Design Your Life, Your Way - Strategic Growth for the Conscious Midlife Entrepreneur

Certified coach Christopher Jackson recently joined me for a LIVE interview on Facebook & LinkedIn to talk about how kind people who are risk adverse can get paid for their work. Chris is also the co-owner of Kinetic Life, a career and lifestyle design company, specializing in helping high-performers leave their unique stamp on the world through their professional work, while looking and feeling good doing it.

Connect with Christopher

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In 2015, Sam Crowley was offering a course on how to launch a podcast, and it was that course that led to the creation of this podcast. Today, Sam joins us as a guest. He is a speaker, author, and high-performance coach. Sam specializes in helping everyday individuals create their own stage and share their million-dollar message.

On this episode of the Live. Love. Engage. podcast:

Connect with Sam Crowley

Podcast: http://everydayissaturday.com/

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You’re listening to the live love engage podcast on today’s show, how entrepreneurs benefit by keeping their message simple Stay tuned. I am Gloria Grace Rand, founder of the love method and author of the number one, Amazon best seller live love, engage how to stop doubting yourself and start being yourself. In this podcast, we share practical advice from a spiritual perspective on how to live fully love, deeply and engage authentically. So you can create a life and business with more impact, influence, and income. Welcome to live love, engage

Namaste and welcome to another addition of live love, engage. And I am really excited about my guest today because he is somebody that I have known for quite a while. And he’s actually the reason really, frankly, that I’m doing this podcast today. So I wanna first off welcome Sam Crowley, to live love engage. And I’ll tell you more about that in a second. So welcome Sam.

Hey Gloria. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Well, I’m delighted to have you and for, yeah. Let me, let me read a little bit about what Sam’s bio is, and then I’ll tell you, how he’s responsible for me being here today. So he is a speaker author and high performance coach, specializes in helping everyday individuals create their own stage and share their million dollar message. And he also has a podcast of his own. It’s called Every Day is Saturday, and it’s been downloaded over 20 million times in 225 countries. I still have a ways to go for that but I’ve gotten there slowly. And Sam has also shared the stage with a who’s who of speakers, including Tony Robbins, Les Brown, Bob Proctor, the late lovely Bob Proctor, John Maxwell, and many more with the purpose of showing audience members, how they can create a lifetime of Saturdays. And as I mentioned, how I got to know Sam is that back in 2015, he was speaking at some event I went to, I don’t even remember what it was and he was offering a course on how to launch a podcast.

And so I said, Hmm, I think this might be a good way for me to get my message out, to grow my business. And I invested in that course and sure enough, I was able to launch a podcast. It was called, Write, Sell, Succeed at the time and was all about online marketing. And, I, you know, followed the, his directions and, you know, got to be on that new and noteworthy on apple and all that good stuff. And then life got in the way and I wound up putting it on hold for a few years, but now we are back and I’m proud to say, I’ve been doing this for over two years now. So, that’s my version, my story, but I wanna hear, and I know our audience wants to hear your story, Sam. So share with us where this concept of every day is Saturday came from and why you wound up actually then launching a podcast of the same name.

Yeah, that’s great. Cause I, like I said, thanks again for having me on the show. I remember 2015, that was probably either a peak potentials or new peaks, uh, whatever the name was at the time. Yes. Right. I think it was. Yeah.

Yep. And you invested in yourself and there’s a big lesson, right there going to live events and investing in yourself in your own personal growth and your business growth. And you know, whether you launched a podcast seven years ago, when you changed it, none of that matters. What matters is you actually said, Hey, I got a voice and I wanna actually share this. I’m not quite sure how or what it’s gonna doesn’t matter. The fact is you got going, you changed the name here and there. Maybe some artwork doesn’t matter. Know that, what matters is you’re still doing it 2022. And you’re getting that message out there. And people are listening. There’s always people listening to podcast. So, you know, I launched my show, you know, some, almost 20 years ago, my daughter Madeline and I was stuck in the corporate rat race. And my daughter, Madeline was three years old at the time.

And I never saw her. Um, because I worked all the time. And one night I came home from work and it was a Monday night, a cold November evening here in Ohio. And, but was tucking her in and she said, daddy is tomorrow. And I said, well, no, it’s not. Um, why do you ask? And she said, because that’s the only day we get a chance to see each other. So that just hit me right there. Like sometimes you have these epiphanies, and you know, it’s not a lightning bolt coming from above, but pretty close, you know? And so I went to bed that night didn’t sleep well at all because you know, my whole goal was to be a father. Um, you know, my dad left my mom to raise eight kids by herself, back in Bradford, Pennsylvania in the late sixties. Wouldn’t know the guy if he walked in the room right now. And I don’t use that as a, any kind of victim talk, I’m just saying that actually propelled me to want to be a father. But here I found myself not being present with my kids. Now I have four daughters. Madeline’s the oldest, she’s gonna graduate from the University of Cincinnati this year. That’s how fast time flies Gloria, you know? And we all say, I’ll get to it some day or one day. And next thing I know, 20 years go by and your kids are off to college or having their own kids. And you’re looking back like, where was I? So that’s what drove me. I’m not saying it’s the right way. It’s the only way I’m just saying that was my message and why I got started. So I started podcasting, sharing the hope and the vision of making everyday Saturday for men and women all around the world.

And some 20 million downloads later, uh, here we are with my own podcast and you know, I never, I just, I never, and everybody could say I had this vision. I did think about being a speaker. I’m not gonna lie. I did. I thought about sharing the stage with those people you mentioned, but I never believed it because I come from a poverty mindset and growing up on, you know, not, not a lot going on. And so I believe I thought about it, eh, you know, but what I found was that if you just keep doing what you’re doing, good things are gonna happen because, uh, things start to conspire in your favor because you start attracting like-minded individuals into your sphere of influence. And next thing you know, yeah, I’m on a stage here, I’m on a stage there. You saw me speak on a stage and they don’t just let anybody speak at those events.

You know, you have to be able to, you know, not only speak, but be able to actually move the needle, not only for the promoter, but the people in the audience. And whenever I talk, I always have zero expectation that anybody’s gonna buy my course or come on board as a client. I have no expectation. All I want to do is serve because I’ve been in that audience before and I’ve had the big pitch pitch pitch. I never wanted to be that person. And hopefully you didn’t feel that way you bought because you’re like, oh, you know, I like this guy seems to vibe with me. And I think I want a podcast. I think there’s a great lesson there when you go in with, with no expectation, but a real, real, whole lot of passion, good things are gonna happen for you. So it’s kind of my abbreviated version of how it all went down.

Well, I love it. And there’s so many good nuggets in there that you, that you just shared and I’m trying to be able to pull them all out here. But one of the things is the having no expectations. I think that a really good lesson for entrepreneurs in particular, cuz sometimes we get very stressed out about making sales and, and I know even, uh, I’ve, I’ve done a lot of speaker training and they will talk about the fact that, you know, training you the right way to be able to make a presentation, to be able to then make an offer and then hopefully have that offer, um, purchased I guess, or invested in. Yeah, the, the thing is, is that sometimes we get too caught up in that and we get too concerned about, oh, you know, and, and then people can feel that and then they’re not going to invest with you if you’re coming at it from that lack mindset.

Oh, I know the other thing I wanted to, I wanted to talk about, which I thought was interesting too, is that, I don’t know if it’s, if you have noticed this, but it seems that all of the really successful people are… maybe not all of them, but a lot of successful people, a lot of successful speakers have come from backgrounds where they were, I wouldn’t say disadvantaged, but I would say they didn’t have maybe that support or, you know, they, they weren’t, you know, handed the silver spoon, shall we say? I think that is also what helps them then to become good speakers and, and great speakers because they’ve experienced that. What, what do you think has that, have you noticed that?

No, absolutely. A hundred percent. I think of Les Brown, you know, Mrs. Maybe Brown’s baby boy. And Les was always called DT, which stands for stood for when he was in the fifth grade, the dumb twin, cuz he had a twin brother Wesley. So it was Wesley and Leslie Les was uh, deemed by the, uh, by the education system to be educably retarded at the time we’re talking the sixties, you know? Yeah. And you know, when you hear him tell a story and he was called the dumb twin and labeled this and labeled that here, this guy could speak in arenas of 40,000 people just go on YouTube. You could see his stuff there. And you know, there’s a lot of that men and women, you know, I’ve listened to the Janet Atwoods of the world, the Lisa Nichols of the world and people like that. And they all have not only, I don’t know about the disadvantaged background, but you’re right, everyone that you just mentioned has, I mean, Bob Proctor, you know, the late Bob Proctor now feels weird to say that, but you know, Bob is an individual who, you know, he doesn’t even have a high school.

He didn’t even have a high school degree, you know? And speaking is more about passion. It’s not about being able to articulate perfectly or say the right thing. I mean, most Americans communicate at a seventh grade level and that’s the way we talk every day. Like we’re hanging out at the kitchen table or with our friends or at Starbucks, we don’t try to put fancy words together. And I think that’s where speakers get caught up. And you could say this in any kind, whether it’s email marketing or social media, when people put a post out there, they try to say the right thing and the perfect thing. And you know, I think with a podcast, especially if you speak how you always do, uh, it’s so natural for you to speak that way. And that’s why it’s. So I think everybody should have a podcast.

And, and when you speak on stage, don’t get caught up in the fact that now you’re on a riser, you know, three feet above everybody else. You’re just at Starbucks having a conversation, telling people why you’re so passionate about the topic you’re speaking about. And if you keep it simple, my motto is do simple, better. So pick something, keep it simple, do it better than anybody else out there. And the reason it’s better than anybody else Gloria is because it’s your story. Can’t be copy. You know, you can copy a piece of software. You can copy literature, you can plagiarize this or that, but nobody could copy your story and your experience. So whether you come from, you know, you’re a trust fund baby, or whether you come from a trailer and getting free cheese like I did in school, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you speak the way you always speak regardless.

And you know, the speakers you’ve seen on stage that you’re like, does this guy or girl even know where they are right now. They know their audience, you know, and you can tell right away. So I would just encourage anybody out there that yes, become a public speaker. Even if that means launching a podcast. I mean, I podcast from my car every day. Okay. I have a phone. I podcast in my car, into my phone, create a 10-minute audio out the door. It’s very, very simple. So that’s kind of like where the advice I would give somebody is keep it simple, speak like you always do. You don’t gotta have the Toastmasters degree or anything like that. People really resonate with an authentic message.

Absolutely. And I, I love how you do, uh, keep it simple in that fact that you are able to do it, like in your car, I’ve gotten to be more elaborate. And I think it’s just because my background, I actually, I used to work in television, so. Oh,

Although at the time I never wanted to be in front of a camera though. Never wanted to do that. So it was only when I started my business that I realized I had to, oh, I have to like talk to people now. Oh yeah. But I realized I still, I do like it. So you get used to it. What, you know, you talk about, I, I know that you really have a passion for helping people to be able to speak and be able to, whether it’s launching a podcast or, or just being able to communicate, what gets you really excited about the work that you’re doing and helping people that way?

Because I get an opportunity to coach people. Who’s a, a former version of myself, you know? So I look for, uh, people that have a high degree of motivation and energy and I, and you and I had this conversation a couple of nights ago, people wanna be led. They don’t wanna be saved. You know? Well, they may wanna be saved, but you can’t save them. They, you need to lead them. So I look for people to it wanna be led. Like I, I, I want, I didn’t wanna be saved. I knew I had to save myself. You know, of course I’m a Christian. I know that. Not everybody. I’m not here to save anybody in the Christian faith, but I accepted the Lord, Jesus Christ into my heart and everything flows through him. To me. I feel I have the Holy Spirit inside of me.

So I’ve got God literally living inside of me. I can do anything I wanna do. That’s my mindset. Okay. That’s my mindset up there. So I don’t really get too worked up either way, but I look for people who wanna be led, they feel like they have a tremendous passion. They just don’t know. You know, they need to be fumbled into the direction of where they want to go with their message. It’s very difficult. If you ask people, what do you do that can keep up at night for a week? You know, I don’t know what I do. I mean, I, and I would love to talk about, but I don’t know what I do, you know, and that was me. It’s like, great. I can be a motivational speaker, but you and I both know Gloria. You’ve been to the motivational speaker, uh, get togethers and you feel good while they’re talking maybe for an hour afterwards, but then you’re like, what do I do with that?

You know? So I look for people who have a high degree of energy motivation. They understand that they’re here for a purpose and it’s a very short period of time on earth. And they want to be able to get that message out while it’s still inside and they still have time to do it. So that’s really who I’m speaking to every day on my podcast. And you know, there’s a lesson there as well. You’re not gonna be everybody’s cup of tea, you know, but you throw the seeds out there. Some will land on the rocks. Some will land in fertile soil. The ones that land in fertile soil become the best clients. And it’s how I was able to attract you in, into my inner circle with every day a Saturday, because I was speaking to you, you were a former version of myself. You were just getting started. You didn’t have a podcast here we are. You know, and it’s, I I’d love to say it’s more complicated than that. It just isn’t, you know,

I love that. That’s true. And we do tend to overcomplicate things. I know I do. I, I live in my head a lot of the time. And so it’s, uh, I have learned now over the years to start leaning into my heart because that, yeah, uh, the heart is a lot smarter frankly, than the brain. And, uh, I, yeah, I love that. Um, one, one of the things I like to ask, uh, people like yourself, you know, someone who’s had modicum of success and to be able to ins,inspire educate also as well. Um, our listeners and, and viewers on YouTube is to talk about challenges because, um, it’s not always easy running a business or launching a speaking career or a podcast for that matter. So what’s one of the biggest challenges you’ve ever had to overcome.

