ray Loewe11:12

Then you were in Taiwan for 23 years. What caused you to go on next? Because next was Hong Kong.

Phil Schwab11:19

It was. The year was 1996. Our organization realized that there were a lot of openings in China at that time. I mean, China was wide open. It just happened to be really wide open at that time for people coming in to do medical work, educational work, other kinds of social work, working with tribal, poor, tribal people, all kinds of things. So our mission asked me to be kind of the point person, and the good place to be a point person was Hong Kong. I was trying to help teams get started in China. That's what I was doing for four years after we left Taiwan.

Ray Loewe12:07

Let's go back to these two places that you've been. When you look at your experience in Taiwan, is there any particularly thing that stands out as a memory, or a tragedy, or a benefit, or anything that you want to talk about?

Phil Schwab12:26

Well, you mentioned a tragedy. That's because I've shared with you we did face a tragedy.

Ray Loewe12:33

I cheated on that one a little bit.

Phil Schwab12:34

Our son Brian was 15. He was in the American School. He was a freshman in high school and doing very well in English. Of course, it was Americans school. But also, he was one of the best students in Chinese. He took Chinese as a foreign language. Just a regular kid, you know, he liked soccer and so forth. He was in a dormitory because we were living three hours away from the school. His dorm dad planned an outing, a camp out by a river. Some of the dads were there, and some of the teachers, and so the guys were swimming at one stage along the way. The people in charge didn't have any safety equipment, just plain old, what he called life preservers, and all that kind of stuff. Because this is like 30, 32 years ago. So, unfortunately, Brian jumped into this river along with some other guys. It had been raining for three weeks and the river was very swollen. Somehow he, he got swept away, and we were too far away to actually rescue him. We lost him and didn't find his body really for a week. This is a big thing, not only for us, but for all his friends, and colleagues that we've had there in Taiwan. 

Ray Loewe14:17

You took a tragedy and you're doing some good things about it. I know you have a campaign here to improve safety equipment, to make sure that that doesn't happen again. This an extension of your being a missionary, I think to a large extent. So anything else you want to say, that unfortunately, you have this in your life?

Phil Schwab14:41

Yeah. Excuse me. We have a daughter and a son. Brian and then Beth Ann was two and a half years older. If I could focus on the main thing that I faced in this situation was being able to forgive the school and the people that planned this thing. And basically, faulty planning, allowed this to happen, allowed the accident to happen. So I had a challenge with this. Just a simple word forgiveness, being able to forgive the school and it all happened internally. No, they didn't know I was struggling with this. But one guy was on the staff of the school said you should sue the school. And I just very simply said to him, you know, the Bible says Christians don't sue Christians. And it was a Christian school. And it was not intentional. But nevertheless, this was a struggle for me. I told God at one point, I said, I feel very bitter and very hateful here. But if you can change me, I'm willing to be changed. One day, as I was out walking, I realized that I had been changed by God. I never had any problem with the bitterness and the hatred and all of that for the next 32 years till today. And it was a miracle.

Ray Loewe16:10

So let's take a different approach here and go back because one of the things that we've found about all of the luckiest people in the world is one of the mindsets that they have is, is the fact that they work real hard to find their sense of purpose. I think yours might have been a little easier, because it was kind of you were born into it, to some extent. So what is your sense of purpose in life? 

Phil Schwab16:35

When I met you at the swimming pool, you asked me the same question. It kind of shocked me, I don't have people just saying, what's the purpose of your life? You know, the first time I met you, you know? I said I'll tell you, I'm a minister. The Catechism says, the purpose of mankind is to love God and enjoy him forever. That's the purpose of my life.

Ray Loewe16:58

It's helped you make decisions along the way as to where you want to go, how you treated your son's death, and everything. It's interesting exploring lucky people for a long time. It's amazing how many people have no sense of purpose or can't define what their sense of purpose is. So when you can do this, and when you can get a handle on it, it certainly allows you to live your life in a more fulfilling way. Let's go on here because there's more to your life than we've had so far. We're in Hong Kong, and now we're going over to China. Where did you live in China and tell us a little bit about the China experience?

Phil Schwab17:42

If you look at a map of China, and I like to call it the New England of China because China sticks up just the way the United States does. So we lived in a city called Harbin, H-A-R-B-I-N. A lot of people call it "Ice City", because it's below freezing almost half of the year. They have this big Ice Festival there every year. It's very famous. This is a long story, but this is where we ended up. We felt like people were interested in learning English, they were interested in medical teams, various social services we could provide. So a team of us, five couples, ended up in Harbin. I was there with part of that team for almost 10 years. And I liked it. You could ask the question: 'You've lived in all these places? Which place did you like best?' Well, I liked China best because the people, at least in that area, more disconnected from Beijing, the big cities. They weren't spoiled, like people we've been with other kinds of Chinese that were kind of wealthy and kind of first worldy. This area, they were just wondering why we had come all this way and all that stuff. They were very easy to get to know and so we established friendships that have lasted till today. In fact, I'm on a Zoom meeting once or twice a month right now with some of the guys we got to know there. I call one pastor there about once a month to and have a long conversation with him. So here I am. We left there in 2008. And here I am, all these years down the road. These are friendships that really meant a lot to us. These are people that appreciated our being there. It doesn't seem like any of the Hong Kong or Taiwan really necessarily appreciated our being there. Oh, another American big deal. But this that was the attitude of these people. So we just right from the word "go", we established close relationships and they were very good. They reached out to us. They were very open. So that was our favorite place to be.

Ray Loewe20:03

It's interesting you're still in touch. Yeah. 13, 14 years since you've been away? 

Phil Schwab20:10

About 14 years. Yeah.

Ray Loewe20:12

So continuing with your life, you now came back to the United States, right? So you're in of all places, Washington, DC, that had to be a big letdown for you after all of these other places, right? 

Phil Schwab20:27

In some ways it was, but in other ways, depends on what you mean, right? But we were invited, we were actually on loan to another organization, from our organization, to work in Washington, DC. And this organization's purpose was to minister to leaders in Washington, DC; so on the hill and in the Pentagon, and then also foreign diplomats. That's why we were asked to come, is with our background. And overseas for all these years, they asked us to join a team, a small team, to do various projects to help these diplomats to adjust in some ways. Also, if they were interested in studying the Bible. That's what we were really excited about doing that with them. But we were there for almost 10 years before we retired to our fourth country. My wife calls it Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And we love it. It's like country, we've been in all these cities. Now we're in the countryside, and we love it.

Ray Loewe21:40

Let's talk for a minute about being retired because retired by a lot of people's definition is you sleep late in the morning, you go play golf, you do crazy things like that. You're far from being retired. So what is it that you're doing now? And where are you? Where are you headed in the future?

Phil Schwab21:58

Well, I tell people, I'm retired but not tired. I was eager to, well, actually, my wife was worried about our moving here that I go get in my rocking chair. I wouldn't really know what to do with myself. But early on, we came to know the proportion of refugees here to the population is one of the very highest in all of America. So we ended up joining a team of people that were already working with forming welcoming teams for the refugees. We're starting a church that's trilingual. Actually, whatever is said in English is translated into Arabic and sometimes into Russian. This is moving along. But we're also developing welcoming teams that help families get settled, find jobs, learn to drive, all of these different things, that get the kids in school and all of that. I've taught a couple, a new family. They came with three kids, beautiful family from Syria. But what happened was the husband was ganged up on back in Syria. They hopped on him, took him away, and didn't give him anything to drink for two days. When they gave him something to drink, they brought this big cup of what looked like water, but it was actually Clorox. He drank enough down to really ruin his system going down. The US government is really interested in bringing in some people who have serious physical conditions, and we have the facilities here to help people like that. So anyway, that's, that's his background. I've enjoyed teaching the husband and wife English, but in this case, I had to start with ABCs and helping them write their alphabet. So that's pretty basic. But the kids, this son, who's in fifth grade now, or I think he's in seventh grade now, he picked it up in about six months. He was quite fluent in six months. He would sit down with us, this couple that was just on the basics, and he would help us interpret and so that's one of the things I enjoy doing very much. There's other practical things like I've already said that we help in developing these welcoming teams. 

Ray Loewe24:46

I could carry this on forever, but unfortunately, we're near the end of our time over here. I think our listeners are going to very easily see why you're one of the luckiest people in the world, in spite of the tragedy in your life. Because you found a way to deal with all of these things in a way that not necessarily make you happy but make you fulfilled. The track that you've been on is just absolutely fascinating, from China to Japan, or Japan, I guess to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. When you start driving a horse and buggy over here, then we'll know you're in your next level of your career. Do you have any final comments that you want to add before we sign off?

Phil Schwab25:39

That's a good one, that's hard to do. I think every day, all the problems you face you accept as coming from, we say coming through the hands of a loving God is how I look at it. So we can accept whatever happens and deal with it because he realized that it comes through that grid and we can survive.

Ray Loewe26:03

Well, Phil Schwab, thanks for being a guest on Changing The Rules. Thanks for being one of the luckiest people in the world. At thanks for being you. Luke, why don't you sign us off?

26:21

Thank you for listening to Changing The Rules. Join us next week for more conversation, our special guest, and to hear more from the luckiest guy in the world.

Ellen's Website:  https://www.nextactunlimited.com/

Transcription:

00:03

Welcome to changing the rules, a weekly podcast about people who are living their best lives, and advice on how you can achieve that too.  Join us with your lively host, Ray Lowe, better known as the luckiest guy in the world.

Ray Loewe00:17

Good morning, everybody. This is I think, a lively host, although sometimes I worry about that a little bit. But we're here in our studio in Willow Street, Pennsylvania, I have to get that right because we moved our studio from New Jersey recently, and we're here with our engineer, Luke, and Luke is going to make sure that all of this runs correctly, and that we have a successful podcast. So I want to remind everybody that the name of our podcast is changing the rules. And you know, all through our life, we're saddled with rules. And I remember growing up, my parents told me what to do. And then the church told me what to do. And then my school teachers told me what to do. And then I went to work and my job, people told me what to do. And there was a quote by a very interesting guy by the name of Steve Jobs. And you know, who we know from Apple his Apple career. And he came up with an interesting quote, and he said, you know, if you're living your life under somebody else's rules, you're not living your life. And so what we're introducing here in our show is some of the luckiest people in the world. And one of the things that the luckiest people in the world do really well is they sift and sort through the Bank of rules. We all have rules, we know we have to have rules. But sometimes we have to get rid of some that get in our way. Because rules tell us what we either have to do or what we can't do. So the luckiest people kind of sift and sort and make their own rules and make them work. And what we're trying to do here today is bring in another one of the luckiest people in the world as a role model for people who want to take control of their lives and live them under their own terms. So today, we have Ellen Quint, and Ellen, say hello to everybody. Hello, everybody. Okay, and Ellen has a company called next act unlimited. And we're gonna get into that a minute in a minute. But Ellen has a really great story. And it's very typical of what the luckiest people in the world go through. Because we know in life that nothing works the way we want it to work. And so the luckiest people in the world have found ways to constantly reinvent themselves, to stay on the track to keep themselves happy and engaged, and doing wonderful things for wonderful, wonderful people. So, Ellen, you're on? Why don't you tell us a little bit about your history and where you're coming from? And then we'll move forward.

Ellen Quint02:49

Sure, why don't I start with now, where I live, which is in, I'm actually talking to you from Morris County, where we have a weekend house, which is now our full-time house since COVID. Where I live, I live with my husband of 43 years. I'm the mother of two boys who are hardly boys anymore. Who blessed me with three wonderful grandchildren who are the light of my life. And just to provide your listeners with a visual because this is a podcast, and they cannot see me when I was young, and people used to ask me, What do you want to be when you grow up? I would always say five feet. Well, honestly, I never made it to five feet. And now, unfortunately, I'm heading in the opposite direction. So my goal now and if you mentioned I'm now the CEO of Next Act Unlimited. Where through workshops and coaching, I help current and since the retirees build their next act, as a matter of fact, Ray I am recommending to all of my clients that they listen to this podcast because I think there are some wonderful messages even though your target audience is not necessarily totally mine, you can be for yours is for everybody. I think it's a wonderful resource. And then I will tell you one other thing, my goal, my vision is to become the Dr. Ruth for positive aging. And I think physically I kind of look like that. And so

Ray Loewe04:23

That's for a short person and a powerful body. Right. And with a powerful mind. That's great. Okay, so let's go back into history a little bit. So your career started somewhere and you did a lot of work, I think for nonprofits. So give us some history and then we'll talk about moving into the dark side.

Ellen Quint04:46

Right. So to go way back. I earned a master's in community social work and spent about 20 years in training and human resources for a very large national nonprofit. And it was an Excellent, very fulfilling career. But the organization was going through some significant changes. And so in 2000, I made the decision to look outside to, as you mentioned, to what I call it, the dark side or the for-profit world. As you and I discussed this in the side, this is an area your listeners might be interested in because we're working with retirees, people who have spent their lives in the corporate world, and now feel, okay, I want to give back, I wanted to take all of my experience and go into the nonprofit sector. It's not an easy transition. It's something I work with people on all the time. And there are ways to be more successful at it. And in fact, in this time of the great resignation, there are many more opportunities and possibilities. But that's an aside, maybe we can talk about that some other time. So back in 2000, there was a similar The reason I read that there was a similar work environment, a similar job market, and it was labeled the war for talent. And as a result, there was much more openness to consider someone like myself coming from the nonprofit world for the for-profit world. And being one of the luckiest people in the world. I was very fortunate to be hired in training by Deloitte, one of the large professional services firms. One of which you know well, they right because she worked for one of the big four.

Ray Loewe06:21

I did. Yep. That was part of the dark side. You're right. So go on, Ellen.