How much time do we have? How much time do we have? Um, my golly, I could tell you the one that just comes always to the front of my mind was our daughter, Susan. Who’s our youngest child. Uh, she’ll be eight years old this August, but she was born at one pound, uh, back in 2014. My wife’s water broke at 23 weeks and she delivered Susan at 24 weeks, which is barely viable. Um, and you know, we were told she’d live maybe an hour or two, and this was at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital right down the road, 30 miles from where I live. And we’re like, okay, well, we’ll stay around. And we prayed and prayed. She made it through the first night. We were called down the second night to the NICU to say goodbye to her, cuz she wasn’t gonna, she made it through the second night and long story short.

Uh, she got a trach. She continued to grow from one pound to two pounds to three to five. And she spent 221 days at Children’s Hospital. Finally was able to come home. We set up a hospital in our living room and we just lived out of there for the next couple years, changing the trach, changing the ventilator, all of those things cost $40,000 a month to have a ventilator. And we got a hospital bill for $1.3 million during that period of time. And you know, what do you do with that? I just laughed when I got the first bill, I, I literally laughed out. You talk about an L O L, that was the L O L moment. Like what the, what am I gonna do with a million, three paying for? But you know what all of that worked itself out, uh, pick up the phone, you talk to administrators and people in billing, they just put a different code inm 1.2 million becomes a hundred thousand just like that. You know?

And you just gotta ask the right questions. You get better answers when you’re always asking. And because I was an entrepreneur and I didn’t have a job, imagine asking your boss, if you could take 221 days off work to be there for your child every day. But I brought my laptop to the NICU every day, uh, worked alongside my wife, Angela. So we would drop our three oldest kids who were in elementary and middle school at the time, drop ’em off at eight O’clock go down to children’s hospital, come home by two, pick up the kids, homework, bath, dinner, all of that, get ’em to bed, do the same thing again for 221 days. And had I not been an entrepreneur Gloria, I wouldn’t have been able to do any of that. So you get through adversity reminding yourself why you ever got started in the first place.

And I think that was my way of really understanding why I did this every day as Saturday gig again, is to be there for my I’d be there for my kids. And now we got our daughters gonna be eight years old and that’s, it’s just amazing. It’s an absolute living, breathing miracle as all humans are, but this story just had that extra caveat to it. So how do you get through adversity is you go through adversity enough and well, I’ll be 54 June. So I’ve had my fair share of adversity. You don’t live that long and not have that adversity. And I think it gives you a tremendous amount of wisdom. I would’ve never been able to deal with that in my twenties or even thirties, you know, because I wasn’t ready for that. And I think life prepares you for what’s gonna come your way because you went through challenges before and I went reminded myself, well, how did I get through those?

You know, the sun still came up the next day, went through a bankruptcy. The sun still came up the next day and everything has its way of kind of, uh, as long as you’re still in the game. It’s my philosophy as you’re yeah, you still got a shot, you know, and I never lost sight of why I was doing what I was doing. And I would still travel to Vancouver to speak in LA and Dallas and Florida. We would work out arrangements with a nurse or my wife to watch over Susan and I, we just still kept everything going and through the grace of God made it through, you know?

Um, yeah, I do love the fact that this is a lesson and it is why being an entrepreneur, even for all of the challenges that it can provide, but it really does have that wonderful gift of flexibility and that you can be able to take the time to be able to be with family members. I mean, I went this through the same thing myself when my sister had cancer and I, I flew out to Arizona to be with her cuz I lived in Florida and I, and I remember going to one of her chemo treatments bringing my laptop and I would sit work while she’s, you know, just having that IV. So I know exactly not exactly, but similar situation to what we were going through.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.

You know, I think it’s really important to get them into the workforce young, to get them experienced that if they don’t like a job, that’s great. Now, you know, you don’t like one go the entrepreneurial route. And if you know, I didn’t go to college to Penn state for a couple of years. It just didn’t really vibe with me, but I don’t talk my kids outta go to college. You know, I don’t push my beliefs on them, but I wanna change generations of my family. So when they have kids, they now have their foundation is built upon dad. They don’t even remember me going to a job. None of them ever remember me having a job, you know? And so I love the fact that my wife and I together through the work that we’ve done, we had our 24 year anniversary two days ago. And you know, know we’ve been able to change the generational curse within our family, whether that’s alcoholism, whether that’s poverty, whether abuse, whatever that looks like. That’s the mark that I would be probably most proud of.

I, and it’s so wonderful that you are teaching your daughters, uh, about that, about the fact that just because you have a, a degree of success, that it doesn’t mean that they get hand in everything that I, I love that they still need to be able to, to work and to pay their bills. Yeah. And yeah, I, I felt the same way about my kids there. I mean, I, I still remember when my son was, everybody was having an Xbox and, and I was like, no, I’m not gonna buy him one. If you want better earn the money to buy yourself. Cause you don’t need that stuff. I’d rather you rebook.

Oh Yeah, absolutely. In fact, it’ll be with them even as they get into their twenties because my kids have, um, I am very proud of them, uh, because they are saving money. I mean, they they’re, they don’t have like huge amounts of credit card debt. And in fact, I don’t think they have any credit card debt because they have learned from my husband and I, and they have applied those lessons. So they they’re so way ahead of what I was, let’s put it that way when I was their age. So I’m, I’m really happy for that. Um, one other question I wanna ask about, and this is something I, I love to ask our guests too, before we finish up today. Is that, um, what are you curious about right now?

Well, I’m, I’m curious really, uh, I lead a small group, so we have a, uh, weekly, small group. And this is really funny cuz they call me kid. I mean, we’re talking about 88-year-old, 75 year old, 74 year old men and women. And I started in this small group. We started studying the book of Jonah back in 2017 and I was the new guy at the time. And you know, I didn’t, you know, I’d love to tell you, I knew my in and out. I knew who wrote it and that’s probably about it. Okay. And uh, so I got involved in the small group and it just started working on me and working on me. And I saw life through the lens of an 80-year-old, which is much different than seeing it through the lens of somebody much younger than that.

And it gave me tremendous perspective and it really got me curious about, uh, relationship with Jesus. It got me curious about my faith. It got me curious about what would it be like to not have worry, anxiety and fear in my life, which really used to be a big, big part of my life. So I’m very curious, uh, about God, Jesus, the holy spirit, uh, my walk and my faith and how again, how that permeates, not only through myself and my wife, Angela, through our kids and through generations. And again, this may not be a popular opinion, but we don’t force our kids to go to church. Okay. I go to church and if they want to join me, I think that’s great. And they don’t, I don’t be like, you’re going to hell, you know, no repent, repent, but um, the old adage, I can’t hear a word you’re saying because your actions are telling me everything I need to know.

Uh, really is the, what I kind of live by. So they see my wife and I leading a small group. Now I lead our small group, like I’m the leader. Okay. I’m the one that passes out the handout gets us going. We’re studying first John right now for the past six weeks. And they’re like, Sam, you’re just a great Bible leader. And I can’t even tell you my wife laughs because she’s like, this is just, so this isn’t you like, this is I she’s proud of how it’s evolved, but she’s just laughs sometimes because that’s how everything evolved over the past last five years. So I’m less curious about money. I used to be very interested in money. I used to be very interested in wealth and don’t get me wrong. I still listen to the Science of Getting Rich every day by Wallace D Waddles. I still listen to, uh, Earl Nightingale, um, because I really believe those are biblically based as well. And I, I think there is a science to get, I think there is a science to being wealthy and it’s not just about money. It’s about relationships and it’s about health. And so I’m very, very curious about my spirituality. I think that’s a long answer to your question, but that’s really where my curiosity lies right now.

I love it. I, and I’m absolutely 100% with you. In fact, I’m, I’m doing the science of getting rich myself again for, you know, the umpteenth time. And, and actually I just started listening to some Earl Nightingale I found on YouTube, people have uploaded his stuff. So I’ve been listening to some of his and it’s like, oh, I see where Bob Proctor got some of his stuff from and other people. And it’s like, yeah, it’s, it’s amazing. And I, I think too, the, it is something that we start looking at, I think probably especially as we do get older. And when you experience things like, you know, with your, with your daughter, when she was, um, you know, going through those health challenges of just to try to be born and to try to live every day, um, that it does get, you started to think about that. So I appreciate you sharing that with me.

Oh My pleasure. My pleasure. The rest of everybody listening. Is there anything else, um, that I should have asked you about that you’d like to be able to share with us? Anything else about business life or anything that

Not that I can think of, we covered a good amount right there, you know, and of course we could talk for out. I mean, obviously, but I think for the purpose of your message right now and what we’ve talked about, I loved it. I thought it was a great conversation and again, it was authentic, you know, no script. It’s not like you sent me questions ahead of time. And I was, prepp be, these are brand new to me. Had never heard of before. And it is a great conversation. I hope people got something out of it.

Awesome. Well, I hope they did too. And if, uh, anyone is listening today and would like to, uh, you know, check you out and either check out the podcast or maybe learn more about, uh, possibly working with you, where is the, the best place for people to get ahold of you?

I’d say two places. Number one, wherever you get the podcast, wherever you download, ’em just look for every day is Saturday. Uh, it’s a great place to start. I do a daily podcast and it’s motivational and, uh, it’ll help you get, not make a bad five minutes and do a bad day. How about that? And then when you’re ready to launch your own podcast, you can go to launchmymovement.com and get started and I’ll work with you and work with you to make sure your show gets done the right way and you start getting downloads immediately.

Excellent. All right. Well, I will be sure and have all of that information in the show notes so that in case you are listening somewhere and you don’t have any way to be able to check it out, you can go to live love, engage podcast.com and you’ll be able to get, uh, all of that information there. So thank you so much for taking of time outta your day today and spending it with us, Sam. I really appreciate all the good work you’re doing in the world and yeah, glad that you were here with us today.

Thanks Gloria. My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. Oh, And thank all of you as well. I wanna thank you for listening and for watching and again, make sure that, uh, if you like what you’re here today, uh, that you tell a friend and, uh, so we can get some more people, uh, being able to benefit from lovely, uh, guests that we have on the program like Sam. So I encourage you to go out and do that. And also before I close as always, I encourage you to go out and live fully love, deeply and engage authentically.

Did you know that a majority of entrepreneurs tend to discount the importance of their work and a good number, feel their success is simply due to luck. I know from personal experience, that self-doubt can keep you from having the kind of life and business you desire. That’s why I’ve created a free guide called uniquely you how to move from self-doubt to self-love in four simple steps to claim your free guide, go to live love, engage.gift that’s live love, engage dot g-i-f-t.

In this episode, (livestreamed on Facebook and LinkedIn), you’ll learn why I believe journaling is one of the most important tools you can use to achieve your goals and create the life of your dreams!

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Enjoying what you’re hearing on Live. Love. Engage.? Subscribe on Goodpods or your favorite podcast platform, and  leave us a review on Podchaser or Apple. You can also watch the conversation on YouTube.

On this episode of Live. Love. Engage. we’re joined by Lisa Skinner to talk about how people are affected when their loved ones get dementia. Lisa is a behavior specialist on Alzheimer’s and its related dementias. She’s also a private advisor who helps families, caregivers, and health professionals gain a deeper understanding of this brain disease.

On this episode of the Live. Love. Engage. podcast:

Connect with Lisa

Not All Who Wander Need Be Lost Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/notallwhowanderneedbelost

More resources

Alzheimer’s Association: https://www.alz.org/

TRANSCRIPT

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Enjoying what you’re hearing on Live. Love. Engage.? Subscribe on Goodpods or your favorite podcast platform, and leave us a review on Podchaser or Apple. You can also watch the conversation on YouTube.

You are listening to the Live Love Engage podcast.

On today’s show, we’re going to be talking about how to manage the day to day challenges that people face with a loved one who is afflicted with dementia.

Stay tuned. I am Gloria Grace Rand, founder of the Love Method and author of the number one Amazon best seller, Live Love Engage How to Stop Doubting Yourself and Start Being Yourself. In this podcast, we share practical advice from a spiritual perspective on how to live fully, love deeply and engage authentically so you can create a life and business with more impact, influence and income. Welcome to live, love, engage.

Namaste and welcome back to Live Love Engage. Of course, that is I’m assuming that you’ve been listening or watching before, so that’s what I’m saying. Welcome back. And if you haven’t, catch him on the replay. But anyway, I am your host, Gloria Grace Rand, and I am delighted to have a wonderful woman on the show today who is going to educate us about the brain and things that happen to it. So she will I’ll get more into that in a minute. But first, I want to welcome Lisa Skinner to Live, Love Engage.

Hi, Gloria. Grace, thank you so much for having me as a guest on your show. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Well, I appreciate having you. And let me share with our listeners and viewers on YouTube just what your expertise is. And it’s something that affects a lot of people, unfortunately. So Lisa is a behavior expert in Alzheimer’s disease and other related dementia, and she has a lot of experience in this field. She’s been a community counselor, regional director of senior care facilities, a trainer, speaker and private advisor, helping thousands of families and caregivers understand the daunting challenges of brain disease for over 25 years. She’s also the author of a book called Truth, Lies and Alzheimer’s Its Secret Face and and really spends a lot of time helping people by offering counterintuitive solutions and tools so that they can manage symptoms of brain disease. And so I want to again welcome you and thought we’d start off, first of all, with having you explain the difference between Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Because I know a lot of times I think people use those terms interchangeably and I don’t think they should be doing that, should they? So maybe you can enlighten us on that.

Well, that’s absolutely correct. And there actually is a significant difference between the two. I’ll start with Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s disease is actually a brain disease that attacks the brain and damages the cells. There are over 100 known brain diseases that cause very similar behaviors and symptoms as Alzheimer’s disease. The hallmark for Alzheimer’s disease is memory, loss and confusion. That’s what most people associate the disease with. But it’s actually very much more complicated than that. Some of the more familiar brain diseases that have a lot of overlapping similarities or Parkinson’s disease, people can get that with dementia or without dementia. There’s Huntington’s disease, there’s vascular dementia, there’s Lewy body dementia, there’s frontotemporal dementia. So these are all brain diseases.

Now, when we use the term dementia, we’re actually using that term as a broad term to. Refer to the symptoms, signs and behaviours that are associated with all of those brain diseases that I just mentioned. Think of it like. Getting a cold because we’ve all experienced that probably in our lifetime. And you start to show a variety of symptoms. But everybody comes down with different symptoms when they have a cold or even the flu. Some people get body aches and chills and fevers. So those are the symptoms related to a cold. Dementia. Are the symptoms related to one of the brain diseases that causes dementia? And they’re all kind of overlap depending on what the disease is that’s causing the brain damage. They vary a little bit from disease to disease, but there’s a lot of similarities to the symptoms, the signs and the behaviors that are associated with a brain disease.

Oh, wow. Yeah. Who knew that? It was so complicated. And I guess that’s where having someone like yourself who’s been focused on this for so long, I think could be a real advocate for people who are going through this. Share with us, if you would, your your story. What what brought you into this line of work as a as a field to really focus in on I’m guessing you have maybe a personal interest in or something maybe that might have kind of sparked your interest in it?

Well, that’s really where it all originated. When I was a young teen, my grandmother developed what they called back then senile dementia. And she was reporting not only to her family, but also calling the police three or four or five times a day, reporting that there were birds that were living in her mattress and coming out at night and pecking her face that were men breaking into her home to harm her. And they were stealing things from her. And she saw rats running along the walls in her home, and she was just constantly calling the police. And so after many episodes like this and the police did go out and respond to her call and realize that. It was just what she was talking about was just impossible. They eventually tracked my mother down and they came over to our house and I happened to be there. And they said the police officer said to my mother, you need to do something with this woman. She is a nut and we don’t have the resources to keep responding to these these hallucinations and delusions that she’s having. And there was something about the way he said it that stuck in my craw because I was close to my grandmother. She only lived a few miles away. I grew up with her, and I knew that she was the farthest thing from a nut that I knew. And that really bothered me that a professional would come over and just tell my mother that this woman was a nut when they’re supposed to be there to try to help them. And back then, we really didn’t talk about her disease. We all were very aware of the behaviors that we were seeing and the story she was telling. So when I got to college, I took a class in human behavior and I was told that was it. I’ve always been very fascinated by what makes people tick and why do people behave the way they do and what changes people’s behavior when they get in certain social situations. I ended up pursuing my degree in human behavior.

And then having kind of filed that whole experience with my grandmother in in the background. And it was something that just really stuck with me. So I had an opportunity to go to work for an assisted living and memory care facility as a community counselor. And my job was to kind of onboard the family of what life in the facility was going to be like for their loved one. And I did all the assessments and the. Having them move in and got all the paperwork done and went to visit them like in the hospital and just made sure that they were appropriate for the placement. And. I realized within a few years of doing that job how little people really understood the disease, just like that policeman feared for. And since then, I’ve had seven more family members succumb to one of the brain diseases that causes dementia. So I had eight family members. I mean, that’s like unheard of.

Most people – one- they think that’s daunting.

I’ve had eight. So between my personal experience and really knowing what families go through. And then my professional experience and my degree and really having a kind of a comprehensive understanding of how to help people. The last 25 years and to be honest with you, things really haven’t changed that much. People still don’t have their heads really wrapped around the day to day challenges that surface as a result of this disease. All the strange behaviors and the stories that are told and the false beliefs and all of this is the disease talking to us. Is damage being done to the brain? And so this is what I do is I help people understand what’s happening to their loved one, how to decode the behaviors, how to figure out what triggered the behavior, because that’s a complicated process and it’s not a one size fits all answer and really help them get back to what matters with this disease is spending. Quality time with their loved one and having a less stressful relationship. I’ve had so many family members over the years tell me how stressful and how much anxiety it creates because they don’t know what to say. They don’t know how to respond to some of these false beliefs that that that person believes and some of the behaviors that are that are displayed. So this is what where I come in and I help people. Learn a new set of skills and a new way to communicate with their loved ones so they can really enjoy the time spent together. This is a long, drawn out disease. It lasts for years. My grandmother lived with it for 20 years. The average person, depending on what type of brain disease they have. The average is 8 to 15 years. That’s a very long time to try to manage a relationship with somebody that you really don’t want to abandon. But with all the the challenges that pop up on a minute by minute basis or day by day basis are so challenging.

That if I could help make that experience easier for them, then they could enjoy their visits and have less stressful time with them because a lot of family members, they spend their time arguing with their loved one and fighting with them and trying to correct them and convince them that whatever they’re saying isn’t true and everybody feels the stress of that. So that’s that’s where I help from a psychosocial approach.

That’s good. Yeah. I mean, I my only real experience of that was when and I’m thinking, let’s say I was. Yeah, I guess I was a teenager too. It was my, my grand grandfather who would he would just sort of walk out of the apartment and just wander away and and I and I possibly thinking that he lived in Florida at the time, but he had lived in Michigan. And I think possibly he was even probably trying to find locations in Michigan. And so I know it was definitely stressful on my grandmother. And I know it’s there’s like so much to go on with this. I mean, as you say, there’s like so many different symptoms. And and I think people who are with loved ones are probably feel really not only stressed, but also helpless at times because they’re watching their loved one, you know, that they’ve known change radically. You share because I know I’ve seen I’ve seen like some movies on TV or even films where they depict some of the symptoms and and how people how dementia or Alzheimer’s, for that matter, affects them. Can you share some some a little bit more about maybe some of the common behaviors that are associated with dementia and and and maybe even then also how people can recognize them early on.

Sure. So this is kind of what makes diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease and some of the other brain diseases difficult.

Because in the very early stages of the disease. The symptoms in the behaviors and the signs are actually very, very subtle. And oftentimes they can be mistaken for just normal aging forgetfulness that we all will experience as we age, which is perfectly, perfectly normal and nothing to worry about. It’s really isn’t until somebody reaches more of the middle stage of the disease, that’s the the most common time that they are actually diagnosed by their doctors is when they’re already into the middle stages, because the symptoms and the behaviors have now become very obvious. And people can live with this disease for years and it will either go unnoticed or family members might just kind of dismiss it as, Oh, she just forgot where she put her keys, kind of thing.

The biggest differences between having a brain disease that causes damage is it’s not unusual for us to misplace something and then find it again. But with true brain disease and true dementia, that person will rarely misplace things. But let’s say they misplace their keys. And then let’s say a family member finds them and hands them to their house, keys to their loved one. Person may look at those keys and not have a clue what they’re supposed to do with them. Completely are confused and forget what the purpose of those house keys are. They wouldn’t know that if they went outside and close the door behind them in at lock that that was the tool that they were supposed to use to get back in their house. That’s a significant difference between having dementia and normal aging forgetfulness. So so because it takes a really long time for these. Symptoms and behaviors that become so obvious that you realize the next step is to go to the doctor. They’re already pretty much into the disease. And those symptoms, what you can look for. One of the very common things that people do is repetitive behaviors. I’ve had so many family members over the years tell me how frustrating it is to them when their mother, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, asks the same question in the same conversation over and over and over and over again, because that’s a common thing that they do. Or they might tell you the same story in the same conversation over and over and over again, because the damage being done to the short term memory is such that they honestly didn’t remember that 2 seconds ago. They either told you that story or they asked you that question.

So there are tools and techniques that family members and caregivers can learn to. Diffuse that situation. So those are things that I talk about in my book and kind of get off that topic. So there are several things people can do. There’s more than one technique. And as I mentioned earlier, that’s not a one size fits all. There are things that you can there tools that we can put in your toolbox to help you kind of redirect that particular situation. But if that doesn’t work, then you can try something else. So other behaviors are agitation, and if that’s not handled properly, that can easily escalate into a catastrophic what we call catastrophic reaction, which would be an episode of extreme anger or even some physical violence or violence. That’s an easy thing to trigger. So there are best practices for how to respond to agitation. There are best practices for how to respond to false beliefs. And this is a counterintuitive response. Most people’s gut reaction to. Having your grandmother tell you there are birds living in her mattress and they only come out at night and peck her face. The person that’s hearing that story would be in disbelief and probably react like, Grandma, what are you talking about? Do you understand how crazy that sounds? There’s no way there could be birds living in your mattress. Come on, let’s go see. Pick up the mattress. Look underneath it. There’s not even a hole in the mattress. But in her world of dementia, she 1,000% believes that birds come out at night and peck at her face, and there is nothing anybody can do to change that reality for her. It’s not reality, but it’s her reality. So you have to be very careful how you respond to a false belief.

Because again it can trigger a catastrophic reaction, especially. And this is another thing that’s common. My mother-in-law did this at our house one time. She was visiting and she had dementia. And all of a sudden she stood up out of nowhere and insisted we take her home because she believed her husband was at home waiting for her to come home and fix him dinner. Well, he passed away five years earlier. So we had to be very careful how we respond to that false belief, because keep in mind, if we had told her, tried to correct her and steer her back into our reality. It could have been like she was hearing her husband had died for the very first time and gone into a panic. So these are very important skills to learn for caregivers, and they’re also very helpful skills to learn for family members and friends because it’s kind of like that proverbial box of chocolates from Forrest Gump. Any minute, any hour, any day when you are with somebody with Alzheimer’s disease or any dementia, you never know what you’re going to get. Anything can pop up a behavior. And that’s the other thing that I think it’s important for people to know is. People mistake behaviors for trying to be difficult to be disobedient. I mean, it’s not that way at all. I mean, some people do get agitated, but to just intentionally be mean, that’s kind of a rare occurrence. And you see it most with a brain disease called frontotemporal lobe disease.

That affects your personality and your emotions and your reasoning. But with Alzheimer’s disease, which causes dementia, most people, they at some point lose their ability to communicate with. Everybody, your loved one, their loved ones, your caregivers in the way that we were used to, by verbalizing something or articulating something, they lose that at some point. And the only way that they have to tell us that there’s something wrong, something’s bothering them, something they want, something they need, something is through behaviors. That’s why I said we have to learn how to decode the behavior, how to figure out what it is they need, want, etc., and find out what triggered what triggered that behavior. And it’s almost like going through that process of elimination, trying to figure out what’s what’s going on. And it’s not always the same thing, even though you see a similar behavior. So living with Alzheimer’s disease nonetheless is extremely challenging because of all the symptoms that fall under this umbrella that we call dementia. And it takes some very specialized skills to kind of navigate through it and know.

And it’s also really helpful to know old habits of your loved one they enjoyed before because these all play into this new. Life of theirs. This new world of theirs. This new reality of theirs.

Yeah, absolutely. One thing I was going to ask is let’s say somebody know their family member, maybe, you know, their parent or some other close family, or sometimes it can be your spouse as has. Let’s say they get diagnosed with dementia. What would you recommend to them? What what? Other than, of course, following whatever their doctor recommends, what would be like their next step for them to take?

My recommendation would be to learn as much as you can about the disease. What to expect on a day to day basis. There are some wonderful resources out there, too, like the Alzheimer’s Association. They have a hotline number that if a family member is experiencing a situation that they just don’t know how to handle, you can call that number website and get advice from a professional. And understand the different behaviors and symptoms and signs that show up and then the possible meanings behind them. So again, you can kind of get to the root of what triggered that behavior. And I think one of the very important things to understand about Alzheimer’s disease, which is the number one cause of dementia, the most common brain disease that we are familiar with is. The hallmark, again, is affecting the short term memory. And when people have these false beliefs, the reason why it happens and this is the way I explain it and people really appreciate this explanation because they can really relate to what’s happening. So think of the short term memory is having an on switch and an off switch in the very beginning stages of Alzheimer’s disease. That person’s short term memory is on and functioning fine more than it’s off as they progress to the mid stages of the disease. Sometimes that switches on and sometimes that switches off.

So when it’s all of a sudden suddenly goes off, the short term memory is not functioning properly. And then the person starts pulling from their long-term memory because that stays intact by the end of the disease. The short-term memory pretty much is gone completely, and that person regresses back to a period of time from their long term memory, and that’s where they stay. And in 25 plus years that I’ve been doing this, everybody kind of ends up in a different part of their life. I’ve seen people regress to childhood. I’ve seen people regress to adolescence. I’ve seen people regress to the prime of their professional career. That’s what I advise people. Listen for the cues, because once that short term memory switch either gets shut off or is gone completely, you will kind of be able to figure out where they have ended, where they have gone to in their past based on what they’re talking about. If they’re talking like a child and talking about, where’s my mommy, where’s my daddy? I need to go home. I’m scared. You know, they’ve gone back to their childhood. My mother-in-law, when her short term memory switch was shut, was shut off temporarily. She regressed to her adolescence. And because of that, she didn’t recognize my husband as her son. Because in her mind, she was 12 or 13 years old. She hadn’t met her husband yet, had five children. But she knew she knew him. So she called him Otto, thinking that he was her brother. So if a family, if your loved one doesn’t recognize you at any given time, it’s probably because that short term memory switch got shut off and they’re back in a past part of their life. They almost always know that they know you from someplace, but if they can’t recognize you by your actual name, it’s because in their mind you couldn’t exist yet. Does that make.

Sense? Yeah, it does. Yeah. Yeah. And. And I’m sure it’s. It’s probably challenging and and and heartbreaking sometimes I know certainly like if if you’re not especially I can only imagine like say a spouse or a child with a parent and they’re not recognizing them. It’s hard. But then I think at the same time, if then you can meet them where they are, then that will probably make things a lot better for both of you and being able to, you know, navigate that part of their condition from then on, I suppose.