Ellen Quint06:26

It was probably the big eight set or the big 16. Even this is is? Yeah, one of the evidence. I feel like I'm one of the luckiest people in the world. And it was a great match. Every day, I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge across the plaza of the World Trade Center to get to my office in the World Financial Center. And then 911 happened. And it was a beautiful, beautiful, I don't know if you remember, it was a beautiful, sunny, crisp day. Someone was coming to me my office, so I had to get there early. So I took the subway and I walked up from the subway. And everybody was standing there looking up at the World Trade Center buildings, and there was smoke debris flowing out flames flowing out. It was really like walking onto a set of a disaster movie. And I realized after that some of the debris because I saw pictures were bodies coming down. And I everybody was paralyzed. Everybody was just standing there looking. And I didn't know quite what to do. I decided okay, I'm just going to walk home. So I turned around and started heading towards City Hall Plaza towards the Brooklyn Bridge. And there was an explosion that shook the ground. And then everybody started screaming. And people were running everywhere. And I realized that it was the second plane had hit. I just kept walking over the Brooklyn Bridge and looked back. And now I saw that both towers were in flames with smoke coming out and billowing billowing smoke. And I was listening to my Walkman radio. I don't know if you remember the Walkman plugged into my Walkman, and was listening to the news. And the stories were crazy. Nobody knew quite what was going on. It was so beyond anybody's imagination. I kept walking home, got home, got up to my 10th-floor apartment. And I watched as the World Trade Centers disappeared in smoke in ash, they were there. And then a second later, they weren't there anymore. It was a profound experience that lasted a very long time because we continue to feel the repercussions of that. And personally, I felt the repercussions of that because two months later I was downsized.

Ray Loewe08:47

Okay, so you were up close and personal at an event that most of us are glad we weren't up close and personal with. And let's talk about your transitions from a couple of things. Because you worked from the nonprofit and a big nonprofit by the way. I think it was a Jewish Federation. Is that correct? The Council of Jewish Federation Yeah. So So you were heavily involved in a whole lot of nonprofit activities, you then went to Deloitte, a consulting firm, and did training for the things that you were good at, but a different career in a different environment. And then we had this event occur, and the event was not one of your choosing. So so how did you react at that point in time, because you had to reinvent yourself again? To keep going, what went on through your head and what happened?

Ellen Quint09:42

What I did was basically take some of the techniques that I've used with clients, which is to have them really take a look at what would be an ideal job to go for. Because I realized I really had a choice. I could go back to nonprofits and look heavily in nonprofits, I had a 20-year career doing that. Or I had a wonderful year working for a well-resourced, large profit organization, Which direction did I want to go in. And I realized that in my target in the center bullseye of my target was really that I wanted to work for a for-profit, well resourced, large organization. But the environment in New York at that time was really terrible. People were living with uncertainty post 911, I was again, being the luckiest person in the world was able to find a job in a large insurance brokerage, a large global insurance brokerage, I won't name it. But it was a great job title. I was executive vice president of learning and development. But it was a terrible job. And so a couple of months later, when Deloitte called me again and said, Would you come back and actually head the group that you left, I left as a manager, they want to come back and actually lead the group. I said, Yes. I said, Yes, I had to go. And I would be working again, adjacent to the World Trade Center. And at that point, it was a big hole filled with rubble. And I had to decide if I could go around that coal every day, and look out those windows and see what was there. But I decided, yes, and it was one of the best decisions I've ever made. Because then I had a wonderful, exciting, stimulating 20-year career at Deloitte.

Ray Loewe11:31

And then we had COVID, all right, so what happened? What happened at the COVID stage?

Ellen Quint11:41

You know, there's that there's an author named Bruce Feiler, who has written a book that refers to these events as life quake. And that's really what it felt like, you know, all these things feel like major life quakes. So yeah. So June 2020, I got the call saying you are being downsized. I didn't leave until November of 2020. But in that time period, between June and November, I decided to take my focus to take the experiences that I had in screening and facilitation and development, and do something that I've been thinking about doing for quite a long time, which is to create my own practice, my own consulting business of next steps unlimited, as you mentioned, which is focused on helping current and soon to be retirees feels their next step.

Ray Loewe12:29

Okay, and give us if you wouldn't mind a rough idea of, of age here, because I think it's significant. You could have retired, right?

Ellen Quint12:40

Absolutely. I was thinking of retiring in November, December of 2020, when I'd be turning 68. Okay, so I was left with 67. And yeah, so and to be honest with you, I was super old for being at Deloitte, they had the retirement age of the partners of 62. So I was a real gray hair, which I didn't have back then. But I was gray hair in that environment.

Ray Loewe13:09

Okay, so So you had to reinvent yourself a couple of times here, you know, you had your original career, you went over to what we call the dark side affectionately because it really wasn't the dark side. And then you, you had these two major events. And, you know, what I find is the luckiest people in the world take these events, we have them. They're part of life, we can't get away from them. Whether it's personal sickness, whether it's 911, whether it's a COVID kind of a thing. And the world changes and every time the world changes the luckiest people figure out how to get around those changes and make the rules work for them. So congratulations on that. But what I wanted to get to is, you had a number of statements that you made when we were prepping for this interview that I'd like to get on the table. And then we can talk a little bit about the new book that's coming, where people can find out more about these things if they want. So let's start out with preparation meets opportunity sprinkled with grace. Come on.

Ellen Quint14:19

So Ray, you as the luckiest guy in the world to speak all the time to the luckiest people in the world must have a book full of definitions of luck, or what luck looks like. So for me, this is what love has always looked like. And it's been my guiding principle which is luck is preparation meets opportunity. And as I've gotten older, I have realized it is also sprinkled with grace. So it's all your work needs to work of some higher power. meets opportunity. And as I've gotten older and wiser and smarter I've also really added on to that my third agenda, which is a quote from Thomas Edison, which is that opportunity is missed by most people, because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. And I have certainly found that to be true.

Ray Loewe15:22

Okay, now again, because time is getting short over here, you have come up with 10 principles that you use every day with your clients, to help them figure out where they want to go in life and how to help create other luckiest people in the world. So, so take a minute, let's just go through them, we're gonna have to go through them pretty quickly. And we'll understand we'll talk about your new book coming out. And this is where people are going to be able to really get into the meat of this, but let's start out with you are the CEO of you.

Ellen Quint15:55

Right, and by CEO, I mean, you are the chief, everything Officer of you. So, especially for people who have come from the corporate world, where they have had wonderful support that they don't even realize that they've had, all of a sudden, you are responsible for the whole ballgame.

Ray Loewe16:14

Okay, and you better deal with it somehow. Right?

Ellen Quint16:18

Exactly, which gets the principle to, which is get real and deal. And that involves with knowing your numbers. And that's not just your financial numbers. It's also your health numbers. So and you realize things change, just a quick, a quick story on that I always had low blood pressure, all of a sudden, at 67, I started having high blood pressure. So I had to really take all of these behaviors that I had gotten used to and now shift it. So it's really important to recognize that you change and you have to become very real about these numbers as they shift.

Ray Loewe16:57

Okay. And again, I'd like to probe into these but given our time constraints, I think what use it or lose it was next on your list.

Ellen Quint17:06

Exactly. And then that's to do with building muscles. And that's just not physical muscle. I consider luck, a muscle. And it's a muscle that you have to work on. Including a gratitude muscle and your mental and emotional and spiritual muscles. So you use it or lose it. But you got to work on them.

Ray Loewe17:24

Okay, so why don't you take it just give us the list of the rest of them so that we get them all in quickly. And

Ellen Quint17:34

I'm gonna do it New York City, New York quick, okay. So principle for downsize to upsize. Principle five, kill the loneliness before it kills you. Principle six. Pursue purpose to find fulfillment. Principle seven. Appreciate your time, affluence. Principle eight give give, but set boundaries. Principles nine, enjoy the journey, not just launch. And then principle 10. Plant seeds of gratitude, watch them grow your legacy.

Ray Loewe18:18

Okay, and if you do all of those, you're going to be one of the luckiest people in the world, Aren't you?

Ellen Quint18:24

Exactly. Exactly,

Ray Loewe18:27

you know, I'd love to spend the time to go into more of these, you know, I think I think we may have to have you back on another podcast? When do you think your book is going to come out and give us the title of the book.

Ellen Quint18:40

The title of the book is "The Top 10 to thrive practical principles to maximize the third third of your life". And as to when it is going to come out? Ray, you are working on a book, you know that there's a mystery involved in this?

Ray Loewe18:57

Especially today, right?

Ellen Quint19:00

So I would say in about a year. Okay, so

Ray Loewe19:03

you'll let us know, we'll have another session before that, probably. And we'll try and get closer to when the book comes out. Because I really want to know more about these 10 principles. They're tantalizing. And I can taste some of them but I'm not sure I understand them completely so so we'll come back and you know, just thank you so much for being with us and sharing a big part of your life with us. And your stories about the impact of COVID and the World Trade Tower, kind of a thing, and thanks for being one of the luckiest people in the world and sharing with us. So Ellen Quint. Next Act unlimited. We're going to list your website and everything in the podcast notes that we put so people can contact you. And just again, thanks so much for being with us and join us again and another week we're going to have another exciting guest and it will be another one of the luckiest people in the world, and Luke, sign us off

20:05

thank you for listening to changing the rules. Join us next week for more conversation, our special guest and to hear more from the luckiest guy in the world. 

Transcription:

00:02

Welcome to changing the rules, a weekly podcast about people who are living their best lives, and advice on how you can achieve that too.  Join us with your lively host, Ray Lowe, better known as the luckiest guy in the world.

Ray Loewe00:17

Hello, everybody, and welcome to our podcast, changing the rules. We're here at our brand new studios in Willow Street. We're here with our engineer, Luke Cagn0, who makes everything work for us. And thank you, Luke, for being here. And we're here with a great guest today. But I want to give you a little background before we start on changing the rules. You know, throughout our lives we're given rule after rule after rule. It started with our parents, it went to the church and went to the schools and went to our jobs. And everybody's got rules that they throw at us. And some of them are pretty good rules, and we want to keep them and some of them become irrelevant over time. But we have this body of rules that we have to get through. And I think it was Steve Jobs that said, when you're living your life by other people's rules, you're not living your own life. So we encourage you to go through the rules and pick the ones that are really pertinent to you. And we have today one of the luckiest people in the world that we're interviewing, and we define the luckiest people in the world as those people who take control of their own lives, design them to their own specs, and then live them under their own terms. And Dr. John Neely is with us today. And John is a medical doctor. He started his career as a pediatric oncologist. And you're gonna have to define that for us John and welcome to the world of podcasting.

Dr. John Neely01:45

Great, thanks so much glad to be here. So you want to know about pediatric oncologist? Well, when I went to medical school, actually, which was up in Hershey, you know, when you go to medical school, you're exposed to so many different things. And I for a while thought about surgery, I liked orthopedic surgery quite a bit. But what really caught my eye was taking care of children. And when I realized that I wanted to become a pediatrician. And I was influenced by some of the patients that I saw who were seriously ill at the time. And when I did my residency out in Minnesota, it was one of the bastions of teaching for pediatric oncology. And some of the very first patients that I saw there were patients that had serious oncologic issues. But it just touched my heart when I saw these patients, and I realized, for me, I could do general pediatrics, it's enjoyable enough, but I wanted to do something really challenging. And back in the day, I was encouraged because we were curing about 50% of children with cancer, which meant, of course, 50% were dying. So it was still a somewhat challenging and can be very depressing. But now we're up to about 85 to 90% cure rate. Oh, wow. So we now can tell most families, your child has something serious, we have a game plan for how to take care of it. And the odds are really high that they're going to be cured.

Ray Loewe03:15

All right. Now you told me while we're prepping for this, about an experience that you had walking down the street one of these days, why don't you tell us about that? Because that puts it all in perspective, I think?

Dr. John Neely03:27

Well, you know, I think one of the advantages for me of staying in Hershey to throughout most of my oncology career was I took care of a lot of patients and, and I didn't move away. So the odds of my running into them, and some of them I've are close friends with were pretty high. So here I was two years. Well, just before COVID I was at the Fulton Theatre. And they were doing the one of my favorite Christmas plays about the Red Ryder BB gun. And you know, and all of that.

Ray Loewe03:57

Cleveland, Ohio, right, yeah.

Dr. John Neely03:59

And it was intermission. And suddenly this guy comes up to me, who has I think two or three children in tow young kids. And he was probably about 40 at the time. And he comes in introduces himself. And of course, I didn't recognize him because I hadn't seen him since he was about 12. And, but I knew right away who he was. And I had taken care of him with leukemia. And not only was he cured of this, but he you know, we think about can you ever have children after therapy and all that? Well, he's living a normal, productive life has at least three kids of his own. And he just came up and said, You know, I saw you over there. You haven't changed as much as I've changed, and he wanted to say hi and thank me.

Ray Loewe04:45

Wow, what a rewarding career. So so it was all worthwhile. But you haven't stayed there have you

Dr. John Neely04:51

No, and to get to kind of your thoughts about what do you do with rules? I remember because I was the chief of the division of pediatric oncology and a colleague in surgery came up to me at a meeting and he said, What what's your plan for, for advancing and I said, you know, I want to develop this program to the point that it has grown beyond my capabilities. Because I'm very good at patient care and, and some community things. But an area that needed to be spiffed up was research. And I said I want to work the division to the point where it needs somebody beyond what I can do. And that's exactly what happened, I became, I knew that somebody else needed to take over and I was getting very interested in other parts of medicine and leadership. And I made a decision to step down from the Division Chiefship, I still saw some patients, but I started to focus on other areas of medicine.

Ray Loewe05:51

Okay, so what are they? How did you ever divert your career? And then one of the things that is important as you go through this is that again, I mean, you exude luckiness. You're our definition of the luckiest people in the world over here. Because you, you follow what's fascinating and motivating to you and you make things happen. So what are these areas? How did you find them? And where are you?

Dr. John Neely06:17

Well, you know, it's an it's kind of like a pioneering spirit. Because I think one of the rules that I've had to struggle with is, because I was always told as a child, you can't fail, you have to get, you have to get straight A's, you have to do this and that. And I've set myself up in careers where there was a high likelihood of failing, because either it was something so innovative, that it wasn't the time wasn't quite ripe for it, or I grew something beyond my capability. So I wanted to move on. So it's been very difficult to say, Hey, I failed, that was a success. You know, that's an interesting thing to look at.

Ray Loewe06:55

Yes, it is, you know, and that's one of the things that I've learned over life, too, is that if you don't push yourself enough to fail, you're not learning. And I have two different kinds of days. I either have a great day, or I have a learning day, John. Okay.