Well, with Alzheimer’s disease, that’s the recommended best practice. And we call it joining their reality. Based on everything we’ve kind of discussed today, I think people can probably understand why it’s the recommended best practice. The exception to that would be with Lewy body dementia, which is the one that. Robin Williams was diagnosed with a lot of the symptoms and the behaviors are similar to Alzheimer’s dementia. But the hallmark of that disease is hallucinations and delusions. It’s a completely different part of the brain than Alzheimer’s is. So with that type of dementia, it’s best to just be completely upfront with, oh, no, that’s not possible, and tell the person you’re having a hallucination. What do you see? Because I know you’re seeing something, but I’m not seeing it. So tell me what you see. But with the other dementias joining, their reality is the best practice because it minimizes the situation from escalating into a more serious situation. And as I said, there’s nothing anybody can do or say to steer that person back into our reality. What short term memory switch is off, even if it’s temporary? So the best way to handle that situation situation is just to listen for the cues.

And just go along with whatever they’re believing for that time. And unless they’re at the end of the disease in the short term, memory is completely gone. That switch will go back on eventually and then back in a world that aligns with you. But while it doesn’t, it’s really not going to do any. Serve any benefit for anybody to argue, to correct, to try to steer them back into your reality because it just is not going to work.

Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, there’s so much that goes on with the brain and this is just one aspect of it. I’m having memories of myself, of of other things can cause these same types of symptoms, too. And it’s not just dementia, like, for instance, like hallucinations. My father was an alcoholic and I remember as a teen he went through I guess he was going through withdrawal. And I walked in on him having hallucinations and it scared the crap out of me because I didn’t know what he was talking about, what he was seeing. And so I think even if you come across someone you know, who you know with dementia, who is having that stuff, I think hopefully if you can talk to the doctor and know that that is a possible side effect that they could have, then you can be more prepared, hopefully, especially if you’re if you got kids involved, that they don’t get freaked out because even though I was a teenager, it still freaked me out.

Oh, I can understand. And you are absolutely right, because alcohol actually is one of the things that causes can cause dementia. Every alcoholic gets dementia, but it actually is very common and it’s one of the only types of conditions that could potentially be reversed through recovery because Alzheimer’s disease, the other brain diseases that cause dementia are progressive and you don’t recover from them. But a person like your father would developing dementia due to his extreme alcoholism and he was suffering hallucinations and things like that. If he were to go into a recovery program and he became clean, as they say.

Those. That dementia could could disappear with the alcoholism. But it’s very rare for some of these to reverse once they’ve said it.

Yeah, absolutely. Is there anything about Alzheimer’s in general or dementia that you wish you had? Or I would say actually more of the support for people. Support for family members and things that you wish you had known when you first started out.

Well, yes. I ended up running a support groups later on in my career. For family members whose. Loved one was suffering from one of the brain diseases, and that was an eye opening experience for me. And I wished I had a lot of the knowledge that I gained through my support group. I did it for years in the very early stages of my career. That I gained from running leading the support groups because I really. Kind of. Even though I had eight of my own family members and I count many, many families the support group format. Just people just open up that necessarily reveal their deepest, deepest concerns and feelings. And when it was just like a business situation, when they were my clients and I didn’t have the extended relationship with them, they held a lot back. But in this group, it was no holds barred. They just and I learned so much about what people were really suffering through.

And one of the things that I discovered that I didn’t realize before was just how destructive having a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease or another dementia was to them. Tearing them apart. Watching their loved one deteriorate. It was very hurtful when they would tell me that my mom didn’t recognize me today. And I’ve been so dedicated and so loyal to her. And they were taking it very personally. So it opened up a completely new window for me to look through, to understand what this really is doing to loved ones that yeah, I had a glimpse of it before, but not to the degree that I think I gained that insight from leading the support groups.

And that’s awesome that it’s good that you have that experience. And, and I know in I think in any type of situation, being with people who are going through the same type of thing that you’re going through, like I attended grief support when after my sister passed. And it’s, it’s really comforting to be able to talk with other people who may be experienced, even if it’s not exact same thing. It could be something similar. And it’s like, oh, thank goodness. You know, I’m not I’m not the only one feeling these feelings. And so I can imagine that.

It truly is. And one of the common things I would hear from the attendees of the support group is a lot of people would express that they were depressed.

And depressed for a long time because of what this was doing to them, kind of going through this journey with their loved one. And somebody else would say, Oh, you are? Well, I kind of feel that way, too, but I was kind of embarrassed to say something, so that would open up. Now, I’m not the only one in the room that feels that way. And other people would say, Yeah, I am too. And and it’s that sense of camaraderie. And I’m not the only person that’s that’s feeling this way. And maybe there really isn’t something wrong with me. This is a normal reaction that a lot of that came out in support group environments. So I would definitely recommend support groups to anybody who is going through this with a family member, a loved one or friend that it’s really having a psychological impact, their emotional impact on them, because as you said earlier, you feel totally helpless.

Yeah, that’s for sure. Well, I know we’ve only really scratched the surface on this, but in the subject. But I do think we’ve covered a lot today. And if someone listening wants to know more, maybe they want to be able to even get a copy of your book or something. How can people get in touch with you?

A couple of ways? So I have been maintaining a blog for about seven years and you can go on to Facebook. It’s on Facebook and it’s the name of the blog is Not All Who Wander Need Be Lost. And I post a lot of tips on there and things that hopefully will be helpful and valuable to anybody who’s looking for guidance in this situation. My new book is actually available on Amazon, Barnes Noble’s other fine booksellers, and it’s called Truth, Lies and Alzheimer’s Its Secret Faces. And the reason why I added on that it’s secret faces because of all of these. Unpredictable things that pop up on a day to day basis that people either aren’t aware of or aren’t expecting. So I talk a lot about those things in the book and then how to effectively respond and react to a lot of the behaviors and those type of things. And again, I think the Alzheimer’s Association website is an excellent resource. They have that hotline for people to get help and a lot of valuable information as well.

All right. Well, I will be sure to have your information, and I’ll also put the Alzheimer’s link in the show notes as well. So you don’t have to Google it. You can have it right there when you’re referring back to this episode, especially if you’re not somewhere where you can jot that information down right now. So thank you so much, Lisa, for number one, doing the good work that you’ve been doing in the world and helping people in this area. And thank you for spending some time with us today and enlightening our audience. I appreciate it.

You’re very welcome. And thanks again for having me. It’s been a really nice pleasure to to be on your show and and enlighten people with this.

Absolutely. And thank all of you for listening and for watching and YouTube. And again, you can always go to Live, Love, Engage, podcast and check out other episodes as well as check out there’s a new platform. Well, it’s not that new. I guess it’s been around for a little while. It’s new to me. I’m new on it. It’s called Good Pods. And you can also find us there as well. So until next time, as always, I like to encourage you to go out and live fully, love deeply and engage authentically.

Did you know that a majority of entrepreneurs tend to discount the importance of their work and a good number feel their success is simply due to luck. I know from personal experience that self-doubt can keep you from having the kind of life and business you desire. That’s why I’ve created a free guide called Uniquely You How to Move from Self Doubt to Self-Love In four simple steps to claim your free guide go to live love engage dot gift that’s live love engage g-i-f-t.

I had an opportunity recently to interview two close friends and spiritual teachers of mine for the podcast. Angel Therapy Practitioner Priestess Patricia and Master Channel Queen Jess Lee joined me to talk about their monthly Spirit Circle Series that helps others achieve their dream life through divinely guided messages.

On this episode of the Live. Love. Engage. Podcast:

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In this episode we’re joined by Omar L. Harris. Omar is the Founder and managing partner at Intent Consulting, a firm dedicated to improving employee experience and organizational performance. He has more than 20 years of experience as a global pharmaceutical executive.

On this episode of the Live. Love. Engage. podcast:

Connect with Omar

Website: https://www.omarlharris.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omarlharris/

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You are listening to the Live Love Engage podcast. On today’s show, why businesses need leaders who are a force for good versus being a toxic boss. Stay tuned. I am Gloria Grace Rand, founder of the Love Method and author of the number one Amazon best seller, Live Love Engage How to Stop Doubting Yourself and Start Being Yourself. In this podcast, we share practical advice from a spiritual perspective on how to live fully, love deeply and engage authentically so you can create a life and business with more impact, influence and income. Welcome to Live, Love, Engage,

Namaste and welcome to another edition of Live Love Engage. And I am Gloria Grace Rand, of course, your host and I am delighted to have a gentleman on the show today who is going to be really enlightening us about how to make companies better. I’ll leave it at that for now. But we’re going to go into much more detail in a second. But first off, I want to welcome Omar L. Harris to live, love engage.

Thank you very much, Gloria. How are you this evening?

I’m doing very well, thank you. And I’m looking looking forward to this discussion because I’ve been doing my research on you and you’re quite the accomplished gentleman. And so I’m actually going to dive into that first. Before we get into asking questions, I want to just share with our listeners and viewers on YouTube just what what you’re all up to in the world. So Mr. Harris is the founder of Intent Intent Consulting. He has over 20 years of global pharmaceutical executive experience. Building teams worked on four continents, and he’s been the former general manager of GSK and Allergan. And he’s also a speaker and an award winning bestselling author of five books, including his latest, which is something we are going to be talking about in a little bit. It’s called Be a Jedi Leader, Not a Boss. And I love that title. So it has nothing to do with Star Wars? No. Instead, it is leadership and the era of corporate social justice, equity, diversity and inclusion. And and if that’s not enough, I guess in your well, I’m sure you’ve had to do this by being a global executive. He speaks five languages, also plays seven instruments and started his first company at the tender age of seven. So I guess you’ve you’ve got a bit even though you’ve worked in a corporate world, I guess you also have a bit of the entrepreneurial spirit about you. So I thought we’d start with that is to tell us, tell us your overall journey that got you where you are today. What did that look like?

Yes, well, I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but I lived all over the US as growing up. So I moved to West Virginia, Lake Charles, Louisiana. I went to college in Tallahassee, Florida, at Florida A&M University. Down the street from you or up the street, rather.

Yeah.

I’ve also lived in Detroit, Michigan, Philadelphia, parts of New Jersey as well in my US part of my journey. I got into pharmaceuticals early when I was at Florida A&M, when I did my first internship with Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, which everyone knows very well because of the vaccine. But I was a sales rep with Pfizer in Detroit, Michigan for eight months. I did an international marketing rotation with Pfizer in Sao Paulo, Brazil, which was my first international assignment at the age of 23. I graduated with my MBA at 25 and then began matriculating through the pharmaceutical industry from that point on, primarily in marketing at first, then getting into leadership roles and then ultimately operations, which led me to be a general manager in countries like Indonesia and Brazil as well. So really along my journey I got a taste for positive psychology really early in my career, got a taste for servant leadership very early in my career as well, working for some phenomenal, phenomenal leaders who really supported me and really developed me early in my career. Got to do some entrepreneurial things at the right stages of my career as well, and get gained from experience from failure actually. And then also learned from kind of being isolated in different cultural experiences, living in Istanbul, Turkey and also Indonesia and Brazil.

So really have had a pretty interesting journey. I’m somebody who I call myself a a seeker. I’m always trying to understand more about the world, the universe and. And not someone who thinks I figured out anything as of yet. But whatever I have figured out, I try to pass on to to everyone else who is interested in trying to go on the same type of journey. I really believe that leadership is a journey, and it disheartens me that people, when they get into a managerial position, they stop developing themselves. And this is really it’s when you need the most development is when you become responsible for other people’s lives, basically. And so that’s when you need the most development, the most support. But it seems like people actually take the take the easy way. And so I’m trying to help break up that paradigm. Very passionate about building new leaders, empowering new leaders, and letting people know that there are multiple paths to success. You don’t have to do it the way that we’ve seen it be done. You don’t have to do it with the ego. You can do it with love, actually, and be just as successful. Even more successful because people you bring people with you and you build people up.

Wow. What struck me about what you just talked about was the fact that you you had your first opportunity to really work in a different country early on, I mean, in your early twenties. And I’m wondering how has that experience being able to be working in different countries, experiencing different cultures? Has that how did that impact you, maybe even personally, but also professionally in in your desire for leadership? Because I think so so often, you know, living here in the United States and people who don’t get a chance to get outside of the United States, we get this very narrow view of certainly of the world. And and I think it hurts us in being able to not only even deal with our own peers, but also then dealing with people who are living in the different countries or have a different culture. And I’m especially impressed with this because I’m so blessed that my kids are sort of following in that path. My daughter is actually living in Hungary right now, and my son has already taken a trip to to Portugal of the summer. And so they’re starting to take advantage of that and learning about other cultures.

Yeah. I think that it’s fundamental for me. It was fundamental to get that experience early in my career. I think that it required living overseas. You know, it’s one thing, it’s visiting, other things living. So to survive overseas is a whole different beast, that it will bring out different things of yourself. I don’t know if you’re familiar with. I’m sure you are. The Johari window concept of the known unknown, the no known and basically the four quadrants of self awareness. And so I really believe that the unknown unknown zone, which is basically, you know, things you don’t know about yourself and things that others don’t know about you as well. You can only figure that out by throwing yourselves into these kind of foreign experiences. So I think a great way to know, learn about yourself is to put yourself into a foreign context and and survive and go from surviving to thriving in that in that context. And I think that that was something that I learned early on. I remember in an early experience in in Brazil when I got there, I didn’t speak the language. And so I was basically eating McDonald’s twice a day based out of my own. Like, what was the name of it was Super Size Me. I was doing that.