Dr. John Neely07:10

That's the way I'm with golf to by the way. That's an impossible task. Yes. So I've kind of done two things since then I, you know, the way people advance in my career is typically they move to a new institution, and then they do the same thing again, you know, they may advance in their academic standing. But, you know, my opportunity would have been to say, I've done pediatric oncology here, now, I'm going to go do it at a different institution, or perhaps become a department chair, which is a different skill set. What I did differently was I decided to stay in the same institution, but to switch a career within that. So I got very interested in some of the things in medicine that I found to be short-sighted because we are trained incredibly well to take care of acute illness. So if you have a heart attack, or if you are in an auto accident, our health care system is the place to be it's the best in the world. But if you are struggling with a family history of heart disease, or diabetes, or there's a tendency to autoimmune diseases, we don't do a lot about the preventative aspects or looking at the whole body as to how they're going to respond. Instead, we throw pills at it. And that's just the nature of how we're trained. It's the nature of how we're reimbursed. So I've spent a lot of time trying to understand holistically how people can bring their life back into balance by having their different systems in their body optimized for function. And then, because my goal is people should, and we always talk about life expectancy as well, I am looking for what's called a health expectancy, I want somebody to live in a healthy, active, meaningful way to the very end of their life. And then they have a relatively short period of time where they may fail. But issues such as cognitive decline, or chronic heart disease, or chronic lung disease, are things that we need to spend more time trying to prevent.

Ray Loewe09:16

Okay, so where are we with this? What are we doing as a country? And what are you doing specifically?

Dr. John Neely09:23

Well, I've joined several different groups I've learned. I've done some certifications in what's called integrative medicine, some of which is very helpful, and some of which is not so well proven. And one of my goals is to help guide patients to these are things you can do that might really help and these are some things that you should steer clear of. So I've done that and then I've focused on a specific area of integrative medicine that's got a stupid name, but I can't figure in another name. It's called functional medicine. And, but the gist of it is instead of looking at systems like we look at in medicine, we you know, if you go to the doctor, they always do this review of systems. How are your eyes? Our your lymph glands? How's your heart? You know, and all of that the systems and functional medicine are? How do you take in the most nutritious food and digest and absorb it? What are the rules for what you should be eating and how you should absorb it and how you should protect your gut is an important part for nowadays is how do you feed and nourish your immune system so that when you are hit with something like COVID, you have the best possible chance of fighting that off. And then another area that is important is the environment. What are we doing with environmental chemicals and toxins and all that, that we have to detoxify?

Ray Loewe10:51

So where are we with that? And what kind of support do you have to do this kind of stuff?

Dr. John Neely10:56

Well, this is the uphill fight in a way because many of these things are looked at in medicine as Yeah, we know that's important. But we don't have time for that we don't have we're not trained for that. And so I've spent a lot of time and I still do teaching fellow faculty members, fellow doctors about some of the principles of holistic care as it fits into standard western medicine. Now I have some interest in things like traditional Chinese medicine, or Indian or Vedic medicine, I have work some working knowledge of it, but I am not a practitioner of those. But I can help people understand when they're approached with, with some questions about that. I deal a lot with the Amish, for example, who are wonderful people, they are very common sense. And they but they also are interested in natural approaches to things. So a lot of my work with them is saying, we have some things in standard western medicine that would help you but I want to help you with natural medicines that could help things go better for you and help you boost your immune system so we can work together and integrate care, you're going to be my new doctor here John. Well, that you know, that's why we were talking that a goal. Yeah, it's been, wouldn't it be interesting to do some podcasting on these types of topics or even lectures, so, and I'm a teacher at heart, okay, I you know, I'm in an academic medical center, I still love to teach. I'm doing some coursework here at Willow Valley. And that's,

Ray Loewe12:31

well, let's make a commitment to do that. But I want to probe into something else because you also talked a little bit about communication, and how to improve things. And I know you're doing some stuff here in terms of teaching people how to communicate better. So talk to me about where you're going there. 

Dr. John Neely12:47

Well, that went back. And two ways with my medical career. One was, there's research out there that shows that the time between you go into a doctor's office, and they interrupt you, and don't listen is around seven seconds. So nobody ever has a chance to tell their story, their own medical story. And teaching doctors how to just sit back and listen and have the time to listen is so important. And the number of times in my holistic practice where I have somebody come in and start and I'm sitting there and starting to tell their story. And about five minutes into it, they cry. And they say you're the first person that has ever listened to me. So a lot of this is how do you practice listening? Now from the difficult conversation standpoint, that grew out of some of my teaching of leadership, what is the what are the principles of a sound conversation? What's the difference between a discussion, which by the way, rhymes with the same root word is percussion and concussion. So you can see that a discussion tends to be a back and forth, kind of a fight going on, like percussion or concussion, as opposed to dialogue, which in Greece means to flow through. So teaching how to listen and how to balance a conversation so that new ideas can flow through the group rather than just having a battle back and forth are the principles that I'm trying to teach.

Ray Loewe14:20

Okay, so here you are, you're in, I'm gonna say, a new phase of your career. I mean, you're phasing out of the oncology you'll never phase out of it. But you'll do less and less. And you've got the interest in preventative medicine, general health care, how do we take better care of ourselves, and this concept of dialogue, so where are we going with all this?

Dr. John Neely14:47

Well, you mean me personally. 

Ray Loewe14:48

Yeah, we're you gonna take this?

Dr. John Neely14:50

Well, I do see that at some point, I will fade out I would say, I call it a glide path out of my career, although I still enjoy seeing my colleagues and seeing some patients. But that's becoming less and less of an issue for me, and I just see myself working with some of these other principles. Now, again, I am not so inclined at this point in time to spend day after day seeing patients, because I think might be, I would be better, my talents would be better served in some kind of a lecture type series, we're going to be perfect for broadcasting in some way or another. And then doing some small teaching, the idea of having good conversations, I'm currently doing it with a group of about 21 people here. I would love to see this applied to virtually anybody on the campus, including team members and administration so that we can all learn to converse together and learn together.

Ray Loewe15:52

So I'm going to change your name from Dr. John to Professor John over here. Okay

Dr. John Neely15:56

You can call me the professor like Gilligan's Island.

Ray Loewe15:59

Yeah, you know, unfortunately, we're at the end of our time, and we're going to have to do a repeat on this because I think any one of these topics we could spend a whole session on. And I really am kind of interested in this. How do you take better care of yourself? Overall, as opposed to just fighting the battle of here's a symptom, let's get rid of the symptoms. And so let's make a commitment to do that somewhere along the line. And, you know, I want to thank you so much for being here. I think your career is a model for people. And I think it's an important model. You know, here you are you had your career, and most people stay in that kind of a career forever. I mean, after all, you're a pediatric. I'm going to stumble over my pediatric oncologist over here. But you're not satisfied with that. And you're moving on to new things. And you're still a young man. And as we I bet in another 20 years, you're still going to be working on this stuff. To the degree I can, I will be cool. So thanks. Excuse me here. Thanks, everybody, for listening. We've been with John Neely and Luke why don't you sign us off and we'll see you all here next week. Great.

17:11

Thank you for listening to changing the rules. Join us next week for more conversation, our special guest and to hear more from the luckiest guy in the world. 

Transcription:

00:03

Welcome to changing the rules, a weekly podcast about people who are living their best lives, and advice on how you can achieve that too.  Join us with your lively host Ray Lowe, better known as the luckiest guy in the world.

Ray Loewe00:17

Well, this is the lively host, Ray Lowe, and welcome to our brand new studio in Willow Street, Pennsylvania, wherever that might be. And we've got a great guest today. But before we get into our guest, I want to remind everybody that changing the rules is about the fact that all through our lives we're given rules, we're given them by our parents, and then we went to school in the school gave us rules in the church gave us rules, and our jobs gave us rules. And I think it was Steve Jobs, the Apple guy who came back and said, You know, when you're living your life under somebody else's rules, you're not living your life, you're living somebody else's life. And we're lucky enough that every week we interview one of the luckiest people in the world. Now we have a definition for that. The luckiest people in the world are those people who take control of their own lives and live them under their own terms. And we certainly have one of the luckiest people in the world with us today. And I want to start out with a statement and you're gonna see why it's so important as we go through. You know, just because you reach a certain age in life doesn't mean that you have to retire and that you're washed up. And in fact, many people when they reach a certain age are useful. And sometimes they're outstanding, and sometimes they're even become the best there is regardless of their age. So I want to do is introduce today, Candice O'Donnell. You prefer Candice or Candy?

Candace O'Donnell  01:45

Candice? Candice. I think Candy sounds like a retired stripper at my age.

Ray Loewe01:53

Oh, well,

Candace O'Donnell  01:55

I go with Candace,

Ray Loewe01:56

you know, you'd probably do that well, too. But we'll get into that one. Okay, so So Candice has a really interesting career. And her background is she's raised four children. Okay, not a small feat. While she was doing that she taught English at Elizabethtown University, she has always been active in the theater. And then she got to a point where she had a chance to create some projects that were of interest to her. Okay, and a let's and that started later in life. So So let's, let's tell everybody how young you are.

Candace O'Donnell 02:31

I'll be at in about a month 27th two months 27 of June

Ray Loewe02:37

And you know, many people, when they reach these certain ages, say it's time to shut down? Well, not Candice. Okay, so tell us a little bit about these projects that you created. And tell us about them in general. And then let's get specific about the three specific ones that you chose to put into life.

Candace O'Donnell 02:56

Well, as you said, I've been doing theater here in Lancaster for maybe 25 years. I've done the Fulton I've done EPAC, my favorite role until I started doing this. This one-woman show was Driving Miss Daisy. That's a wonderful play with a fabulous message. But I guess it was about six, seven years ago. I started doing these one-woman shows I had done small skits for the anniversary of the Fulton 200 and 50th anniversary of people who had appeared at the phone, one of them being Sarah Bernhardt. And so I started I had done a little bit on Carrie Nation, the Temperance leader I had done Abigail Adams, but I started going in earnest into these one-woman shows. I had always wanted to do Mary Lincoln. And I hesitated on Mary Lincoln because it was such a tragic life. She was mentally ill, and she lost every single person that she loved. Every single person that she loved was taken away from her. And I couldn't figure out a way to get into humor in it. And so I kept hesitating, because I thought can I put in audiences through 70 minutes, 75 minutes of hell, her life was hell. And then I remembered one of her funny lines. When she first met Lincoln. She was the belle of the ball and he was a country bumpkin. And he came up to her and he said, Ms. Todd, I want to dance with you in the worst kind of way. And then she said, and then he proceeded to do exactly that. So that's where I got a little humor and I developed that. And then I decided to undertake Sarah Bernhardt an entirely different person. I go for a through-line with each of my characters. The through-line for Mary Lincoln was much madness is divinest sense, which is Emily Dickinson. And was it the track it was a fact that she was mentally ill. Sarah Bernhardt entirely different story, my throughline for her was Edsp ofs. Riojan was not ago not at all. And Sarah Bernhardt lived life on her own terms. She was a survivor. She invented the casting couch. She invented the PR agent. And she invented the cougar. She was amoral, rather than immoral. She was a tremendous survivor. She continued to perform 10 years after her leg was amputated. And incidentally, she did perform at the Fulton Theatre in Lancaster. And finally, I worked my way to Queen Victoria. I had had a strong interest in her for years. And the subtitle there is he was my all in all, Victoria is about her obsession, obsession with her husband, Albert. And particularly funny because they had nine children, she hated babies. You do the math, you put it together? Why did they have nine children? She hated them. So that's how I got into these. And I've really enjoyed them.

Ray Loewe06:03

Okay, well, I'm sorry, you don't have any passion for any of these at all. But you know, I think what does it take to do this? So let's go back to the first one to Mary Todd Lincoln. First of all, you had to make the decision that this was a character that you were going to bring to life. Okay. And so what did you have to do? I mean, because you wrote the script, right?

Candace O'Donnell  06:29

You I, it takes me about two to three years to research each person. And, but it's, it's amazing. Ray, the, the through-line comes to you almost instantly, at least it did to me when you see what the glue of this character is what you're going to emphasize. Now, another writer might not emphasize it. But then your research all falls into place. And

Ray Loewe06:56

okay, so you write the script, you're starting two years ahead of before you're going to deliver this Right, correct. And you got to go where do you find the background data on these people?

Candace O'Donnell  07:07

There, you're gonna really be surprised at this. It shows you what a low-tech dinosaur I am. I get it out of books. You've heard of books, B. O. O. K. S. I do not get online. Most people today would do their research online.

Ray Loewe07:23

Yeah. You know, we have our engineer here, who is college age, you know, and I think he's a digital book guy. Oh, is he? okay. Well, maybe not. Maybe he knows what a book is. Okay, You read books in college? Yeah, he did. Okay, so you dig in, and you've got two years of finding a character? Have you ever started on any and then found out halfway through that you couldn't get enough material and you killed the character?

Candace O'Donnell 07:48

No, I'm a little bit too cautious a person for that? I wouldn't. I'm usually interested in the character and know something about the character. And also I use films and plays as my sources too. I know enough about the character that I have yet to launch into one and thought, oh, no, this is actually a boring character. In fact, the more I researched them, the more fascinating they become.

Ray Loewe08:13

Okay, so So you start digging into this and you got this two-year process and you're writing your own script? Yeah. Okay. Which probably helps you memorize the script. Okay, and now you're going to deliver this. Okay, so how do you deliver this do you need to get sponsors for this as something that you go to somebody and do a trial.

Candace O'Donnell  08:38

I'm really glad you asked me that question, because it gives me a chance to pay tribute to Betsy Hurley of the Lancaster Literary Guild, and I haven't been asked that question before. She's the person who got me into the Ware Center with Mary Lincoln. Okay, and once those were very successful, and then I didn't have trouble getting into the Ware center after that. Most of them the more sellouts. My difficulty was COVID. You know, I had a delay of several well, all told this production was delayed four years because of COVID.