I did my own experiment when I was 23 years old and I could only eat the big bad combo because the only thing I could say was numero one, which is number one. I couldn’t even ask for an apple pie for dessert because I couldn’t say the word for pie. It was a very frustrating experience, but it gave me all the fuel I needed to want to learn the language because otherwise I was going to be eating McDonald’s the rest of my life. So I think that that that was the kind of thing you learn, simple as that, but also much more complex lessons as well that I picked up, you know, learning in these cultures and really appreciating someone else’s history and learning that, you know, the history of how the history determines the present and really getting that context to culturally, especially when you’re leading people of a different culture as well, you really need to understand kind of the historical background and appreciate that background while still trying to disrupt some of that background if you’re trying to modernize leadership approaches and whatnot. So I think that but first thing to do is appreciate and try to assimilate as much as possible. Then you can innovate on top of that.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s great that you’ve been able to do that. And so so have you then incorporated a lot of those lessons in like when you came back to the States? Well, and actually. Well, let me ask you, did you when you were working overseas then, did you come back and work in the United States then before you left the corporate world and started your own your own firm?

Oh, definitely. So my story is kind of bouncing back and forth by being I think in my early part of my career, I had that internship experience in Brazil when I was 23, I think got my MBA at 25 and I started working in the US and I worked in the US from 2000 to up until 2012, so I had ten years in the United States. Well, I’m sorry I said that wrong. I worked in the U.S. from 2000 to 2006. Then I went back to Brazil for two years. Then I came back to the US in 2008 and I was in the US from 2008 to 12. Then I moved to Turkey, Indonesia, Brazil, then back to the US. So I’ve kind of been kind of a bouncing around. But the one thing I’ll say about the Brazilian experience specifically is what leadership style that works in Brazil is the servant leadership style. Because one of the things that you pick up there is that they expect the leaders to, even if you could be the most rich person in the world, they expect their leaders to be humble and to be and to be people who are relatable and to be people who are who are who are very likable. So the more likable, more relatable and more humble you are, the more you can get out of your people. So if you’re assimilating, I grab that those tools and I put them into my toolkit. And then it was my first leadership experience as well. So you just take that forward and it was so very helpful to have lead in that cultural context because then I bring that back to the US of 2008 and then refine on top of it. Then I go back to I go to Istanbul and I’m working with people from 30 different countries across a vast region and that skill set is even more important in that context. And then so it’s it goes on from there.

Well, let’s, let’s shift gears just slightly, but let’s talk a little bit more now about this concept that you have about being a Jedi leader. And so and it’s you’re really talking about just as in Star Wars, that it’s like being a force for good. I love how you came up with that. People who are going to empower and enable them. So why is it so important for businesses to to adopt that type of leadership style?

For businesses, it’s a means to an end. Right. It’s been it’s been a way of achieving an objective for for millennia. And if you think about the way the changes that have undergone or that have happened in business over the course of the last 200 years, you begin to understand, you know, the Industrial Revolution was about primarily poor rural white workers coming from the the fields, from the suburbs to the cities to gain opportunity. And then they built the the that they built the industrial revolution on the back of that. And then during World War two, you have women coming into the workforce because the men were all fighting. And then that that introduces and then you have civil rights and you have more African Americans coming into the workforce. And along this journey, leadership is not changing. But but the composition of the people doing the work is dramatically changing. And now we live in a world where we have the most diverse workforce in history in terms of generations different nationalities, different ethnicities, different gender identities, different sexual orientations, all blending together, trying to do the same work. And leadership is lagging far behind. The science of leadership is lagging far behind the actual necessities of leadership, which is why we see trends like the great resignation today and things of this nature are happening. And and when you think about the four words in Jedi, justice, equity, diversity and inclusion, they become a lot more.

The more heterogeneous the group is, the more it’s a requirement for you to begin to think about how they perceive the work environment, a work environment that wasn’t built for them and hasn’t necessarily evolved over time. Right. So some of the same practices and principles that were in place in the early 1900s, the 40 hour workweek that still exists in 2021. Right. Punching the clock, which was invented in the early 1900s. All these archaic kind of concepts of management and leadership are still in place, but the people doing the work is so different. And so they because they’re different, the experience of work is different. And so these injustices persist and these inequities are prevalent and people don’t feel appreciated for the unique qualities they’re bringing to the to the work. And they don’t feel a sense of belonging, really. They don’t feel like that that anybody cares about them in their place of work. And so for me, this is fundamental work. This is work that should have been done a long time ago. This is work that all of the management science luminaries and Stephen Covey have been talking about for 20 years. And despite selling millions of hundreds of millions of books, leadership is not changing.

Yeah.

And so that’s really kind of that creates a lane and an avenue for more people to keep speaking about this issue. But for me, coming from a corporate background, not from a theoretical or academic background, I have seen these things and now it’s about so this is what I know what happens. I know why they happen. And I know also I can recommend strategies to navigate this in a more effective way for everyone.

Why? Why should someone like let’s say, why should a manager really follow your advice and really do it? I mean, really, because a lot of times, as you said earlier on, you know, it’s like people take the safe way out. They don’t they’re not pursuing, you know, even even even personal growth. When they get to be a manager, they’re not doing the things they need to do. They sort of get stuck in. And so you get stuck in your comfort zone and you don’t stretch yourself. So why should they be able to? What is it going to be? What’s in it? People always want to know what’s in it for me. So it’s like, you know, it’s like the bottom line. It’s like, oh, yeah, yeah. It sounds great to be able to have my people feeling great, but they’re they want to know, you know, why should I really do this? What do you say to that?

I mean, what’s in it for you now is your career survival? We’re at a point, a juncture in time now where these things are just not going to be tolerated anymore. People are voting with their feet. They’re leaving bad managers as a report early to this this year from the predictive index talking about the causes of the great resignation. And 64% of employees who had a bad manager are contemplating leaving their company versus only 27% of employees with a good manager. So this is fundamental work, actually, other other work from I read a report from McKinsey and Company last week over the fact about the Women in Work Report, and it talks about the fact that women leaders are far better at superior leaders then than their male counterparts because of these soft skills and soft attributes that we talk about. And so it all adds up to the same equation. Leadership, the standard is changing. If you don’t get on the train of the new standard, you are not going to have a manager position moving forward. So what’s in it for you is your livelihood. What’s in it for you is is your ability, your license to operate as a manager, your ability to get things done and your ability to succeed. Because the ego driven ambition, me, me, me approach to climbing the corporate ladder is going out of the window in favor of leaders who know how to maximize collective talent. Lead collaboration and lead collaboration, generate innovation, solve problems faster in an agile manner, and generate results consistently. And. A me, me, me manager just can’t do it. It’s literally impossible for you to do that in today’s day and age. In most sectors now there are some sectors that are so lagging behind. I mean, financial and maybe pharmaceutical, even health care are lagging behind, but they’re going to catch up. Excellent. And if you want a job of the future, you want to work in tech, you want to work anything like that. You’re going to have to really embrace these principles.

I want to talk to you for a second. If it’s okay that I was reading an article that you had done on your blog about where you were talking about Simone Biles and and the degree of difficulty and having that be versus and and coinciding that or contradicting with with privilege people. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I thought it was it was a really well done and really gave me pause to think about it, that it’s like we do need to consider that.

Thank you for that question. I think that it occurred to me that. We don’t have a measure of what it takes to succeed. And we we really don’t take into account what everyone’s journey is to succeed. I’m listening to. A book by Chris Gardner right now. Who’s the guy from The Pursuit of Happiness that Smith plays in the movie? And he’s a very successful businessman and author and global speaker now. But he was talking about, if you think about his story, a man who was near homeless with a single child trying to break into investment banking with no previous experience and not only getting in passing the test to become a successful investment banker. If you compare his story to someone who grew up in the suburbs and went to the best schools and one of the best university and happened upon investment banking and was always expected to succeed in that field. It is the degree of difficulty for Chris Gardner versus that other individual is is is significant. And and we have and we have no way to reckon for that in our in our talent management conversations today. And in corporations, we don’t take it into account someone’s identity or someone’s struggle. I guess we’re trying to treat everybody the same. But actually that’s where inequity comes in, is when you start treating everyone the same. If you have a single mother of two who is an executive versus a young upstart, you know, single, single woman who’s in her or her late twenties, their experience of work is not the same.

And there should be some credit due to the person who does it while dealing with tougher stuff. There should be some. Some degree of. Of consideration when we have conversations about someone’s all round skill set, they’re intangibles. Because, you know, for me, if you can succeed, despite all the baggage are handled, you’re handling that. That means to me you’re going to be a significantly better leader than someone who’s never had to navigate any obstacles. Right. Someone who life has been basically blue sky and and never really had to to to face any real adversity. So I think that we know that adversity makes us better. We know that a ship’s captain is not determined in calm seas, but in stormy seas. And so if handling adversity is something we value so much in leaders today, then we should be accounting for that adversity. When we talk about talent management, potential, all these things, we just look at the work that’s being done and a period of time. But we never account for the degree of difficulty that every different people are going through because we don’t even know we’re not asking the right questions.

Yeah.

And so and so this is where the whole trying to be so, so egalitarian and equal treat everybody the same way actually is a disservice to people from underprivileged identities because they don’t get credit for how hard it is for them to be just to be in the same room as some other people.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that’s why I say I loved that article because it really did hit home to me because, yeah, there are people who, as you say, who who struggle or who have grown up with some disadvantages and then they still succeed versus someone who had it a bit easier. And so how and to just be able to say, okay, well, you’re you’re you’re both the same. Well, not really, no. Because someone was perhaps hungrier. And I don’t necessarily mean that literally, but they were hungrier in spirit to be able to get the job done.

And actually, I want to argue that privilege should come with a higher degree of altruism, but it doesn’t. So if you were privileged and you didn’t have to navigate these barriers to get to where you are, then you should be far more grateful for what you receive due to no effort of your own to be far more altruistic than we see in our society today. So for me, if you are privileged, if you come from a privileged background, I would another blog about reconciling my own privilege and talking about the fact that I’ve received a lot of privilege in my in my journey of my life. And and that’s what’s made me so humble and altruistic today is, is the fact that I, I, I don’t forget about my privileges, and I know that it’s my job to pay them forward to others versus just basically say, hey, that’s the way of the world. You know, that’s your journey. This is my journey, you know, and it’s nobody’s fault. And we have nobody has any responsibility or accountability for anyone else’s journey in life. I think that’s a I think that’s a flawed argument.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think it’s it’s cop out is what comes to mind. I don’t I don’t like that because I do. You know, it’s like I do believe in injustice and being fair and with fairness. You also need to look at all all of the everything, not just not just just certain areas, but looking at the whole person. So hopefully folks that are listening to this will heed that. I appreciate you talking about.

Fairness is, first of all, if the starting point isn’t the same, that it’s never going to be fair. Right? So so that’s one. So we talk about fairness as if there was a great moment where everybody got to the same level playing field and we were now on the same level playing field. And basically it’s all equal from here. No. If you perceive someone being equal to you because they they have struggled for that equality, they’ve they’ve struggled to be in the same place as you. I mean, I remember there’s the comedian Chris Rock has a great bit in one of his shows where he talks about, you know, he lives in the neighborhood with Jay-Z and Mary J. Blige. Right. The core the absolute best at what they do in entertainment. He’s the best comedian. She’s the best singer, and he’s the best rapper. And and if you want to know who their neighbor is, if their neighbor is a dentist, a white dentist or a or a lawyer, not the best lawyer. Just a lawyer. Just but to get to that neighborhood, he has to be the absolute pinnacle of his career and profession to be able to reside in the same place as a dentist or a doctor or a lawyer and who are not even the best at what they do.

Yeah, absolutely. It’s a challenging world we live in and the hopeful thing. I think is is that there are folks like you out there who are bringing these subjects forward and talking about it. And hopefully it will continue to get through to people and they will start to be able to implement these things, these changes that are so needed. I want to go back a little bit because I think it’s also important for people to know that, you know, the entrepreneurial journey is is not easy. And even for people who, as you said, you know, you had some privilege, but you did mention that you had made some mistakes or had some failures along the way. So can you share what was something you failed at and maybe what was the lesson you learned from it?

Yeah. So what I basically, my my corporate career was interrupted twice. It was interrupted in 2009 when another company bought my company, my farmer company. And I decided at that moment to take the severance package and go off on my own. And so then I ended up working for a startup where we were trying to basically create some inclusive technology. For corporations. And really what I learned in doing that work was basically you have to make sure you have a good partner. So, you know, I didn’t pick the right partner. We didn’t have the same vision for what we were trying to accomplish, probably because we have different we’re from different generations. So my partner was a gentleman who had survived cancer, who was in his who’s in his seventies and a six foot five Italian with wide hair and who survived cancer cancer survivor. And I was at time with 30, 34, 34 years old. You know, the world is my oyster and trying to create the next big thing. And so we can never get on the same page about what we were trying to accomplish with this with this business. And it ultimately sunk the business. And so, you know, some conflict is productive and it actually can drive towards better results. But some conflict is destructive. And if you can’t get on the same page around the ultimate goal you’re trying to pursue in the short term, even a medium term, as with as an entrepreneur, if your partners are not aligned to that, let’s say you have partners who who their exit strategy is to sell in two years.

And and you want to build something in ten years. It’s not going to work. And so and so we fail to raise the money to sell the company because we were trying to just build the application out. And so we didn’t follow the traditional we kind of beta testers and then, you know, it was always about making money versus making meaning. And so I learned from that experience that when you try to make money, you, that’s your whole purpose. You will probably fail more quickly than if you try to make meaning something meaningful that changes and enhances people’s lives. That will be something that’s much more has a lot more longevity to it. And so you don’t have to rush that process because you’re trying to make meaning and meaning comes from the outside end. Like you can’t you can’t determine what meaning is for someone else, they have to tell you. And so that’s a longer process to figure that out. And so that was that was an important entrepreneur lesson that I gained at that time of my in my career.