Ray Loewe09:16

Okay, so this is why Candice is one of the luckiest people in the world. I want you to think about this as our listeners here. Okay, so she took on a project several years ago, she knew it was going to take several years to do this. She ran into the COVID barrier most other people use as an excuse to quit, but not here. We were going to deliver this and we're gonna get into a couple of other things later as we go. So all of a sudden, Mary Todd Lincoln appeared on the stage, and you have a script. And do you have any plans to do anything with that script? Now that you've given the character life?

Candace O'Donnell  09:55

You mean Mary Todd Lincoln? Yeah. I've been asked to do a program here at Willow Valley and what I sometimes do with my programs, I'll do 20 minutes of Mary Lincoln. I'll do 20 minutes of Sarah Bernhardt. I'll do 20 minutes of Queen Victoria. I'm developing that now.

Ray Loewe10:14

Okay, so you've finished, Mary Todd. She's now alive. Okay. Yes. And now you sat there and you said, Okay, what's next? You didn't stop. Right? So how did you get the drive to go on to the next one? 

Candace O'Donnell 10:34

I, because I'm an incorrigible ham. That's what my husband would tell you. Okay, that's where I get the drive. Okay, I have to admit it.

Ray Loewe10:42

Well, this is where the passion meets the excellence, though, so go ahead.

Candace O'Donnell 10:47

Well, that's what motivates me. But also, right, I really get passionate about these women. That's why I don't choose anybody that I don't admire. I see their foibles. We all have our foibles. But I couldn't do it fair, if I were doing man, I couldn't do Trump because I wouldn't, I couldn't admire him enough to do him, okay, I admire all these women. And the more I know about them, the more I see the hell they went through in various ways, and they triumphed over it. So it's not at all hard to motivate myself to do this. It was hard to keep the faith during COVID. With all the delays, like um, and of course, as you and I discussed, I'm getting older. So I'm wondering if I'm gonna go into dementia. Oh, and by the way, I'm losing my balance. I take the balance classes here at Willow Valley. So I won't fall down on stage. Okay. So you're wondering, you are wondering, is the body is the mind going to fail me. And you just sort of leap out in faith,

Ray Loewe12:00

but you didn't give up? And it worked.  So let's talk about being queen. Okay. So I met you when you were going into this role of Queen of the empire Victoria. Okay. And, to tell you the truth, when I met you, I went to your performance with some trepidation. I mean, I'm sitting there saying, you know, can I sit through an hour plus of this? And I'll tell you, I was wrapped for 75 minutes, I don't think I moved in my seat, and to your little heart and to get me to do that. This is not me. I you know, so you know, you're an athlete. So you did something special here. And, it was a wonderful performance, and you brought this character to life. And I could just see in your eyes and your, the way you moved on stage that you are not you that don't you are Queen, Victoria. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about putting this one together. Because you had to start two years ago, you'd already done a couple of these. So you knew you could do it. Yeah. But now you started asking these questions in one of the things that you told me was about two weeks before you were gonna give this guess what, what happened?

Candace O'Donnell 13:12

Really, really nasty cough? And, of course, immediately tested for COVID. No, it wasn't COVID chest X-ray, is it pneumonia. And that was frightening I, people, I don't get frightened by performing because as I already confessed, I'm a ham I love to perform. But this cough frightened me. Because I was really terrified that I would not be able to deliver the performance. I was thinking of some other actresses I've worked with, but that was too late for them to memorize a 70-minute script. And I remember my daughter, saying, Mom, well, you may just have to give up on this. And she said I said, Well, I'm, you know me. I'm not giving up at this point. Don't you know my personality? And she said, Well, would you rather die mom? And I said yes. Yes. I would rather die than have to call Keegan my granddaughter was in the show introducing it. She's a temple, a student at Temple called Keegan and say, Keegan, we're not doing it. I would. So that was our big family joke. Mom would rather die than not do it so. As you know, you were there. Well, I was coughing right before I went out, I had to sucrets, I had tea. But now this, you said I'm the luckiest person in the world. And you are and I am and we are but that this was also a blessing. Because I absolutely believe this was God. I mean, I go out there and I'm not coughing. It's unbelievable to me, nor did I fall down on stage. 

Ray Loewe14:39

And the show must go on. The show must go on. So I think this is a message that I want our listeners to get across. Most of us during our lives, put off projects that we want to do because life gets in the way. You know, here you were. You're raising four kids. You're teaching English. You know you're doing all of these things and then somewhere along the line, I think this germ woke up in your head and said, this has been there for a long time I have to do this.

Candace O'Donnell  15:09

Yeah. It's, it's, I think, if you have a particular passion, you almost have it from the womb.

Ray Loewe15:17

And it's never too late to do that. And even at your stage of the game, when you are worried about health issues and things like that, guess what? You know everything falls in place, it was no problem. You got it done.

Candice O'Donnell  15:32

I was flabbergasted by it myself. Oh, I want to say one other thing, because there were so many Willow Valley people in the audience, I had two very sharp audiences, you being one of the members of the audience, who were completely with me, and you can tell that when you step out on stage, you can feel the button. You know, Bruce Springsteen, performing as an exchange of energy between the audience and the performer. You can tell when they're with you, they were laughing ahead of my jokes. That before I got to my punch line, they were laughing. I thought, Oh, boy.

Ray Loewe16:10

Well, you know, what was the gift? Well, when we had to stand up and sing God, save the queen, and do the royal wave to greet you in there. I mean, you had us at the beginning. But I think this is a really good lesson for people because here you are. And I'm going to predict you're going to do another one. I have no idea what it might be.

Candace O'Donnell  16:30

My husband will kill me but yeah, we can all see I'm incorrigible.

Ray Loewe16:33

And the other thing that you're doing here is you're creating scripts, that maybe somebody else will do not as well as you do, but they'll do it at some point in time. And, and the research that you've done is just phenomenal projects. And I think you're to be congratulated for doing that. And I think it just makes you younger and younger and younger. So there all right, it keeps you going forward. Okay, so, unfortunately, we're near the end of our time here. So it's flies. Do you have any, any parting comments, any words of wisdom to anybody who wants to do these things? Or anything for the good of mankind?

Candace O'Donnell  17:12

Well, I just want to say I am hoping to eventually sell the scripts so that they will live on after me. Again, you may think I sound like a religious fanatic here. If you can get the guts to get out there and do it. Something in my case, I believe it was God, but something will see you through. Don't be afraid to try.

Ray Loewe17:39

And with that, I don't think there's anything more to say. So Luke is our engineer here at Willow Valley. So Luke, sign us off, please.

17:52

Thank you for listening to changing the rules. Join us next week for more conversation, our special guest and to hear more from the luckiest guy in the world.

Podcast Guest:  Sarah Brown

Sarah's Website: https://bookofyou.com/

Sarah's Online Course:  https://knowthyselfacademy.com/

Transcription:

Kris Parsons00:02

Welcome to changing the rules, a weekly podcast about people who are living their best life and how you can figure out how to do it too! Join us with your lively host, Ray Lowe, better known as the luckiest guy in the world.

Ray Loewe00:19

Everyone, this is Ray Lowe, host of Changing the Rules. Changing the Rules is a podcast. We're now in our 100 plus episode about how people change the rules to live better lives. And every week we try and host someone who we think is one of the luckiest people in the world on our show. The luckiest people in the world, by our definition, are those people who redesign their own lives personally, to meet their specs. Then they step into them and live them under their own terms. The luckiest people in the world have a number of mindsets that they have to have in order to to take control of their lives. We're going to talk about a couple of them today because we have a great guest, Sarah Brown. It's actually Dr. Sarah Brown. We'll get into that in a minute. Sarah and I met each other several years ago and Sarah actually was a speaker at one of the conferences that I ran. Her comments about her "Book of You" just resonated so well with our audience that we wanted to have a chance to get back with her and find out what's changed over the years. Sarah is an executive coach. She is an author. She is a Ph.D. She has some interesting studies in her background. I think her undergraduate degree is, and of all things, mathematics. Sarah, is that true? 

Sarah Brown02:01

That is true. 

Ray Loewe02:03

Take a minute and tell us about your Ph.D., because I have no idea what you're talking about when we get to this. It's just good, right?

Sarah Brown02:13

So my Ph.D. is in a field called psychoeducational processes, which is a combination of group psychology and adult learning. The practical application of that in business is in the field of organization development or change management. In other words, how do we help people change as technology and work changes. And that's what I did for that. Talent management is what I did for the last 30 years of my career.

Ray Loewe02:44

Okay, so now you have changed your life, right? You went out on your own, you design your own life. That's why we know you're one of the luckiest people in the world. I think you're living under your own terms and you're doing some really good stuff for other people in the process of doing it. So I want to go back about three or four years to this presentation you gave us on the "Book of You". Tell us a little bit about why you designed the "Book of You" and what it does for people. Then we're going to get into the evolution a little bit later. So let's go back a few years.

Sarah Brown03:22

Okay. Well, the genesis of the "Book of You" came from a problem I saw in the last five years of my corporate career, I was managing director with Accenture. I was observing a phenomenon. Among my clients are inside Accenture, and other big consulting firms, and generally in my community. It was the vast number of mid-career professional women who were unhappy in their jobs. They couldn't answer the question about what would make it better. What did they actually want. And if you don't know what you want, you're unlikely to get it. So the problem that I initially set out to tackle when I retired from Accenture was coming up with the tools and the techniques to help people get very clear about what it is they want. The "Book of You" is designed to do that. It is based off of a world-renowned assessment called the Burkman method. It helps an individual identify their interests, their passions, their behavioral strengths, and more importantly, their motivational needs. In other words, what kind of environment allows them to minimize stress so that they can contribute their interests and their strengths to the greater good? That's what the "Book of You" is all about. It plays back for an individual, what his or her interests, strengths, and needs are. Then it embodies that in a coaching process that he or she can go through to actually get clear about what to do. How can you be happier and more successful in life, if you take into account what your passions are, what your strengths are, and more importantly, what environment will keep you out of stress? So the "Book of You" is basically a coach and a book, customized to you with information all about your unique personality, and some tips on how you can be happy, successful, and better understood, vocationally or in life.

Ray Loewe05:30

Okay, so I certainly understand that knowing what you want is the key to this. If you have no clue as to what you want, you're going to end up somewhere else, right? Now you take people through the "Book of You". Let's assume that you're always successful because you always are right. All of the people that do this, all of a sudden wake up one day, and they say, "I know what I want". So now, what do you do about it?

Sarah Brown06:02

Well, knowing what you want is step one, taking action on it is step two. So what I have put in place is how you can begin to take action on it and some tools. So if, Ray, if you go back to what fundamentally needs to be in place for anybody to change, it's three steps: awareness, motivation, and functioning capability. So the awareness piece is who are you? And what do you want? The motivation piece is getting what you want. Then the functioning capability piece are the tools to actually take action on it. So that's what I'm focused on right now is really working on those tools to help people take action to get what they really want.

Ray Loewe06:57

Let's go back to knowing what you want first. I think I have known what I want 47 million times in my life, because I think we have to realize that things change over time. It would be great if we didn't have this thing called maintenance in life, where we actually have to maintain things. So in your coaching process, or your design process, or whatever it is, how do you stress to people that, yeah, this is great, you figured out what you want. And guess what the world is going to clobber you in ahead a couple times. Some things are going to need to be changed. How do you handle that?

Sarah Brown07:36

Well, you handle it two ways. One is you be open to evolution around how you can bring your interests and strengths to new goals. So each situation you encounter in life is going to give you feedback on are you on the right path or not. Part one is being flexible enough in your goals that you can shift them. But doing so in alignment with what your interests and strengths are. Because if you pick a goal that is totally out of the realm of what you care about, you're not likely to be happy going at it, you might be successful, but you won't be happy. For example, if you don't like numbers, you're probably not going to be happy as a financial planner, you might be successful at it if you really work hard, but you're unlikely to be happy. It is being flexible on your goals and making sure they're in alignment with who you really are. Step two is taking action on it and dealing with obstacles, and obstacles are going to come up. It's just a part of life. The interesting thing about obstacles is that we can't usually tackle them on our own. It's building the support structure around us so that when obstacles come up, we can work them out with another individual who knows and cares about us; and figure out is it giving us feedback on we need to change our goals? Is it giving us feedback on we need a new path towards our goals? Or do we just need encouragement and resolution to keep plowing through that obstacle? So that would be my answer to your question.

Ray Loewe09:26

I like this word accountability that you kind of stuck in there a little bit. I know in my life, it's so happy, because it's so important because nothing happens if I'm not accountable to somebody else. Let's talk for a minute about the need for others because I think you said that you can't do this by yourself.

Sarah Brown09:50

Correct. It's been my experience that individuals don't actually get clear, really clear, about what it is they want. And don't find ways around obstacles in a really effective manner. Unless they work it out and talk it out with somebody that they know. Somebody that knows and cares about them. That's one of the values of the coaching process, but you don't need a trained coach to perform that function. You just need somebody who knows and cares about you, and can help you clarify, is this really what you want? And how do you address this particular obstacle? What is the obstacle telling you? Is it helping you to refine your goal? Is it telling you need to find a new path? Or do you just need encouragement to get through it?

Ray Loewe10:42

Okay, let's go back three or four years, we had this thing called COVID. Everybody's favorite topic, right? We had a lot of people who were on a path before that. What have you noticed has happened to the people that you coach or the people who read your book? In terms of this rather momentous change that took place and how did it affect the way they think about the "Book of You"? The way they think about their lives and about where they're going?

Sarah Brown11:19

COVID was just an obstacle that got in the way. It has helped people to reevaluate what they want. It has gotten them to reevaluate the path to get what they want. It has presented obstacles that they got to plow through with the help of everybody else. So I'll give you a case in point from my own life. It has not caused me to change my goal of helping and empowering women, that's really where I am still focused. But what it did do was to say, I need to do it more virtually. That enabled me and allowed me and pushed me to develop more virtual offerings. So I have virtual public offerings right now. I am doing virtual corporate training right now and my coaching was always primarily virtual. So that has enabled me, that COVID actually was the impetus to pivot a little bit my path towards my goal. It's actually been beneficial in that it serves my needs as well. I'm not real wild about traveling, so it has enabled me to really cut back on travel, which has been good for me. Now, the third point, figuring all of this out, I had to work this out with another human being. In my case, the other human being is my accountability partner, who I was actually meeting with virtually any way. I have met with her at 9:30 every morning for three years. And so I balanced all of these ideas as I was thinking about them off her and actually refine them.