Awesome. Well, thank you for sharing that. I appreciate that. And and yeah, I do know that picking the right partner is is very important. I was working with someone that it started off great. And then we we did we started having different visions for how we wanted to take things. And and I realized I finally said, you know, I think we’re better off just going our separate ways. And and luckily we hadn’t really gotten too far along in even monetizing anything. And so it was a nice clean break. But yeah, you’ve got to be very, very careful about that and and really vet the person and I guess get to know them and what their goals are early on. So I appreciate that you sharing that story with us. Is there anything that you wish you had known when you first started out, especially even other than that, you know, even in some of your entrepreneurial ventures that you’ve had?

I think that, you know, I a lot of I was waiting to be in a position of influence to make changes happen within corporations, you know, kind of working the inside track and you change it from the inside. Right. But you you’re trying to wait until you have enough weight behind your position to make change. And and I realize that’s a faulty premise. I think that you can make things you can make change happen at any level in our organization just by being courageous and speaking up and letting people know just what you see and what you don’t see. So, for example, when I came into my my career as a marketer with an MBA in 2002, I didn’t see any other African American people in marketing. So I could have basically told my boss or talk to HR or said, Hey, what are we doing? I had mentors, African American mentors in H.R. and we could have had a conversation about what strategize about how do we do this better, you know, because we’re not seeing it happen. But you don’t think it’s. I didn’t take responsibility for that. I just observed it and noted it, but I didn’t do anything about it. And so I think that if something bothers you, it’s an opportunity that that little that little itch you have, these are all opportunities for improvement. It’s the same thing that drives the entrepreneurial instinct is that these little problems you see, that’s the basis of entrepreneurism is basically solving problems that other people may feel, but they haven’t.

No one else has done it or no one else has done it the way you want to do it. And so listen to that little voice, because that’s the beginning of innovation and beginning of change. And everybody can make change happen from from any any position in an organization. And if you work for an organization that doesn’t support those type of changes, then you can find an organization that does. And you learn that early on, if you speak up and get shut down, then it’s probably better for you to go someplace where you can actually contribute from the beginning. Because it’s because you’re new in an organization doesn’t mean you don’t have anything to contribute. And so I think that that’s something that I would have I would have if I could go back, I would probably be a lot more assertive early on related to that particular issue because it still hasn’t been solved. I mean, you still don’t see a lot of a lot of diversity in certain roles like finance or I.T. or marketing, sales, leadership, you know, you don’t see and these are kind of high profile roles and organizations that you still don’t see that coming through. And it’s because everyone’s waiting for someone else to do the job. We’re all we’re all waiting for somebody to come and do it and no one’s doing it. So we might as well do it. We might as well do it.

So I think that’s absolutely yeah, that’s way definitely so very good advice because yeah, if you wait and that’s that’s something that I’ve learned as well because if you wait too long for anybody else to do it, then it’s not going to get done. So you might as well do it yourself. So that’s awesome. Is there anything else that I haven’t asked you about that you’d like to share with our listeners today?

No, I think I think that the last part about this type of leadership and this leadership transformation that we’re advocating for is it’s a better way to live. It enhances your life. So, you know, it’s not only about your livelihood and maintaining keeping your license to operate, but it also enhances your own life. When you connect with people individually and understand their stories and start to develop them, you you get boosted by every single person you help achieve. And developing Rome. And so this is something that I would like everyone to experience for themselves. The leader is that that that that that boost that comes from actually not just. Not just achieving a number or whatever it is, but helping the people around you get better. That’s that’s the best kind of boost in corporations.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here and for sharing your wisdom with us today and also for all the good work that you’re doing. And I really appreciate it. If someone listening would like to know more about you, maybe see how they can get a hold of one of your books. What’s the best way for people to reach out.

On my website? Omar L Harris dot com has all my other links. If you’re on LinkedIn, you can also find me under Omar L Harris. Those are the two best places for us to interact.

Okay, awesome. Well, thank you again for being with us today. Really appreciate it. And I’m sure I have all your information in the show notes for those who are listening. So thank you.

Thank you so much.

All right. And thank you out there as well for listening and for subscribing. And in fact, I also want to give a shout out to Liz Kelly, who recently left us a five star review on Pod Chaser. So we really appreciate that. And if you would like to leave us a review, I might shout give you a shout out as well. So take advantage of that. And if you also would ever like to have a chance to chat with me about anything, you can also go to engage with Gloria Dotcom and set up an appointment. And if you need some help getting clear on your goals, I’m happy to help you out with that. So until next time, as always, I encourage you to go out and live fully, love deeply and engage authentically.

Did you know that a majority of entrepreneurs tend to discount the importance of their work and a good number feel their success is simply due to luck. I know from personal experience that self doubt can keep you from having the kind of life and business you desire. That’s why I’ve created a free guide called Uniquely You How to Move from Self Doubt to Self Love In four simple steps to claim your free guide go to live love engage dot gift. That’s live love engage dot g-i-f-t.

In this episode we’re joined by Paige Speers, a brain injury survivor who’s on a mission to help people with similar injuries align for balanced living. At 32, Paige suffered a pulmonary embolism and anoxic brain injury. She channeled her innate resilience into her recovery and found her passion to help others do the same.

On this episode of the Live. Love. Engage. podcast:

Connect with Paige

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/choosegreaterhealth

Email: paigespeersspeaking (at) gmail.com

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You are listening to the Live Love Engage podcast on today’s show, we’re talking with a brain injury survivor about her mission to help those with similar injuries align for balanced living. Stay tuned.

I am Gloria Grace Rand, founder of the Love Method and author of the number one Amazon Best Seller, Live Love Engage How to Stop Doubting Yourself and start being yourself. In this podcast, we share practical advice from a spiritual perspective on how to live fully. Love deeply and engage authentically so you can create a life and business with more impact, influence and income. Welcome to live love. Engage

Namaste and welcome to another edition of Live Love Engage. I am, of course, your host Gloria Grace Rand, and I am delighted to welcome a friend of mine whom we’ve known each other for a little while and we’re actually in a program together. But if we have time, we may talk about that later. But for now, I want to just welcome First Paige Speers to live love engage.

Thank you, Gloria. It’s great to be here.

Well, I’m delighted to have you. And because I know that you are an inspiration to people and you’ve also got a passion for helping helping people thanks to what you have been through. So let me explain to you, those of you listening and those of you watching on YouTube why I’ve got pitch on the show today. So after surviving a pulmonary embolism and anoxic brain injury at the age of thirty two, Paige found her innate resilience into recovery, finding whole person therapy centered around bringing all systems into balance in a way that would fill in the pieces and complement allopathic medicine. And this brought in her entrepreneurial vision of connecting other under supported brain injury survivors with integrative, holistic, functional and bio regulatory resources and practitioners, in addition to speaking and writing about her recovery path. And I know we were just talking before we get started here, but I wanted to ask you about what people need to know about brain injuries. But I’m thinking, actually, if you wouldn’t mind, can you share maybe a little bit about your story and how how you came to, you know, suffer, you know, the brain injury and and what you’re even your recovery process has been like?

Yeah, I realized now looking back on the 12 years prior to it, that was when my anxiety started. And so for 12 years, I was on medications for that. In addition to having taken aerobatics for four years or so before that, it was a low dose motorcycling for acne. And like that, and also in 2005, I had my wisdom teeth taken out and antibiotics for that, too. And that would have had a detrimental effect on my microbiome, of course, and the gut flora and everything being important for neurotransmitter production. So the balance was off there and from my nutrition in general and that they wasn’t good. So, yeah, I was just off even maybe, maybe 60 percent optimal, but there were pieces missing dietary and nutritionally and so. Yeah, that caused the anxiety and then the medications for that really didn’t do much good and in fact likely contributed. That and yes, for my period being off and that particular hormonal disruption was also likely involved with less natural nutrition. So that and all those medications combined probably had an effect in that hand in causing the blood clots in both lungs, although I didn’t have much in the way of symptoms of it right until the injury. And that was when I also found employment misalignment, and that’s where the energetic, an emotional component comes into it also. And I just didn’t have a job that really fit me, and I was spent all the years even after college, just looking and not finding anything and like, what’s going on here? So I figured I would just go into office work, and at least then I would have regular hours and evenings and weekends off. And so I did miscellaneous retail things, and that’s where I got the idea that I didn’t want to work evenings and weekends.

And so I landed a law firm, ironically in the medical claims department, doing data entry that was my first and only full time job with good pay and. So at the time, I was in the mailroom, and I just find it hard to breathe, and I only really only just had enough time to call Sean, who’s my anchor, my husband now. And yeah, we got married in. But in 2017 and about 14 months after the injury, so I called him at the office and then I just backed out and heard later that my coworkers had done CPR until the ambulance got there and everything was just a blank until sometime later. And I think I remember moving from the ICU to a regular room at the University Hospital and and all the scans that were going on. And so I don’t remember much of the. I heard that they couldn’t. They could only. Today means so much and couldn’t do an fMRI functional MRI because I was having medication withdraw education, so I do credit the whole thing for actually getting me detoxed off the medication since I was taking Paxil and Pam, Pam was a benzodiazepine, so I had dependency issues there. That’s a big one. Yeah. And I also had a feeling, I think in 2010. By 2015, I knew there had to be other options available. I just didn’t know what they were. And at the time, I would even have looked into nutritional psychiatry. If it had anything, then it would have been great if that had even existed in 2004. Yeah. And I also heard that I at least was off just breathing within 24 hours, and my care team had never seen that in a cardiac case.

Holy smokes. You really went through a whole huge ordeal. And it’s interesting that you talk about the fact that it’s a lot of this seems to stem from possibly at least that all these different medications you were on were not helping you. So I’m grateful to see that you’re alive and here because, you know, it sounds like it was pretty, pretty serious thing that was going on with you.

Yeah. And also the fact that that people are only really just finding out about the effect of nutrition on the mind and everything else, and that could have helped me too.

Hmm. Yeah, absolutely. What? What was the. Well, actually, let me let me ask it a different way instead, what you know, maybe let’s say, say, maybe even I don’t know if this happened as while you were still in the hospital or maybe afterwards how what led you to, you know, looking at different, you know? Or, as you say, whole person therapies that you talk about. So how how did how did you get started on trying to be able to improve your overall health as a result of all of this?

It started just after the rehab hospital. In my first few months. I’d been living in Missouri at the time, and then I moved back to Rockford, Illinois, to recover with my parents for about eight months after that. And so I started going to a brain injury support group at the outpatient rehab place there, and they had a guest presenter about, well, first there was neuro neurofeedback, and I think we just heard about that from one of the therapists. And I did that twice a week for about eight months and that that was with the electrodes on my scalp and there were specific protocols for brain stimulation in certain areas based on my symptoms. And what neurofeedback does is it actually helps a lot with emotional disruption and anxiety and things. And so I got that out of it too. And I would watch a movie and the screen would flicker depending on how my brain was responding to the protocols and stimulation. And yeah, so it took a few sessions to really get the hang of it and get a clear screen the whole time. But that was interesting.

Hmm. I can imagine. Yeah. So what? What’s been sort of the most challenging aspect of your recovery?

My reading and walking, definitely, since it started about a week after the rehab hospital and something like six months, you know, six weeks post injury when my lower left leg kind of swelled up around the ankle and then that went down, but it started to spasm and seize up really bad. And that went on for nearly 24-7 for a good six months. And yeah, so it was hard for me to walk, of course. And kind of like if your if your foot or leg is asleep, that kind of thing just really bad and cramping. And currently, my functional neurologist has had the idea that it was just misfiring going on caused by maybe a not quite optimal approach to rehab because of course, the University Hospital didn’t quite know the whole story. And that’s where functionality differs from conventional neurology. It’s looking at the even the movement, the developmental movement patterns and how those can be affected by brain injury and conditions. And that seems to have been what went haywire in my case. And for a while, my walking was it was OK at the rehab center, but it was slow and that is linked to frontal lobe dysfunction. So, yeah, I’ve been working more on that. And yeah, it took about six months to a year for my leg to really settle down, except maybe when I walk sometimes or if I’m doing something with another part of my body and the signals get kind of crossed. Yeah. And then also therapeutic horseback riding was another thing that that I came across in this part group meeting. There was a presenter from the therapeutic horseback riding stable, so I started doing that and that was individual lessons twice a week or about the same time as neurofeedback. And that that actually brings me back to the major I started with in college being equestrian, although I didn’t want to teach lessons or manage a barn and that that was getting overwhelming for me at the time, especially with some of the thoroughbreds being a kind of nervous nellies themselves.

And yeah, so that idea was as a career option, and I transferred schools and changed my major to dance. Since I’ve been doing that for even longer than horseback riding, I just took a break to focus on horses for a while. Yeah. So then well, having found the therapeutic horseback riding to the support group and neurofeedback also, then from there in back in Missouri, I found a somatic practitioner who actually I saw an event poster of hers at my Reiki practitioners office. And so I signed up for the event and found out that she facilitates the brain injury support group in Columbia, Missouri. So I’ve been going to that now. It’s been online and that’s been good. And also I work with her as a client and we do sessions every two weeks and it’s about somatic awareness and reestablishing the developmental pattern. And she also I connected her with my functional neurologist, who I found through a Midsummer’s Brain Health Summit online. And there’s also the Facebook group Amy’s TBI Tribe, and she joined with that. And so that’s what inspired me to do the research to find a functional neurologist near me. And so I was able to use my disability back page to get the three day intensive, initially in 2019. And then I’ve been in for four. Check in appointments to get updated exercises and things every few months. And more recently. And so they collaborate in my care and your case notes and things.