Ray Loewe13:17

We had a positive change here. Wherever you sit, you're saying, Wow, COVID disaster, people are dying from this. That's a shame. I mean, we don't want anybody to die from anything. It really did cause us to assess the way we do business, assess what we want. So here's the book, have you changed fundamentally at all because of what you've gone through?

Sarah Brown13:39

I am in the process. I actually have completely updated the "Book of You". It has become even more robust than it was before. It still contains the detailed information all about you, but it is even more detailed. It still contains a 30-day process to work this through with someone who knows and cares about you. So it retains all of that, but I have made it more robust.

Ray Loewe14:11

You made a comment about your travel and stuff like that. Let me bring in another example. I had a young lady, who was a filmmaker, on our podcast a while ago. She rolled out a film this year. It was a film about aging, and it was good enough that PBS picked it up. It all started with her grandmother and said I have to get her on film because nobody will believe that this 97-year-old works out every day. So she did. In rolling out the film, she said the amazing thing about this thing with COVID was that I got this film rolled out all over the world; all over places where I just never could have gotten because of the cost, because people wouldn't pay to fly me at all. Yet we did these virtual rollouts. So when we think about the changes that occur, I mean, what do you see happening? Are we virtual now for the rest of our lives?

Sarah Brown15:13

I don't think we'll ever be going back to the degree of face-to-face, at least face-to-face that required travel that we had before. I think that's probably a good thing for the planet, a good thing for people. Travel for work is hard. It's hard work. And the more we can substitute virtual interactions like this, the better off I think we're going to be from that perspective. That being said, there are some losses in virtual and I don't think it is going to ever completely replace human one-on-one contact. But I don't think we're going back.

Ray Loewe 16:04

Let me digress a little bit here because I want to address some of the things that we have a book coming out. I want to thank you for being a contributor to that book. Let me tell everybody, what the contribution that you made, because it's such a small part of what you do, but it's so so significant, that it's incredible. One of the quotes that I put in there about you is that "the luckiest people in the world learn how to use their internal power to be happy, regardless of their situation". Take a minute and tell everybody how you become happy every day. Then let's build on this in a different way.

Sarah Brown16:45

One of the points that I make is that you don't have to completely change your circumstances in order to be happy. In fact, when I'm coaching women, I don't want them to go change their jobs, just to be happy, I want them to get in touch with what makes them happy where they currently are. That comes from real self-awareness and self-knowledge. So you get a lot of that from reflecting. You get a lot of that from reflecting on what's going on in your life and how it impacted you. I do a lot of that. You also get a lot of it by just getting still and listening. I have a daily practice in the morning of journaling. I journal what's going on in my life, how I'm reacting to it to see what insights come out of that. Then I have a meditation practice where I just tried to get very quiet and listen.

Ray Loewe17:54

If you listen to what you're trying to do for people if you can make people redesign their lives so that they're generally happy people, they're going to be generally happy anyway, right? I mean, if you're living your own life, what's not to be happy about it, except that little things get in the way. You have to be able to change your attitude every day and make sure that you understand where you're heading and stuff like that. One of the things that you indicated you do is you do a lot of thinking and introspection about who you are and where you're going. Any comments for other people about how to do that or why it's so important?

Sarah Brown18:34

Well, I have two comments about this. The first is on I find journaling very helpful because it gets it out of me and it makes it more concrete. It's it is a way for me to express what's going on with me. But like I said, I don't think anybody gets really clear about this until they voice it to another human being. So journaling is a step along the way, but expressing it to another human being goes a significant way. I'll tell you a quick story, Ray, about this. When Abraham Lincoln was working on the Emancipation Proclamation, he called a friend of his by the name of Leonard Sweat to come from Springfield, Illinois, so that he could bounce ideas off of him. They went up one side and down the other for hours with this individual, around what to include how far to go, what should be, who should be the target territories, and all of this stuff. At the end of that process, he said to Leonard Sweat, thank you very much. I have my answer. Leonard sweat walked out of the cabinet room and said, I never said a word. So what was happening is Abraham Lincoln was voicing it to another human being and getting very clear about what was in him; what were his ideas, how he wanted to move forward. It was important that he do that with an individual who knew and cared about him. But it wasn't so much the other individual, it was us voicing what's important to us. I think that's really important. That's why I built people into the coaching process in my "Book of You".

Ray Loewe20:23

All right, well, there's our nugget for the rest of our lives right there, because I think it's so true. When when you get a chance to talk through with yourself in the presence of somebody who cares. That's what you're saying, right? We're getting near the end of our time. There are a couple things that I want to kind of get from you here. So you've changed a little bit of what you've done. You haven't changed your goals, you haven't changed the vision of where you've gone, but you've changed a little bit by making your book have more detail. You've changed the way you've presented because you're doing much more virtual kinds of things. Is there anything else that's coming out in the way that you're working with people to help them understand who they are?

Sarah Brown21:11

Yes, I've developed an online course, actually, that takes people through this process of getting clear about who they are, and how to translate that into goals. It's another example of going virtual, and it can be done with or without the "Book of You" and it's available at knowthyselfacademy.com That's another way that I've gone about adjusting to the change in our current situation and the opportunity that it presents to go more virtual.

Ray Loewe21:49

To keep it simple, theknowwhoyouare.com. Can we reach that through the "Book of You" if we go to bookofyou.com? Is that going to get us there?

Sarah Brown21:59

Eventually, it will get you there. knowthyselfacademy.com

Ray Loewe22:06

Certainly, people have noted that; we'll put that in our notes so that people can find you. Any other words of wisdom that you have for people?

Sarah Brown22:22

It's as simple as the jingle Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. Let me decode that Row, Row Row Your Boat means you got to take some action on getting what you want. Gently down the stream is code for but it doesn't have to be hard work. If you're in line with your interests and your strengths and you're getting your needs met. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily. Happiness is your key to whether or not you're on the right path. Life is spot a dream, and all starts in the head.

Ray Loewe23:02

Okay, Sarah Brown, Ph.D., coach, woman of the world, accountability coach, among other things. There's nothing to say after Row, Row Row Your Boat. Let's leave people with that thought. Thank you so much for being a friend. And thank you so much for being one of the luckiest people in the world. Thanks so much for following up with us. We're gonna look forward to hearing from you periodically to find out where you're going, and how you're helping people. So, thanks for being here, Sarah.

Sarah Brown23:33

Thanks so much, Ray.

Ray Loewe23:35

Okay, Jim, can you sign us off? Thank you.

Kris Parsons23:39

Thank you for listening to changing the rules, a weekly podcast about people who are living their best life and how you can figure out how to do that too! Join us with your lively host, Ray Lowe, better known as the luckiest guy in the world.

Transcription:

Kris Parsons00:01

Welcome to changing the rules, a weekly podcast about people who are living their best life and how you can figure out how to do it too! Join us with your lifely host, Ray Lowe, better known as the luckiest guy in the world.

Ray Loewe00:16

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Changing the Rules. You know, I don't know about this lively person piece that Christine keeps telling me I am, but maybe I am. Maybe we'll explore that in our with our guest today. The name of our show is Changing the Rules. There are two things that I want to comment on here. One is that life is filled with rules that we didn't come up with. And there's too many of them. Rules generally do two things, they say you can do this, or you better not do this. Right. As soon as somebody tells me that I can't do things, I get annoyed immediately. I start looking for way around the rules. One of the things that I've learned over the course of my life is that if you're going to live your own life, you have to live by your own rules. Now we do need rules. Many of the rules that we've gotten in life are great rules, and we need to keep them. But there are other rules that we need to change so that we can move on and do those exciting things that we want to talk about. One of the things that I do all the time is, I really make an important part of my life to follow is fascinating and motivating debate. When I wake up in the morning, I want to look forward to the day and say, "Wow, this is gonna be a great day, all of this stuff I'm doing, this stuff I'm excited about". It just gets me motivated. It's like these podcasts, I get to talk to great guests, and at the end of them, I am so psyched up and motivated for the rest of the week. And I have one with me today. And Tammy has been on our show before, in fact, a couple of times and she will be on again. Tammy Brandon is a coach. She is an entrepreneur. She's the inventor of the blueprint process. She has been an important part of my life. She's a fairly new addition to the people I know in my life, but she has really helped me hone in on what my purpose is and what I am trying to do. Tammy, thank you so much for doing that for me. I'm going to start you with a tagline and you're going to take off. "Boredom is death."

Tammi Brannan02:46

And that is your tagline, baby. I did not come up with that. You said that on our last call and like bells were ringing. Boredom is death. Do you remember why you said that on our last call?

Ray Loewe02:59

No, but I know when I was talking this morning about being a lively host. It's because I don't want to be bored ever. Boredom is the fastest way to get you in a rut, that is not a place a good place to be. So why did I say this?

Tammi Brannan03:17

I honestly don't remember either. But what I do want to talk about is what you just said, which is there are worst kinds of death than physical death. To me, this is a direct correlation. Boredom is the worst possible death. The reason why I think you say this, the reason why I think this is a philosophy of yours is because it fits with the luckiest people in the world. The luckiest people in the world, who as you identified change the rules, they do not want to go along with the status quo. What's usually done with the person down the street is doing, they want to make sure that what is in their life is fascinating and motivating. So as you mentioned, they're always waking up excited, energized by the projects they've got going on that day. How this relates to purpose is so fascinating to me. It is so cool to think that when you're pursuing your purpose, your God-given purpose, you are not bored. You're not obligated. You're not thinking, "Oh, I wish I I wish I had a different purpose." I had someone actually asked me yesterday, "can I borrow somebody else's purpose?"

Ray Loewe04:41

There's an idea. We can sell it to him maybe, right?

Tammi Brannan04:44

Oh, yeah, right. Maybe no, no. That's what I told him is no, it just doesn't work because your purpose is actually lined up with all the tools you have naturally been given. The beautiful thing about that is you haven't just been given the ability to follow your purpose. You been given the natural fascination and motivation to follow your purpose as well, which goes to one of the biggest tricks I use when helping people identify their purpose. That's asking them your question, what is fascinating and motivating for you? And as you've identified, that can change.

Ray Loewe05:21

Yeah, and it takes a lot some time for people to figure that out. Let me make two comments to emphasize this. I remember reading a statement from the Gallup poll a while ago. I can't believe that this is true, but it keeps coming back and coming back. And that is 80% of the people in the United States, quote, hate their stupid job. I talked to a young man the other day on another podcast. John is 91 years old. He was talking about his life as a manager for the DuPont Company. And he said, the thing that hurt him most is when people came in and talked about how they were checking off their days because it was another day that was done. So pick up on this, and let's talk about how we avoid boredom, how we do this thing. And obviously, one is to truly understand who you are, and why you're here. Then that allows you to start talking about values and then build the life that you want to build. So you're the coach, Tammy, go ahead.

Tammi Brannan06:37

We both are actually, dear. You coach people how to be the luckiest people in the world, and you encourage them to do so. You do that by suggesting to them that it's a possibility. So I would say that's the 80%. I would say the bulk of the 80% when they're checking the days off on their calendar, just to say that another day is done, don't believe in hope. They don't believe that there's a possibility for a better way. Most moms, mostly because they see it around them. If 80% of the population of the working force feels this way about their job, then you can imagine that the people, most people around you that you interact with on a daily basis, friends, family, coworkers, whatever are feeling this way. So you get into this habit of thinking, Oh, this must be all there is. This must just be all I can do. I check my days off for the weekend, I checked my days off for vacation, I check my days off for retirement. So you're in a constant state of waiting and dissatisfaction.

Ray Loewe07:37

The other thing, comment that I get all the time is, when people are unhappy about their lives, they say that's why they call it work. So somewhere in here, we need to change this perception. Because you're right, I am a big believer that there are fascinating and motivating things out there. It takes a little work to find them. But when you find them, life starts to get exciting, it starts to be good. And the last thing in the world I want to do is be bored. Because every time I get bored, I get into trouble.

Tammi Brannan08:10

Right? Because you resist that death, you know, on some instinctive level that boredom is the worst possible death. So you resist that. You do that by mixing things up by changing the rules. That's what you encourage your community to do. I know we're going to be talking about your book later, but I know I've seen your book, and I know that it is a, let's call it, a pot-stirrer. It is the way to disrupt your current life, if it's in a rut, bump you out of that rut, and get you into a life that's fascinating and motivating.  I so appreciate that. You've done that for the world.

Ray Loewe08:49

Okay, so let's go there. You're a coach for the day over here. Let's talk a little bit about what happens when people get bored. What can you suggest to them to do to kickstart their life to at least start a journey away from where they are to a promised land of sorts, right? 

Tammi Brannan09:15

It is probably the scariest and hardest thing you'll ever do. I'm sorry. Because what you're doing is you're looking at disrupting a pattern. That always is very uncomfortable for us to change. Uncertainty is very uncomfortable. Basically what I'm asking you to do, what Ray and I are asking you to do, is jump into the unknown. There's no guarantee out there that things are going to be better. There's no guarantee that if you move from one job to the next that it will be a better job. A little bit. Something you can do to mitigate that risk is study yourself first. This is what I recommend of all my clients is to study yourself first, and not to be self-promoting, but the best process helps you do that. You actually do a better job of getting results when you have someone else helping you study yourself. But in the absence of the blueprint process, you can actually observe yourself in your current environment as boring as it is as predictable as it is. And you can identify the things that bring you energy, what people, what relationships, what tasks bring you energy. I actually have this tracker that I've put together to help people do this. I'm happy to give it to Ray's community for free. You don't actually even need the tracker, you can do this on your own. Just keep track of what drains your energy, and what charges your energy. And by self-study, you're enabled to start making some leaps outside of that rut, little small steps, little tiny experiments. You don't have to quit your job, you don't have to move across the country, divorce your spouse, you don't have to do those big major life changes. You can just do tiny little experiments. And watch what happens to the battery that is within each one of us. Is it charged? Or is it drained?