Well, it’s there’s a lot going on that you have to work with, isn’t it? With all these different practitioners and things and and I know that you and I connected because we’re working on creating programs for people and yours, of course, is to be able to help people with with brain injuries. We’re going to go into the specifics. I know of what what you hope to accomplish with that, especially because I know there’s some key areas of alignment. But I wonder if you know the brain has like so many different functions and it controls so many different aspects of our life. And and then when you know it gets injured, it can affect different parts of of our bodies or, you know, thinking all

Sorts of things. There’s a lot of complexity.

Yeah. So what what do you think is maybe, maybe a couple key things that people need to know about brain injuries, if especially if either they happen to suffer one or if they know someone who has had a brain injury, what what do you think is sort of some of those couple of key things people need to know.

It can vary by injury type and individual. And also there’s neuroplasticity that can be encouraged by doing all kinds of different things like we’ve heard a lot that, oh, you only get two years for the most healing, but you can continue. Add to that even and at different rates, depending on if there’s a good foundation of nutrition and mental and physical stimulation and exercise to go with it. Hmm. Yeah. Also, I’m not quite sure where my vision fits in with everything that I don’t remember which part of the brain that is exactly, but my reading is still on the slow side. I did have to relearn how to read, and I tried to read at the rehab hospital initially and I couldn’t. It was pretty scary. So yet then I saw a behavioral ophthalmologist in Illinois about six months or so at Post-injury, and I got a prescription for prisons in my classes lenses. Although initially it was too strong and it would have been better to start with a milder prescription first and then go up. But I started with, I went and went down.

Oh dear, oh well. But at least it’s it’s it is helping you now, so you’re starting to be able to get, you know, to be able to read better now.

Yeah, it took about a year for me to be able to really read small print again. And although I had been lost my taste for hard copy books and patient,

I can imagine. Yeah, it’s that is one of the benefits of like, say, a Kindle reader is that you can spread it out and make it or just change the font size and make it bigger. Yeah, our audio books. Yes, those are wonderful as well, for sure. So, yeah, and for those of you who are listening who may not know the term neuroplasticity, I know a little bit about that. I don’t know if you want to explain that a little bit more because I have I’ve got a couple of books on the brain I’ve been. I’ve always been fascinated about it. But maybe you can explain a little bit what that means to your

Brain’s capacity to rewire and create new pathways and improve old ones.

Hmm. Yeah. And that’s something that I think I think they’ve only really known. I’m not sure how long they’ve known that, but I know, I think when for the longest time people just thought, Well, these are the brain cells you’ve got, and if you harm them, that’s it. You’re going to be you’re out of luck. But but the brain can compensate. And I guess I think even for for injuries such as yourself, there’s other parts of the brain that will either compensate or, as you say, other things can. They can actually regenerate, right? Yeah. Well, so I know part of what you’re working on with your your program is helping, helping other brain injury survivors, and you mentioned that you’ve and certainly you’ve experienced this, I think in your own recovery that there’s three key areas of alignment for balanced living. So can you share with us a little bit about what what those areas are?

Sure, it’s what I outlined in my initial story, where I came to realize that nutrition is a big part of health and well-being and recovery, and especially for prevention of mental and emotional disorders itself. It can be really important. And also then physical and movement optimization for the second one, and that’s where we’re all kinds of physical rehab comes in, including, say it being under the umbrella of functional neurology and getting at the root of movement disorders and what’s going on there. And the somatic work and therapeutic horseback riding and then energetic and emotional alignment comes in where it’s good to look at the factors going on in life. Like with me, it was employment and I couldn’t connect with a job that really was a good match for me. And emotionally, things were just not in such good place. But I’ve also continued on my energy work path and doing Reiki shares, and I did a whole year of training with integrative medicine online. And that is based in Australia, and it’s getting international certifications for the programs of of energy healing, using essences emotions, self images, rays and herbs and crystals in charts and muscle testing to put together stories and use those tools for healing.

Hmm. Awesome. Yeah. You know that energy healing and and all of that type of work is so important and it really does have an effect on us. But I love how you really are, you know, looking at all these different modalities and incorporating it because I think it’s it’s important for people to know that it’s not just one thing that is going to help you, but if you can really focus on the whole person, I focus on the food, you know, physical activity, like you say and then emotions and your and your and your energy and your body, then that is seems to me that that is going to be the best way to really create a pathway for recovery.

Absolutely. And it’s all part of a balanced life.

Yeah. What what do you maybe wish that you had known before you started down this, this path of of trying as of helping people, you know, and coming to a, you know, becoming an entrepreneur essentially now because that’s that’s what you’re doing. You’re helping. Yeah, you’re looking at helping other other brain injury survivors.

Yeah, that entrepreneurship is where I had to go since after my injury, I knew I’d have to work online, although because I couldn’t drive anymore with my vision being off one thing and also I, I knew there were virtual assistant jobs available, that kind of thing, but I didn’t know who would actually hire me, what with my typing speed being something that I wasn’t too fond of working on and just all the things. And did I really want to do that anyway? And so I wanted to do was to actually use my experience to to be of benefit in the world and help other people out with it. And that’s why I’ve seen that other people do.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah. I wish I had known about the the natural anxiety and emotional solutions beforehand. Hmm. Yeah, that would have been very helpful to me.

Well, when she found out about it now, so better, better late than never, as they say. What is what is it maybe commonly held belief about brain injuries that, you know, is, like, totally wrong? Have you come across anything like that?

Well, like with concussions, I had maybe a very mild concussion, but definitely whiplash after getting rear ended to stop by in 2013. And yeah, and then it’s whole thing of visible versus invisible injuries like Amy Zellmer slogan is not invisible. Really bringing awareness to the fact that a person can have something going on, and it’s not immediately obvious.

Yeah, yeah, that’s important to know that. And I think that’s where we all need to be compassionate and to be able to talk with someone and not just assume, as my mother used to say, never assume. Yeah, because you, you just make an ass out of you and me. So what? What is what would you like to, let’s say, a year from now, what would you what would you like your life to look like,

Like an empowered entrepreneur who has a successful business and success measured in a lot of ways by the success of my client and an increase in their well-being and having a big impact in the world and speaking an even more and bigger platforms, getting the message out that there is hope and continued recovery option.

Absolutely. Well, I think you’re on the road to get there, so I will hold the intention that that’s definitely what will happen in this next year for you. Is there anything else that I should have asked you about, you know, brain injury recovery that I haven’t yet?

Hmm. That’s a good question. We did cover a lot, although what I would like to leave everyone with is that there are always ways to tune in and tap into your resilience and be curious.

Absolutely, I love that. Well, what are you curious about right now?

Well, program validation at the moment and talking with other, more established entrepreneurs with brain health concerns for themselves or someone they care for and finding out what they would like in the program?

Very good. Well, if anyone out there is has a brain injury or know someone who has, and maybe they would like to get in touch with you and talk with you about it, how can people reach you? What’s the best way?

I’m on LinkedIn as page fears and also on Instagram, I’m choose greater help. And my email address is Page Spears speaking at gmail.com. And maybe you can include those in the show notes too.

I will definitely do that. You took the words right out of my mouth. For anyone listening, if you’re you know you don’t have a pen in handy, it’s. Don’t worry if you go to live love and good podcast. That’s where all of these episodes will be. That’s where the show notes for this particular episode will be, and I’ll have all that information in there for everyone. So, yeah, thank you so much. See had to learn more about you today, which I knew I would, and I appreciate the good work you are doing in the world, you know, to be able to help people recover and to be whole individuals and whole and healthy. So continue the good work and I thank you for being live love. Engage today Paige.

Yes. Thank you, Gloria. That was a great discussion.

Well, and I appreciate all of you. Thank you and for being here and watching and listening and encourage you to continue to do so. And in fact, if you want to, if you haven’t checked out something called good pods, I encourage you to do that. It’s a cool way for you to be able to find all sorts of different podcasts, including mine, of course. But check it out. It’s a really it’s a very interesting and upcoming up and coming sort of social networking platform for podcasters. And until next time, as always, I encourage you to go out and live fully. Love deeply and engage authentically.

Did you know that a majority of entrepreneurs tend to discount the importance of their work and a good number feel their success is simply due to luck? I know from personal experience that self-doubt can keep you from having the kind of life and business you desire. That’s why I’ve created a free guide called Uniquely You How to Move From Self-doubt to Self-love in four simple steps to claim your free guide. Go to live love. Engage dot gift that’s live love. Engage dot G. I. F.T.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Energy Psychology Counseling expert Betsy Rosam live on Facebook and LinkedIn this week to talk about why it’s important to heal unresolved trauma, grief and loss.

Connect with Betsy

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Gloria Grace Rand

Welcome to Live Love, engage. Namaste, and welcome to another edition of Live Love, engage, as you just heard, and I am delighted to be coming to live as we’ve been doing on Wednesdays. But for those of you who are listening to this on the replay, you’re listening to this whatever day it is, but I want to welcome those of you who are watching on Facebook and LinkedIn. And I know that we have got a great show for you today because we’re getting an opportunity to chat with somebody that I’ve known through networking, here in Florida for quite a few years. And she is a really heart centered woman who has a lot of gifts to share. So I’m gonna before I tell you the rest of who, what she has to offer, I want to welcome on to bring her in here. And welcome Betty, Betsy, Betsy Rosam to live love engage,

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This episode is all about hospice care and helping loved ones transition with dignity and grace. Today’s guest is Ellen Long Stilwell, a registered nurse who is certified in hospice and palliative care. Ellen has been a nurse for a long time, but she started out in hospice care through volunteering. She’s also a trained death doula.

On this episode of the Live. Love. Engage. podcast:

Connect with Ellen

Ellen’s website: https://www.ellenlongstilwell.com/

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You’re listening to the Live Love Engage podcast on today’s show, we’ll be talking about hospice care and its role in helping a loved one transition with dignity and grace.

Stay tuned. I am Gloria Grace, Rand, founder of the Love Method and author of the number one Amazon best seller, live love engage How to Stop Doubting Yourself and Start Being Yourself In this podcast, we share practical advice from a spiritual perspective on how to live fully. Love deeply and engage authentically so you can create a life and business with more impact, influence and income. Welcome to live love. Engage.

Namaste. And welcome to another edition of Live Love Engage. I am so delighted to be with you today to talk about a subject that has a special place in my heart. But first, before we get into all that, I want to welcome our guest on the show today and her name is Ellen Long Stilwell. So welcome Ellen to live, love engage.

Hi, thank you for having me, Gloria.

Well, thank you for being here. And let me tell you a little bit about this woman she is. She’s an angel on Earth. Let me just say that because of what she does, she is a registered nurse, certified in hospice and palliative care, and she’s started on that. Back when she was raising her two boys, she volunteered as part of a hospice team with the metropolitan Jewish health system and then kind of continued doing some work with visiting nurse service. And she also cared for hospice patients and families. She really kind of, I guess, spends a lot of time working with patients and their families at home, which is the heart of hospice. And she’s also trained as a death doula by a Buddhist monk, and I definitely want to ask you about that as well. But how we even I think especially connected was through a publicity summit where I know you were promoting your book, which for those of you who are not able to watch the YouTube video, she has a lovely poster of it behind her and it’s called Love, Death, Love embracing the journey to death. So, you know, I am familiar with hospice because my my sister went into hospice care five years ago, actually five years ago in November. It will be. And it was, you know, a sad part going into that. And yet also it was a godsend. And I can’t say enough good things about hospice. So we’ll get into more of that in a moment. I know from you, Alan, but first, I want to explore what drew you to hospice care because this is not something that everybody wants to deal with, you know, because it’s not always pleasant being able to deal with death, especially here in the United States, we’ve got a weird kind of fear about death. So right to that. Yeah, yeah.

Really, what drew me to hospice care? Ultimately, it was really many steps. But but ultimately, actually it was the death of my husband. He died at forty-eight of pancreatic cancer. And it was was through his illness when he died. I said, I’m going to be a hospice nurse. Hmm. And that’s really that was a decision made when he died because, as you say with your with your sister, that of course, it said the diagnosis life changes upon diagnosis immediately. But then, you know, getting through it together, supporting each other, and that he died so peacefully with his family around him. You know, it’s it really changed my perspective, and I had been a nurse since nineteen eighty-six. He died in two thousand three. And so I had experience as a nurse and as a young nurse. I was really very in, you know, I felt very inadequate with dying patients and death in general, especially going from the floor of Med surge units to the ICU. Oh my goodness. You know, they don’t prepare you in nursing school at all regarding death, so you learn by experience. Hmm.

That’s that seems very hard to have to do that, you know?

Yeah, it was. It was very hard. Yeah. Oak life experiences beyond nursing. You know, my sister too passed away. She was ill for several years and and again, we did it together. Know she she looks my help and I was looking for her help too, through the whole thing. And and it was really her illness that taught me so much about death. Well, tell

Us for those who are maybe fortunate, hopefully in a way not to be familiar with hospice care. What is what is unique and about hospice care, but also what is there? What is there sort of specific function, right?

Well, when when a patient and family decide no further treatment, that’s when hospice care comes on board. And typically, it’s done in the home, which I consider the heart of hospice in your own home. And then the hospice team comes in. It’s the R.N. or social worker or medical doctor, spiritual care counselor, home health aide. And there’s also volunteers as part of the hospice team. I did that for five years when my children were young and. So this team of very passionate individuals, they love their job. There’s nobody working in hospice care that doesn’t want to be there and very passionate about their jobs and, you know, physically, spiritually, psychically, this team comes into your home and helps not only the patient, but the family as well. And the goal of care is comfort, so comfort on many levels. Ninety nine percent of the time that is achieved.