Ray Loewe11:08

Okay, let's talk about batteries. What did you mean by that? I mean, I certainly know what an Everready battery is or a Duracell. We use them every day. They do run out of fuel. That's usually at the worst possible time.

Tammi Brannan11:24

Yes. Perfect analogy. 

Ray Loewe11:26

So how do you charge this battery? What are some of the activities that you can go through to juice them up?

Tammi Brannan11:33

It depends on who you are, and what your blueprint is, this is the best piece of advice I can give you. Everyone is charged and drained by different things. What's fascinating and motivating to Ray is not necessarily what's fascinating and motivating to you. Simple example I can give you, my dad loves to go fishing. His battery is charged by fishing. I, however, I get in that boat and in 2.3 seconds, I'm bored to tears. It doesn't work for me. Same thing at work, you could take this concept into your professional existence and your personal existence. I would do that. Your battery is charged and drained 24/7, 365 days a year, you can watch it and observe it no matter in what situation you're in, no matter whom you're with. The trick is to discover what does it for you. Now you can take someone like Ray, and you can ask Ray "okay, why do you get up every day? I'm fascinated and motivated and engaged in the projects that you're getting in today." He was fascinated and motivated about these podcasts that he was doing today. So you're like, Okay, I see that Ray's interested in podcasts and interviewing guests and talking to them about the luckiest people in the world. What could I do that might be similar to that? Maybe that would work for me. So maybe you start small by, you go out you find someone who's fascinated and motivating to you, interesting to you. You just have a conversation with them. You have lunch with them. Don't do a podcast, just have lunch with them. Gauge what did that do to my battery? Did it charge it? Oh my goodness, really? You got to pull up the clown nose now?

Ray Loewe13:15

Well, you weren't motivated enough to me. What can I tell you? It can be, on thinking about this while you're talking, it can be as simple as looking in the mirror. Changing your face will. We had a clown as a guest on our show when one of the things he talked about is that every time he dresses up in his different clown outfits, he feels differently. He looks for different things. And I think this is what you're saying. There are different times in our life when we need different things. I noticed one of the big times for people that we talked to a lot or this period of time when people talk about retirement. Retirement like I can't see why anybody gets excited about retirement anyway, because the word retirement means to take out of use. Who wants to be taken out of use? Who wants to think that way? Yet, I see people that leap into retirement with no thought of where they're going, no plan, and wind up being as unhappy as they were before.  I see other people who don't leap in retirement, they keep going back to what they know and are afraid to change. So give us a couple of steps as to how you think about change. I mean, you were talking about this energy audit. What are some of the things that you thought about you today that would go on your energy audit, for example?

Tammi Brannan14:48

That's awesome. I love energy audits. That is a great phrase. Thank you. I'm going to borrow that. Alright, so for me what's fascinated and motivated, and by the way, this has worked for me since 2006. I've been doing what I'm doing today since 2006. So it not only was fascinating and motivating back then, it's even more so today because I've continued to study myself and refine what I do and who I spend time with. And yes, one of those people is right. So for me fascinating and motivating activities, and this is what I've been doing today is, I've been talking to people about their purpose. I've been talking to people about their spiritual beliefs, and how to use those two things and make their life better, both personally and professionally. That energizes me, it energizes me in a big way. So consequently, when I'm with people who don't want to talk about those things, I'm not that interested. I'm not that interested in the conversation. And so I don't I choose not to hang around people who don't want to talk about those things.

Ray Loewe15:56

And that's a big choice. I remember, this goes back many years. After my wife and I got married, and you meet people, and you invite them over for dinner. Then they feel like they've got to invite you back for dinner. Then you have to invite them back for dinner again. The next thing you know, you sit down one day, and you say, why are we doing this? People aren't very interesting. I think part of it is you have to be sensitive to the things that if you want to make a change, you have to actually change things. I think what you're saying is, you don't have to change big things, you can sometimes just change little things. I mean, phase-out of a relationship, if it doesn't suit you anymore. Go find a place where you're excited about the people that happen to hang out there. We started doing this about 20 years before I quote-unquote, "retired from my business", I started studying these luckiest people in the world. I started looking at what makes them who they are. I kicked myself several times, why am I doing this? Well, number one is exciting. Number two, these are people I actually thought I want to hang out with. So where are they? Who are they? How do you define that? And I find that that's one of the things that drives me a lot is the who? Not the what, it's the who? So let's talk for a minute about your blueprint process. Because I know it was helpful to me, I know the purpose of this is not a commercial. I know that you have a website. I want you to give us the name of the website. 

Tammi Brannan17:45

Blueprintprocess.com.

Ray Loewe17:47

We'll put it up on our podcast. I know that you'll take a couple of minutes and talk to people who are interested in this. I think this is maybe one of the key places that we can kickstart change. You got to start a discussion with somebody, you've got to start on this idea of who I am, and why I'm here. Once that becomes clear in your mind, then it becomes easier to start moving forward. And it's not a real easy process and it's painful. Trust me, it was painful to me. But I kept coming back. So talk about where this blueprint process came from and what is your result?

Tammi Brannan18:31

It came from my desire to not be bored. I felt like a complete misfit in my life and I didn't know why. And so it was just a matter of studying, I believe that studying has to happen first before you make any change, you have to study yourself. How you show up in places to get that kind of knowledge that mitigates the risk of change. If you don't study first, and you're just changing here changing there, changing all over the place, you end up making way more of a mess than you need to. So for me, I started to study myself so that I could figure out where to change, what to change, and how to change. And I started to do that. One of the changes I made was, oh my gosh, I really want to do this for other people too. So that's what led me to put the blueprint process together. It is primarily a study program. We're studying you and what your blueprint is so that we know what your purpose is so that we can then apply that to your life both personally and professionally. That's how the blueprint came to be. and that's what I do.

Ray Loewe19:34

Okay, unfortunately, we're coming near the end of our time period. Before we get there if somebody wants to start thinking about themselves. I think you hit us with where's your energy level, we're going to be doing an energy level audit, and find out what excites you and what doesn't; but are there any other things that people can think about on themselves? Maybe not necessarily to make the changes, but to start to understand that they need to make the changes. And if they do, if they make them, they'll be happier.

Tammi Brannan20:07

And freakin deserve it. I think one of the biggest problems with the 80% that are dissatisfied with their life is, they don't believe that they deserve it. They don't believe they have a purpose. They don't believe they deserve happiness, joy. They don't believe they deserve to be fascinated and motivated by every single day of their existence. They think that you are somehow more special than they are. Consequently, they don't even strive to make a change or to believe in a life that's better. On some level, they've accepted that that's all they're good for.

Ray Loewe20:44

So let's talk about the book that's coming out. This is my commercial now. As we've studied the luckiest people in the world for so long, I started writing stories about them. Believe it or not, most of these stories come from this podcast. You're in the book, by the way. Whether you like it or not. I think the idea is that we took people from these podcasts that have interesting stories or interesting thoughts about how do they get lucky. John Freeman, for example, puts on his clown nose and it changes his disposition for the day. It could be as simple as that. But what we tried to do is lay out a motivating frame of people, we try to get into the seven different characteristics that the luckiest people seem to have all the time. They just keep coming back, and back, and back. Then we talked a little bit about a vision and a process to getting there. I think the vision is such an important piece, and you have to visualize yourself as being happy and contented, filled. That's where it starts. So any words of wisdom that you want to impart while you're still here before we shut you off and kick you off the air?

Tammi Brannan22:06

Because that's what's fascinating and motivating to you, isn't it? So with your book and the seven characteristics, I would just encourage people to get the book. Also to go into the book, recognizing that the seven characteristics of luckiest people that Ray will be talking about in the book are not seven characteristics of the luckiest people in the world that are somehow unobtainable by you. It's not like a movie, you go watch and then you walk away and say that was a nice experience. It's a movie that you go watch, and you walk away with seven things that you can now do in your life. The seven characteristics are mindsets that people can apply to their life. Right now today, and make themselves the luckiest people in the world.

Ray Loewe22:13

That's right, Absolutely, thank you for that. Because it's not about changing anything, but the way you think. These are things you have absolute control over in life. It's I mean, I don't care what happens with COVID. I don't care what happens with a war in the Ukraine and anything else in the world. You can always change the way you think. And you control that. All you have to do is focus on them. And by the way, just for note, our book is not out yet. Nobody can get it yet. Today, we're kind of doing a bait and switch kind of thing here. We're kind of setting people up so that they have to go on out and get this later. But thanks again for your comments. Any last-minute, Tammy, comments, and then we're gonna sign off?

Tammi Brannan23:46

I would just say without the book just yet, go listen to past episodes of this podcast.

Ray Loewe23:52

Yeah and go to Tammy's website and look at this blueprint process and whether you decide to go through it or not. I think the idea of take a look at what's there and start thinking about the changes that you can make in your life just by changing your mindset. Huge. Okay, Miss Tammy Brannon, thank you for being with us. You certainly are one of the luckiest people in the world. Every time I get a chance to talk to you, I get fascinated and motivated. So thanks for being you. And Taylor, why don't you sign us off until we got another podcast guest next week.

Kris Parsons24:32

Thank you for listening to changing the rules, a weekly podcast about people who are living their best life, and how you can figure out how to do that too! Join us with your lively host, Ray Lowe, better known as the luckiest guy in the world.

Transcription:

Kris Parsons00:03

Welcome to changing the rules, a weekly podcast about people who are living their best life and how you can figure out how to do it too! Join us with your lively host, Ray Lowe, better known as the luckiest guy in the world.

Ray Loewe00:22

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Changing the Rules. This is your lively host Ray Loewe. No, I have no idea where that lively host thing came from. But we're going to have a lively guest, I promise you that. Let's talk for a minute about changing the rules and what we're trying to do here. One of the things that we found is that we are saddled in life by rules, everybody in the world seems to want to give us a set of rules. Rules are great because they add structure to our lives. We're going to come back and talk about structure later, in a little bit. But it adds structure to our lives. The problem is that rules get overwhelming and that there are too many, and many of the rules that we were given early in our life just aren't relevant to where we want to go anymore. Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, has a comment that he made. He said, "You know, when you're living life under somebody else's rules, you're not living your own life, you're living their life." We interview people that we refer to as the luckiest people in the world on this show. And they're our role models for going ahead. These are people who have designed their own lives and are living them under their own terms. Or if they haven't completed that process, they're in the process of doing that. We're going to find when we talk to Andrei Jablokow. So let me introduce Andre and he's going to talk a little bit as one of the luckiest people in the world, about the process that he's been going through in his life and where he is. So Andre and I met years and years and years ago. He is not a stranger to our podcast, he's been on before. He's been on our television show before when we had that. Andre is a college professor of engineering. He is a coach and he has always been an entrepreneur ever since I've known him. What we're going to talk about today, is about his entrepreneurial bench here, where he's going, how he keeps his life interesting, how he fends off boredom, and where he's heading. So, Andre, why don't you start with anything else about your background that you want to put in there.

Andrei Jablokow02:54

No, that was great Ray. I think you hit on it exactly, that it's all been a journey. I've had an entrepreneurial mindset. If you study entrepreneurship in school, they think that it's all about coming up with new widgets. But entrepreneurship is a mindset. What I found, and I love people that are building things, and creating things and trying new things, and taking risk. I've used that myself to reinvent myself over and over again. Now, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't work. You get misguided and off on the wrong path only to realize, what am I doing here? 

Ray Loewe03:38

Well, that's the adventure and the journey and people don't realize this, everybody thinks that the luckiest people in the world just sit down one day, and they say, I'm going to redesign my life. And here's the way I'm going to redesign it. Then they go off and nothing goes wrong. We all know that everything in the world changes regularly. I often think how boring life would be if we didn't have these blips in the road if we didn't have to maneuver and change.

Andrei Jablokow04:08

I heard a long time ago that, let's say there were two types of people, there are river people and there are people that wander. The river people found out a long time ago, what they wanted to do, and that was their river of interest. And they got into that. There was nothing you could do to change them. My wife is like that. She decided when she was six years old what she was going to do and she's been doing it. It's incredible. Other people like me, I'm all over the place. Not sure what I'm doing from one time to the next, looking for my next adventure. It's just a different way of the world. They're both good.

Ray Loewe04:10

Well, let me comment on that because you're not as wandering as you think you are. I mean, you've been a professor of engineering for a long time. You are an important part in the lives of students who are trying to figure out what they want to do too. And, you know, let's talk about engineering for a minute. I think it's typical of you in a lot of ways. I mean, how many engineers wind up as engineers in life?

Andrei Jablokow05:17

Not most of them don't, most of them move on to something else. What they gain is a structured way of thinking, a way of solving problems. I mean, to me, life is solving problems. It's not all engineering. But you know, you're not going to do what's in the textbook, you're not going to do what's in class at any point. But today, or tomorrow, you're going to come up with something in your life, in your work, in your business, in your family that you've never done before. You've never seen before. But now you can lean on this to say, okay, how am I going to solve this problem? You don't just curl up in a ball and say, It's too hard for me, I can't do it. You say, Okay, bring it on. Let's do it. And that I think is fun.

Ray Loewe05:58

Okay, so let's talk about when I introduced you. I said, Professor of Engineering, and you're a mentor to kids there. But you've also done some coaching beyond that, why don't you talk a little bit about your interest in coaching? Because it's part of this. It's part of who you are.

Andrei Jablokow06:17

Yeah, it is. To me, I enjoy seeing the lights go on, and people, whether I'm teaching or coaching, or somehow helping them to see what their next move is what works for them. Should they continue on, supporting them, lifting them up, to believe in themselves enough that they can take action, in the direction of their dreams and in their goals? Whether that's the right one. They're gonna find the one right now and they're going to move forward in that. Sometimes when you get beat up in the world, and we all do, it's hard to keep going. Oftentimes, a coach supports a person but at the same time, enables a person to figure it out on their own, to move forward with the change.

Ray Loewe07:14

This all starts that most people have certain fundamental things that they want. So let's go back there a little bit. This is what everything builds on. This is why people are lucky this is because they don't just go off in random directions. There's some stuff behind us. So talk for a minute about what most people want.

Andrei Jablokow07:39

What I have found is, just in my experience, is that most people want to have some kind of purpose, some reason for why they're doing what they're doing, getting up. They want to contribute in some way to society; to even in their workplace, to do whatever they do, they want to feel like they're, they're important to somebody. They want to be able to add value, beyond just doing the work and getting a paycheck. Honestly, those types of people kind of bore folks like you and me. I want to know people that are actually creating value in other people's lives. In other words, helping them solve problems. But the other thing that they want beyond that is some ability to have some freedom. And most of the times when you start looking for freedom, you start saying, I want to be able to do what I want to do when I want to do it, the way I want to do it, and so on. But what I found is that freedom doesn't come that way. Because you end up getting lost, and watching television and not doing anything. What I found, and working with my sons, and my wife, and so on, was that structure and discipline, ultimately would create the freedom. Here you go back to the rules, the thing you started up. Which rules though, are they somebody else's rules? Are they your rules and your terms? The universe works in a certain way, you're not going to be able to violate those laws, but to the degree that you can focus, have discipline, consistency, practice. You and I have talked about this lots of times before those kinds of structures are ultimately looking for freedom. 

Ray Loewe09:26

Let me amplify that a little bit because I think this is the heart of the matter. We all need structure. We all need rules. But the important part is to pick and choose those rules. I think part of picking and choosing those rules is what are the rules that are going to be your guidelines to perform what you want to do. To live your life the way you want to live it. Then how are those rules going to build on your sense of purpose? How are they going to add value to your life and other people's life? How's it gonna help you make a contribution? One of the things that I have been thinking a lot about lately is boredom. It's one of the things that we want to figure out. How are we not going to be bored? How are we going to wake up every morning and feel fascinated and motivated, and really excited about where we're going in life? And when you can do that? You have a real niche on life as part of your design process. Let's keep in mind when we talk about this because people are gonna say, Well, you know, nothing's forever. And that's correct, nothing is forever, the things are going to change. But this is where you are not on your life. It's one of the pieces. Once people start to pick a direction, that direction weaves a little bit, but it doesn't change. It keeps you going.

Andrei Jablokow10:56

It actually doesn't matter which direction you pick, just pick one. So to the degree that you can focus on only the things that you can control, and go about improving yourself, what can you control? What can we control? I mean, everybody has been called a control freak, once or twice in their life, but what can you control? You can control your thoughts, your actions, your behaviors, how you respond to things, what you focus on what you eliminate, that is not necessary and not getting you toward your goal. Once you start focusing on those things, you'll start to see which direction you need to go. Then you'll have a basis for comparing whether or not somebody, some opportunity, something is right for you. You've got to have a solid foundation. The other thing that happens is that everybody wants to maybe have their own business, or succeed in the job that they're in, relationships, what have you. None of those things are going to change. You know this until you change yourself. It's a do-it-yourself project. When you get better, all of a sudden, your world gets better.

Ray Loewe12:07

So let's now get a little more specific. I know for a long time, engineering has dominated your life, and you're good at it. But obviously, there's something in there that's lacking. Right? Tell us a little bit about your life experience. What motivated you to take the steps that you're going to tell us about in a minute, and what are those steps, and where you're headed.

Andrei Jablokow12:32

So I went down basically the road that we've been talking about, and engineering has been good to me. I'm not sure I'm that good of an engineer, but I'm decent at teaching it. That's what I've been doing is teaching engineers, I think I've taught over 10,000 students now, which is, you know, that's a fair number. For me, what I learned was that the natural order of things is growth. That's whatever the whole world wants to just continue to grow. I've outgrown what I've been doing. I want to venture out and I want to have my own business. I want to get out of the drama that happens in most large organizations. So it's not that anything's bad. It's just that it's time for me to move on and grow. How would I do that? I've looked at several things, whether I work in financial services, or whether I am an independent coach or consultant or speaker, I love to be up in front of people, and so on. What I realize is that to have that kind of an operation, there's a lot of moving parts, there's a lot to do. There's a lot that I don't know, venturing out. When you've worked for somebody else, for so long, you did your one piece of the puzzle, not knowing all of the other things. So I tried to go out on my own in the past, met with some success, met with some failure. I think the fact was that I wasn't ready for it mentally and I didn't have all the pieces, parts. So I became very careful in looking at what was being offered, what opportunities were coming my way, and whether or not I could actually make that work. 

Ray Loewe14:30

Can I interject? Well, I'm going to interject whether you like it or not, because that's who I am. I think it starts with thinking a little bit about two things are the basis. What am I good at? What are my skills? What can I do well? Then I think the third thing is how do I supplement these things to make them work the right way? Do those things that I don't do well, need to be done?

Andrei Jablokow15:00

It's those things that need to be done, that you don't do well and don't want to do that somehow have to get done. It's like baking a cake. You can put everything in the cake. But if you leave the eggs out, you're probably not going to get a cake. Right?

Ray Loewe15:14

I know you're not baking cakes, I suspect in your life, somewhere along the line, you're, not a bad cake baker. But we're going to go ahead over here and talk a little bit about the niche that you're exploring now? And what are the pieces of it? And why does it excite you?

Andrei Jablokow15:36

So I've moved in the direction of looking at a franchise. I looked into how could I leverage my background, my technical background in engineering? And what interests me? I love gadgets, and technical things, and toys, and playing with all sorts of computers and devices. How can I leverage that because it's a skill, and I'm good at that? I'm good at explaining things to people. I love teaching and interacting with people. I love working with people that are trying to do something interesting in their lives. So how can I create that? What I found, Ray is an interesting niche for me, which is home inspection. Now I'm beyond fixing a house; you probably don't want me to be working with the tools. I'm good at looking at things and seeing how they should be fixed. How they should be done, what's the right structure, whether it be mechanical, whether it be plumbing, whether it be structural, electrical, etc. I looked at that, and I go, Well, that's interesting, I could do that. But the further I looked into it, I realized what a can of worms, it is to try to do it on my own. I happened upon a franchise model for this, where now I can work with a company that provides me all the training. I need to get going on it. Ongoing training, marketing support, from eight different directions, support if I get into trouble or have a question, and air cover marketing. Now all of a sudden, I can focus on doing the things that I need to do all day to be successful, while I'm learning how to run a business and actually run the business.

Ray Loewe17:33

Let's backtrack a little bit, because I know one of the things we've got you excited about here are tools. I mean, this isn't your father's home inspection service. That's not what some of the things that excited you. Talk to me about roofing inspections, You don't have to climb up there anymore, right?

Andrei Jablokow17:54

Sometimes you do, it depends. If the roof is too high or too steep or made of some material, like tile, you don't want to go up there. If you don't know how to walk on a roof you'll ruin it, even if it's asbestos tile, or tar, or anything like that. So we use drones. So all of a sudden, I'm a drone pilot, I'm flying around on the roof, checking the chimney, instead of climbing up way up on a ladder. You can get a better view if you go up there yourself, but in the absence of that, you use a drone. Then I look for leaks inside of houses, right? But I can't poke a hole in the wall. So now I have this thermal, this infrared thermography camera. I can look at temperature anomalies, to see where the insulation might be not operating the way it should, or there might be a leak. I can't X-ray the wall, but you can look at it and say, Wow, without taking the wall apart, or just looking at the surface of it, you would have never known. This is all interesting stuff that goes back to my engineering, it's all heat transfer and radiation and all those equations.

Ray Loewe19:09

What about the mundane business side of things, you know, the reports, the stuff that I know, as an entrepreneur, you don't love to do? 

Andrei Jablokow19:18

That's the beauty of getting in with a company who knows what they're doing is that I now have a report writing system. All I have to do is get the data, put it in, and outcomes the report. The other thing is the marketing, right? I don't care what kind of business you're in. Once you get a few clients, the tendency is to stop marketing and then you wake up one day and say I don't have any work. Some people like sales and marketing and well, others just don't, but it's a necessary evil if you're going to be the business owner. So how do you get yourself to do that on a consistent basis and have some accountability whether it be through a partner, in a coach, or systems to get you to do it, because it, it all has to work together. You can't just focus on doing the work. You've got to work on the business, not only in the business, you've heard that before.

Ray Loewe20:21

It seems to me that you have a model here that you built for advancing in life, maybe that's not the right word, but continuing the journey and making the journey worthwhile. So you've kind of looked at yourself, you've looked at the things that you're good at, you've looked at the things that you're not so good at. You realize that to move forward, you can't do this yourself. This is a mistake that most people make, everybody thinks that they're a rugged individual that they can do everything themselves. This is a world of strengths. And when you follow your strengths and minimize your weaknesses, you come out way ahead. So you've found this franchise model. And I think this is something that's a really good option for people who want to go off on their own, and haven't figured out how.

Andrei Jablokow21:15

I think it's a great thing to look at. What I found in all the things that I've tried before, I mean, it all looks good from the surface, it all looks easy. There's three things nobody tells you, they don't tell you. Number one, how much money this is going to cost. They don't tell you how much time it's going to take to learn it. And the third thing they don't tell you is the absolute avalanche of things that you need to study and learn and integrate and create and buy, and all of that, and it's a mountain of work to get something off the ground. I mean, it looks great. If you're listening, all the webinars and sales pitches, and so on. It's an incredible amount of work. And I don't think anyone person or two people could do it, it's huge. It's a lot harder than it was back in the day.

Ray Loewe22:03

So, unfortunately, we're getting near the end of our time. I think you've done some really good things for people who want to be lucky, or who want to figure out how to move into this luckiest people in the world thing. We'll get you back at some point in time. I think one of the other things is, if you offer the franchise mode, how do you choose the right franchise? What are the things you need to look at? How do you keep from getting ripped off and find the value in the system? But take a couple minutes and wind up by recommending to people who want to find the next phase in their journey. Any advice that you have for them based on your thinking?

Andrei Jablokow22:45

My sense is to really start getting their own act together and opportunities start to come. What do I mean by that? Get your health together, get your body together. Whether it's through eating right, moving correctly, reading books. Most people these days that aren't reading, there's so much to read and study all these areas. What interests you? Go investigate it, go meet somebody, interview somebody about what they do, how they do it, and why they do it. And all of a sudden things start opening up for you. You know, some things look interesting to you, because you like to do them; like baking cakes, but that doesn't mean you want to do it all day. Most fun things look good for about a week or two. I wanted to drive a big truck but I don't want to do that anymore, right? So just go out and do something, do anything, go have a coffee with somebody. Come to Ray's group on Thursdays, and you'll meet some interesting people, and ideas will start to come to you.

Ray Loewe23:45

And forget the trucks, drive a drone instead. Right?

Andrei Jablokow23:48

Some people don't want to do that even. I think trucks are great. Some people love to do that. And I think they should continue to do them because they deliver all the things that we need. But you've got to find the thing that works for you.

Ray Loewe24:02

Well, Andre, thank you so much for being with us again on Changing the Rules. And we'll get you back again. There's a lot of wisdom that you've learned during your journey. And thank you for sharing it with us who want to learn. And we'll get you back again. Taylor why don't you sign us off here and we'll see you again next week with another great guest.

Kris Parsons24:29

Thank you for listening to Changing the Rules, a weekly podcast about people who are living their best life and how you can figure out how to do that too! Join us with your lively host, Ray Loewe, better known as the luckiest guy in the world.

Transcription:

Kris Parsons00:02

Welcome to changing the rules, a weekly podcast about people who are living their best life and how you can figure out how to do it too! Join us with your lively host, Ray Loewe, better known as the luckiest guy in the world.

Ray Loewe00:14

Good morning everybody, and welcome, again to Changing the Rules. I know I always say this, but I'm told that repetition is a good thing. Changing the rules is all about the luckiest people in the world. The luckiest people in the world are, by our definition, those people who have looked at their lives and redesigned them to meet their own personal specs. And then they step in, and they live them under their own terms. Now when you do that, generally you have to be a pretty happy person because you're living on your own terms; you're living your life the way you want to live it. But one of the things we're going to find is that there are roadblocks that occur there. The luckiest people in the world have ways of getting around them. And they just have a way of staying lucky. One of the things that they're really pretty good at is the name of our program is changing the rules. I think it was Steve Jobs, the Apple guy, founder of Apple, who said that, 'When you're living somebody else's life, under their rules, you're living somebody else's life. So you got to change the rules and make your rules. And when you do that, you can escape and be you. So today I have a co-host. Our co-host here is a young man by the name of Dick Coyne. I ran into Dick Coyne where I lived, he's become a friend. I think he's a man about town, although he's gonna debate that a little bit. But he seems to know just about everyone that I would want to meet. He's been an invaluable help in putting together important connections for me. You're going to learn more about him hopefully in future weeks because we're going to try and con him in coming back and co-hosting more of these podcasts. He's going to introduce our guest today, Sally Winchell, who's a young lady that he introduced me to. You're going to find that Sally is definitely one of the luckiest people in the world. So Dick, say hi to everybody.

Dick Coyne02:28

Well, hi, everybody, this is Dick Coyne. And Ray, thank you so much for this opportunity. It's very exciting not just to be here to hear about Sally's story, but to be able to get in with you and learn via podcasting about so many people who are living life under their own terms. Like you say, Sally and I first met when we were doing volunteer work for Lancaster General Hospital with a mutual friend actually. And since that wonderful opportunity, she and I have become good friends. I'm so pleased about that. She is the Energizer Bunny at anything she does. She is a woman of great passion, great focus. And without hearing anything more about me, what I'd like to do is take a moment and kind of set a framework for our discussion today. Because Sally has a lot to tell us. First, Sally, I think what I'd like to do is have you tell us about your early life as an adult because it seemed to me that you had a textbook example; you an education, a successful professional woman, a wife, a mom, and then you got to the fork in the road, the epiphany. And then we're going to talk about since that point, where you are now about telling us a little bit about that early phase, please.

Sally Winchell03:59

I certainly will. But I want to thank you Dick and Ray for inviting me This is quite an honor. I'm humbled by anybody who thinks that my story is anything special. I just live my life and do my thing and have fun doing it.

Dick Coyne04:13

There you have it. Keep going.

Sally Winchell04:16

Oh, my early kind of years, born and raised in Lancaster County. And so I grew up here and pretty much normal upbringing. I'd say the Beaver Cleaver growing up. And I think the biggest influencer in my life as a young person was my father. He was a man who taught me kindness, service, energy, passion, and he wanted me to I think, and get out of Lancaster County. So he kind of set the tone for my education. He told me what I was going to do, where I was going to go to school. When I was in seventh grade, there were no options. The option was two things: join the Navy and be a Navy nurse, or you can go to McCann School of Business and become a secretary; because you can always get a job as a secretary. So I wanted to be a music teacher, I wanted to go to music school, but my dad said, there's no debt, I can afford this, and this is what you're going to do. So I chose the medical secretarial route, which is kind of fun, because it did actually serve me well. Then the other thing my dad said was, I want you to meet a Navy man and get out of Lancaster County. Basically, you know, to see the world, there's more to life than what you see here. So that's what I did. I mean, literally, my next-door neighbor went to the Naval Academy, he brought all the guys home. And they needed girlfriends, they needed people to party with. My neighbor gentleman said, Sally, come down to this party, blah, blah, blah, long story short, I married a naval officer, he went to the Naval Academy. We married in '78 and started traveling immediately. We moved to Guam for three years, and I was loving it, it finally got me out of Amish country. Nothing against that, but really, I'm the kind of person that always is looking for exciting opportunity. Not a risk-taker. I'm not like where I'm not going to do bungee jumping and crazy stuff. But I wanted to travel, I wanted to see the world. I followed in what my father really wanted me to do. And it was great. I loved it. So we spent 11 years in the Navy. 

Dick Coyne06:51

So after that, when did he leave the Navy? 

Sally Winchell06:53

He left the Navy, he decided to become a chiropractor.

Dick Coyne06:56

Yeah. Is that part of the story? 

Sally Winchell06:58

Yes, it is. It is part of the story. So we ended up in St. Louis. My ex-husband, now ex-husband, went to chiropractic college in St. Louis. Eventually, we moved back to Pennsylvania, which was my hometown, because, you know, kids coming along. So I think that it was exciting for me because we started a practice from the ground up in 1987. It was in a medical office that was no longer a medical office, in Terry Hill, Pennsylvania. Along with my ex-husband at the time, I had two babies; basically, we started a practice and built that practice from zero patients to 100 patients a day. It was quite amazing, actually. We worked really hard to do that, paid off our house. We were so in debt, but in that short amount of time, we really accomplished a lot by building this chiropractic practice and raising two children. So I was working in the practice raising the kids. And then probably the tragic part of that existence at that time was our son, who we adopted from Guatemala at six months. It was the probably the most exciting time of my life, because we wanted to have children and for many, many years that didn't look like it was going to happen. So we went down the adoption route, which was amazing and wonderful adopted our little son, Travis from Guatemala. And so, two weeks later, you hear this all the time, I became pregnant with my daughter, Kelly. So we had two babies. At that point I'm like, what am I going to do with two kids that are babies? I don't know how to handle this.

Ray Loewe08:50

We have an interesting thread of things going on here. What I'm reading from you is you escaped from Lancaster. Okay, good, bad or indifferent. I noticed you're back in Lancaster now. But that's okay. You escaped. You ran off with a Navy man, you discovered the world. You are living a life that glamour and a life that kind of kept you excited. Then all of a sudden you're back in St. Louis, you're the wife of a chiropractor. All of a sudden, you're building a business and you have the excitement of building a business. And then you have a couple of kids and now you're a mom on top of that. But at some point in time, what I'm detecting here is that you're you're not as fulfilled as you would like to be. And so why don't you talk a little bit about the dance studio that you started, and why you started it, and where that went. And then we'll get into the real exciting part of your life.

Sally Winchell09:50

That's great. Yes, so an opportunity came up for me to purchase a dance studio. I was teaching a dance class and a couple others studios, and again knowing my personality, it's like, that sounds amazing. There's an opportunity for me to have something that I could have and call my own. And that was very exciting.

Dick Coyne10:13

You know, Ray, one thing we haven't touched on, Sally, I think you've been a fitness and a dance enthusiast for much of your life. And so you didn't just decide, hey, I can teach dance in the studio. You had all the street cred to do that. Right? 

Sally Winchell10:28

I did. I actually started taking classes in Guam. That's where I started. And it was with me the whole time.

Ray Loewe10:35

One of the things that comes out of the luckiest people in the world all the time is the fact that there are two things: there's your skill levels of things and then there's your passion. When the skill levels align with a passion, amazing things happen. And that's, I think, coming of where you are with the dance studio, right?

Sally Winchell10:55

Yeah, exactly. You're exactly right. It was an opportunity for me to call something my own and build it from the ground up. And that just is exactly what I wanted to do is have something that I could be successful at.

Ray Loewe11:10

And you were successful at it because you actually grew this thing, and were making some money at it, and doing well with it. But then on an event occurred, since time flies when you're having fun, I want to get to this event really quickly, and it's age 48.

Sally Winchell11:31

That is correct. Yep. 

Ray Loewe11:33

So what happened at this magic age, that kind of topsy turvied everything?

Sally Winchell11:40

Well, it was January, right after Christmas, and you sometimes self-assess yourself. Since I'm a kind of a fitness buff, and a little bit of a freak about how I look, I looked in the mirror at 48, I remember it very well. And I didn't like what I saw. Looking back at me, I saw saggy skin, I saw kind of the aging process happen with my physique. And that just didn't sit well at all. It was very depressing. My husband at that time was in his office, and I went down and I said, this is not acceptable. I don't want to watch my body age like that and that whole 'dancer's body myth' is a myth. You can dance like crazy and never keep, that physique. I'm making this sound like I'm really worried about how I look. It's not, but for me, that was important. That was very important. So I hired a personal trainer, the very next day, and a nutritionist because I was not going to just watch this whole thing diminished before my very eyes. 

Dick Coyne12:52

Was your husband behind you on that? 

Sally Winchell12:54

Absolutely. He absolutely was, in fact, he was training with this person. He said, "Why don't you call to set up some appointments?" And I did it. So he was always very encouraging and supportive and encouraged me in my endeavors. And that's what I did. 

Ray Loewe13:13

Again, there's a trend here. I want to take a minute and point this out because people tend to go along in life and their lives are pretty good. I think yours was a pretty good life, right? But all of a sudden, this event occurs. And it's, in some cases, it's tragedy. In this case, it's a very positive kind of a thing. All of a sudden, you made a change. And when you made that change, life got exciting. So tell us a little bit about what happened after you started getting into the fitness and started getting into some of the other things.

Sally Winchell13:51

Well, what was interesting was the dancing tied into the fitness because I was preparing for a ballroom dance competition eight months later, and I wanted to look killer in my Latin dress. I mean, I wanted to look amazing. And that was one of my motivations is to transform for that event. I started lifting heavy weights, eating well, changing my body, health-wise, as well as physique. I was blown away by the results. I'm like, this stuff works. I said to my trainer, "How long do I actually have to do this?" He goes, "How long do you want to be healthy?" And I said, "Oh, well, that would mean forever. Right?" So long story short, he knew that I was really excited about it. He asked if I wanted to become a trainer and work for him. So I had two things going on, training and a dance studio. Energizer Bunny for about two years, and I started to compete in women's bodybuilding at the same time. So ballroom dancing, bodybuilding, owning a studio, and being a personal trainer as well. So at some point, it was like, this is a lot to juggle. So I sold my dance studio in 2008, which was very sad to me because I loved it. And it was something, again, that I was very successful at. I was drawn to the fitness piece because I felt like I really wanted to help, especially older women, because I was one. Just be energized, and improve their health, and make changes in their health, and fitness picture. I just want to bring everybody with me.

Dick Coyne15:40

Well, you're doing that. Sally, it's clear to me that you're on that road. Where do you want to go? We kind of know where you are today. At a wonderful, diverse set of interests and activities. But what are you doing with it to get your message out? I know what works for you. But how about sharing your passion with other people? How's that going for you?

Sally Winchell16:05

Well, I can tell you, I like when you talk about the luckiest people in the world. That's how I feel. However the cards fell for me, it put me in a place to just be able to do exactly what I wanted to do for other people. So I was an independent personal trainer. I was realizing that clients do not get results in the gym, just by working out. They're like, well, where's those abs, I'm doing all this ab work, I'm pulling on cables, I'm running on the treadmill, but I'm not seeing the results of my labor. They're not getting the whole picture. Nutrition is 80% of our physical success. Going back to some of the things we talked about earlier, I wanted to be credible. As a trainer, you are allowed to give basic nutrition advice to your clients. But for me, I wanted to give them a lot more. And I wanted to be credible. So I got a certification in fitness nutrition so that I could be credible and give advice. And I started a company called Nutra Freak in 2010. In conjunction with training, now I had my nutrition side of the house going so I could really do more for people. My now husband was very instrumental in helping me develop Nutra Freak. As far as the brand, the logo, the marketing, the websites, the photography; he just was my co-founder we'll say in Nutra Freak.

Dick Coyne17:44

Well, I think partner sounds good.

Ray Loewe17:49

This is Ray, here again, I have to interrupt... Nutra Freak?

Sally Winchell17:52

Nutra Freak.

Ray Loewe17:53

Where does that come from?

Sally Winchell17:55

That's George's brainchild. He goes, "You love nutrition, and you're a freak about everything." We're sitting at Panera Bread on Fruitville Pike developing this business. He looks at me says "Nutra Freak". And I'm like, perfect. 

Dick Coyne18:13

What is Nutra Freak?

Sally Winchell18:15

Nutra Freak is me. Nutra Freak is education. I don't sell stuff. I don't sell supplements and shakes and all that stuff. I teach people how to create a lifestyle of eating clean food, so they can improve their health and fitness. That's it. That's it in a nutshell.

Dick Coyne18:38

How do we find out about it?

Sally Winchell18:39

Well, back in the day, I had a website, I don't have that anymore. But I started doing corporate wellness. I started doing Lunch and Learns with big companies. Once you do one, your next one comes along. I do eight-week programs, grocery store tours, I worked at Yoder's grocery store. So I was developing Nutra Freak out into the world. And it became very successful.

Dick Coyne19:09

I hear a commercial side of that but I think that there's a community side to that as well. That you're sharing with not just on a commercial platform, but also sharing your passion in the community. Am I right on that?

Sally Winchell 19:25

You're absolutely right. 

Dick Coyne19:26

Tell us about that a little bit, please.

Sally Winchell19:29

Well, I think when you talk about the community they're kind of your little followers. People who learn from from me, come to my class, has been to my Lunch and Learns talks, whatever. I call them my Nutra Freaks. Like honorary. They get a little certificate and then when I have another talk, I can say hey, Judy can you come and do a testimonial? Can you help? 

Dick Coyne20:04

So you're getting disciples.

Sally Winchell20:12

Exactly.

Dick Coyne20:12

Yes. I think I even saw something in our local newspaper about Nutra Freak a couple of weeks ago. What's going on with that?

Sally Winchell20:20

Well, now here I am at Bright Side. People don't even know what that is. I am now the wellness director at Bright Side Opportunity Center, which is connected to a Bright Side Baptist Church. And the pastor at that time said, "Sally, we need you here." I want you to be the wellness director, we have a fitness center. And this is what our community needs is somebody like you to teach people how to be healthy. Anyway, accepted the position. And I've been here almost eight years. And so what was exciting for me is I can do Nutra Freak training; I can build this little community and the disciples in any way I want to, with a roof over my head, in one place. Not like as an independent contractor.

Dick Coyne20:30

So it almost sounds like you're kind of where you want to be. 

Sally Winchell21:20

Oh, absolutely. 

Dick Coyne21:21

According to your terms. 

Sally Winchell21:26

Yes. What the most recent exciting thing that came down the road was Lancaster County Office of Aging came to me in October, looking for a nutrition program that they can offer to the entire community. They knew of me because I work with Senior Games, blah, blah, blah, I'm really active. And so they contracted with me for three years to teach the nutrition education programs for the county, which is amazing. So it's an eight-week program, happens to be at Bright Side. It's basically teaching people from week one through week eight, how to eat clean food, how to create that to be a lifestyle over time. Nobody is going to be a freak like me and change everything at once. Because that's what I do. You tell me asparagus and chicken, I'm going to do that. 

Ray Loewe22:26

This is Ray Loewe butting in again. Unfortunately, we're nearing the end of our time framework. So let's sum up a couple of things here. Then we'll get closing comments from each of you. One of the things I like about talking with you here is that you're one of the luckiest people in the world in a little different way than a lot of other people are. There are a lot of people who quit their jobs and runoff and be entrepreneurs. And it's easier to control your life sometimes when you do that. But you were able to do this in a controlled fashion, you're in a community setting. You're doing good for the community. And yet you're living your life with passion with the skill levels that you've developed. I hope other people who are listening in, can listen to this and say I can do this. I don't have to run off and be on my own. I can find a way to do this. So with that, let me get Dick Coyne for a minute. We're about done. Do you have a closing comment that you want to make? And then we're gonna go to Sally.

Dick Coyne23:38

Well, thanks, Ray. I think this has just been a remarkable opportunity for me to learn. I've enjoyed it so much. And the reason I really wanted to do this is I am a big fan of Sally's story. I'm so glad that she has been able to share it with others in the future, and that this message will live. It's not a one-time thing. So people who are interested in Nutra Freak can come on to the luckiest site. They're going to hear Sally talk about what she loves to do and how to do it. 

Ray Loewe24:13

Sally, any closing remarks you want to make here?

Sally Winchell24:16

Again, I just want to really thank you and Dick, for inviting me to do this. It's been exciting. Again, I'm humbled. I don't even get why it's exciting to anybody. Because it's what I do, you know, and I just tell people at the enterprise side, just show up. I got you, bring your water bottle, bring your sneakers, don't even worry. Just show up. And I'm going to take care of you.

Ray Loewe24:43

And with that, all I can say is wow. And thanks for being one of the luckiest people in the world. Thanks for sharing your story with us. Taylor, sign us off and we'll be back in another week with another podcast.

Kris Parsons25:00

Thank you for listening to changing the rules, a weekly podcast about people who are living their best life and how you can figure out how to do that too! Join us with your lively host, Ray Loewe, better known as the luckiest guy in the world.