Hmm. Yeah. And that’s how I was going to ask you two about about caregivers, because that’s something else that I know I benefited from is that they would schedule a time and say, OK, Gloria, you need to like, you know, go out, go to the movies or something. And you know, and then we will have someone from hospice here to take care of your sister while you’re gone so that you can get a break. And I think that’s important for caregivers to realize that they don’t, you know, of course, they want to take care of their loved one, but you really can’t continue to do that one hundred percent of the time, 100 percent of the time.

That’s right, self-care is really very important. So yes, there’s a home health aide, part of the team Monday through Friday, three or four hours a day. So that would be that schedule time to plan something for yourself as the caregiver. Very important. Come back fresh. Do some things for yourself.

Yeah, absolutely. What happened? Well, let’s see, I’m trying to think what what’s been the maybe either hardest or most surprising thing that you’ve had to deal with?

Actually, let’s go there.

What’s been the most surprising thing that you’ve had to deal with when you’re in doing hospice care?

The most surprising thing? Well. Actually, I’m surprised every time it happens, and it’s when usually when I arrive in the morning I loved, one would say, you know, Ellen, something strange happened last night and they would explain the patient usually like waving their hand may be reaching out very gently, and usually they call a name, maybe say a few words to whoever they’re reaching for. And it’s usually someone who’s deceased. And it baffles those involved because they know the person they’re talking to is is dead. So it just happened so often. And I love when people share this with me and sometimes I get a chance to witness it too. So it continues to surprise me, and it’s incredible how often it occurs. Yeah, it’s very comforting for everyone involved.

Yeah, I can. I can imagine. I think we I really had that and my sister had that experience. But what I can imagine that it would be very, very helpful for everybody. Yeah. What what do you maybe wish you might have known about hospice care when you first started out?

Yeah. Well, it’s definitely is also a learning curve. You know, everyone starts out not knowing when I come in. So. It’s not so much about my not knowing, but it’s about the family not knowing, and it’s continued education all the time, like I’ll go into a new family’s home and it’s square one. You know, it’s it’s, you know, taking care of someone who’s bedbound. You know, I’m quite versed in it, but families can’t imagine changing sheets while someone’s still in the bed or. Yeah. And that’s ultimately what happens. Our patients, the loved ones are bed bound for a couple of weeks, usually, maybe sometimes longer than that. And so it’s continued education, always and some people. Have a medical mind and others don’t, so so it’s a team effort. It’s definitely a team effort with and it’s it’s always education is so important and a continued education. You know, every step of the way. And the more receptive family members are, you know, it’s it’s just it’s really it’s really a nice place to be for me, helping families get through this because I have been through it. You know, I’ve I’ve been through it professionally and so, so many personal losses. I mean, my dad died in 1990, then my niece in ninety one ninety two, my mom passed away and then ninety three, my sister passed away. Two years later, my brother. Yeah, it was really crazy. Yeah. And then. And then my husband passed away and then my brother and then another brother in law, so yeah, so we were really as a family, you know, we all I’m one of seven. And everyone was very present for each other and for the individual who was ill. So I have a lot of experience, a lot of personal experience as well as professional. So now that I do it as a hospice nurse, you know, I I really love my job, you know, because I enter into the home and and these families are where I was and and I love to be able to help them. And hospice does help them.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, one of the things that maybe people don’t even realize, too, is that it’s it’s not even in addition to, I should say, in addition to the wonderful support of the people, but they also provide supplies to because like, you know, which maybe people don’t even realize, but I hear you talking about someone who has to be bedbound. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re in their own bed, but they because my sister, they had a bed brought in basically a hospital bed because that’s going to be. Yeah. And so we had to put that in the living room. And then also, you know, she needed like, you know, potty and all that good stuff for the bedside commode. Yeah, because you can’t she wouldn’t be able to make that walk into the bathroom. It was too far. So, you know, these are things that they do. They provide supplies, they provide the people. And and as you say, it’s not even just, you know, medical care, but also spiritual care and emotional support because it’s, you know, when people are facing end of life, oftentimes they start wondering, you know, what do I believe? I mean, my sister and I would have these discussions, you know, it’s like, You know what? Yeah, what do you believe? And I know it was good for her to be able to have someone to talk to because

Her beliefs

Have had kind of shifted over the years. And she was, you know, not and believing in some things as much. And now it’s like, Oh crap, you know, now I’m facing the end here, what do I do so?

And that’s very often the case. So there is a spiritual care counselor and there’s there’s actually a Catholic priest, this really cool guy that you would never imagine as a Catholic priest. And then there’s a Buddhist, and then there’s a rabbi. So. And with that being said. If one of these individuals come into someone’s home, they meet that person wherever they are, nothing is pushed on them. And very often I’m told, no, I don’t need any spiritual care and that’s fine too. Whatever part of the team you don’t want, that’s fine. So hospice comes in and meets you where where you are, and that’s on every level. So we we really take the lead from the families.

That’s awesome. I’m glad that you mentioned spiritual caregivers in particular, because now you reminded me that I know that you said in your bio that you also trained as a death doula by a Buddhist monk. So I’ll tell us a little bit about that. What? What is a death doula and what even prompted you to do that?

Well, when I was a volunteer for those five years, the chaplain. Who was assigned to the area where I was assigned? Was this Buddhist monk. So he felt there was a need for people to do vigils constantly by people’s bedsides, particularly for the homeless, because they didn’t have friends or family. So what he did was choose. He hand-picked several volunteers and then he did a six-month training program where he and a seasoned hospice social worker. So we would meet weekly and then he would bring in our therapist, a music therapist. He also introduced us to the care coordinator of a hospice floor. And they would present to us how they felt we could help the patients. But really, basically a death doula is really someone who is a companion, someone who’s not afraid, someone who stays present, and the need that this Buddhist monk felt was for the homeless. So we would do vigils for these folks who really had no family and no friends. So that was why he did it, and that was really a long time ago. Now this programs for death doulas, the certificate programs for death doulas. I mean, it was really it was really kind of a pioneer with it, you know?

Oh, very cool. What are some of the misconceptions that maybe people have about hospice care?

That is a really good question, Gloria, because very often I really have to. Really address that. And the biggest misconception about hospice care is people feel that hospice care hastens death that we’re there to to bring on death. And that’s that’s absolutely not true. We enter again where the patient is and the family is, and we allow a natural death. The goal of care for hospice is comfort care. So. In the journey to death, there’s physical changes, and as these physical changes occur, there’s a comfort box, there’s literally a box of medications sent upon admission to hospice care, and it’s marked do not open unless. Advise and normally we ask that it’s put away someplace out of sight until it’s needed and in that comfort box is several medications for these physical changes that occur when our bodies very naturally, each organ slows down and starts shutting down, which causes physical symptoms. So again, the goal of care is comfort. So within that box is. Morphine and everyone seems to think that more morphine hastens death. And it doesn’t. But morphine is given at end of life for these physical changes, specifically for breathing pattern changes. So this myth occurs and continues to be believed because someone is at end of life and morphine is given and then death occurs. So morphine is given this bad reputation when in fact. It’s given for pain when a patient is unable to swallow anymore, so it’s given sublingual. And it’s also given for these breathing pattern changes. Naturally, our bodies are working harder to breathe. So our breathing becomes labored and morphine given under the tongue works beautifully for calming down the muscles that are causing this labored breathing. So that’s a big misconception that I have to explain sometimes on the first day. A that’s illegal in New York state to hasten death in most in most states, it’s illegal. So hospice is really not there to do that. So that’s the the biggest misconception that I really have to answer very gently, very often.

Hmm. Well, I appreciate you even stating that because I think. If it was explained to me at one, my sister was was on like her last day, I probably didn’t hear it, you know, because I was so, you know, in the throes of like, Oh crap, you know, this is what’s happening now because, yeah, they did recommend, you know, for me to give her morphine. And I did, you know, through the night because I did hear the labor breathing and and then all of a sudden I realized that I wasn’t hearing the breathing anymore. And that’s when I realized that she had passed. And I still remember going over to her and just really, Mikayla, you snuck out on me when I wasn’t paying attention, you bum. But I also understand from I. I told that to my hospice nurse, and she said, Yeah, that happens frequently. Have you had that happen in your instance? Yes. Oh, yeah, sure.

I mean, our loved ones, really, they want the best for us. So they’re going to pass very peacefully and very often they’ll wait until we’re out of the room. We may simply go to the bathroom and they’ll take that time to pass over. Yeah, very often our loved ones wait until we’re gone to do it very quietly on their own. It’s really very common. It’s incredibly common.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. One other misconception I think that I know I experienced and maybe you can comment on this as well, is that I think a lot of people think once you’re on hospice, you’re on hospice and that you can’t get off. But if because this happened with my sister and you know, yeah, you know, pretty much we knew the end was was coming. And I finally got an opportunity for her to go see a doctor for a different type of treatment that we thought might at least prolong her life and give her some pain relief. And so we actually had to get off of hospice care in order to do that. And then right when it didn’t work, then we were able to get

It back on to hospice, right? You can be discharged from hospice, right to pursue treatment. Mm hmm. And then and then come right back on to hospice, too. And you know, some people when you when a patient comes onto hospice, two physicians are signing a document. So it’s it’s the private medical doctor and the hospice medical physician. They both sign a consent where in their professional opinion, the prognosis is six months or less. Right. And treatment has stopped. Well, guess what? Sometimes people get to six months. Yep. And yep, and they are. They are enjoying life on some level with their family. So according to the Medicare guidelines, so if if a patient of meets criteria, then then they continue on hospice past that six months. Mm hmm. That’s good. As with your sister, if you want to pursue treatment, you that’s you are free to do that.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And that was that was a relief because we were both kind of wondering about like, OK, well, you know, can we do this and what it was?

So so I’m sure, can you confirm that?

Yeah, because. And I think that’s important for people to know because, hey, we live in an age where there are wonderful new advancements in medicine. And so people, you know, might be able to get some, some help. And again, maybe it’s even just quality of life for a little while, you know, to extend it for a while. So, yeah, right.

So I just want to point out again, it’s really where the patient and family are. It’s we we use you as a guide and you are making the decisions. Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely.

I want to shift gears a little bit. And have you talked to us a little bit about your book? So what’s the book about and why did you decide to write to write it?

Mm hmm. Well, just last year, actually March of Twenty Twenty, I completed it and it was published. It’s called Love, Death, Love and it’s. It’s short stories of my various experiences. I start off. Actually, as a young nurse and I talk about my experiences in the ICU and really my fear, my fear about death and as as the short stories progress, it’s it’s my experience as a hospice nurse. So for me too, I was quite fearful and then I gained experience and and now I’m not afraid. I’m actually intrigued and I am passionate about it. And very often I witness a beautiful death. And that became my experience, and I just thought if I wrote it in a book. For others to read that they could be helped as well. And plus two, when I was a volunteer, I I was told by the nurses, You know, what is it that you’re saying to the patients because you’re really very helpful. They tell us you’re helpful. And they just used to like to see me come in and they knew what patients they were going to send me to. And really, I was saying the same thing over and over again, and that was my experience with my husband.

So the longest short story is actually regarding my husband, and that was what I found myself repeating to patients, and they found it very, very helpful. So the book is is written. I write it for the reader, I’m talking to the reader, and the reader is the. Terminally ill person and their loved one, the caregiver. So that’s who I wrote the book for. And I just really want to lighten the load. And and educate as as as the reader reads the book, and I’ve been told numerous times that it’s very uplifting, it’s not. I don’t know what people think about a book about death, but I don’t think it’s uplifting, but it is a very uplifting book about death and actually Jack Canfield, the co-author of Chicken Soup for the Soul. He’s read the book and he’s endorsed the book. And actually, I changed the cover to add his endorsement, which is, this is a beautiful book. Very sweet and useful. So there you have. It’s an uplifting book about death. Yeah, yeah.

We should be getting it into hospice facilities. I would think this would be, you know, a good way for you to have them hand it out to know patients if they’re interested in it and their families.

That would say, I’m trying to do actually just that.

That would be very helpful because it’s, you know, it can be overwhelming, you know, this whole process and anything that you can do to lighten someone’s load and alleviate some of the stress. You know, I think would be helpful.

So yeah, right? And that the fact that death is really as natural as childbirth, you know, very often. When someone’s getting close to the active dying phase, they’re comfortable. And we’re waiting, we’re waiting, and everyone wants to they ask me, well, when’s it going to happen? And you know, of course, I can gather facts and and give a generalization. But really, when a baby is being born, we’re waiting. That’s right. Yeah. And then and then when we’re dying, we’re also waiting. It’s it’s it’s so natural and and very often it’s a beautiful, profound experience for everyone involved. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I highly recommend invite the hospice team in sooner rather than later.

Yeah, definitely. It’s yeah, it was a big like I say, it was definitely a big support for me and especially at the very end and and to have to have that is it’s so important. So I’m glad we’ve kind of talked about some of those things. Is there anything that anything else I should have asked that you want to be able to communicate about hospice care to people?

Well, maybe just repeat again to come sooner rather than later. There’s the misconceptions, I think. There are many and people hesitate. And really, it’s a team of people. Who are simply arriving in your home to help, you know? That’s true. And we have to be allowed in, yeah, to help. So, you know what, when we can stop resisting the fact that death is going to occur, you know, because there’s a lot of hope. Yeah, there’s a lot of hope. Maybe this isn’t going to happen. And from myself. When? I. Actually, my husband and I took a trip to Lourdes, France. Hmm. And it was after bathing in the miraculous waters. The women go this way and the men go that way. And it was my experience. That there was no miracle going to occur here, but to accept what was unfolding, that was my miracle, which I actually kept to myself. But but that helped me to care for him in the present. Yeah. And appreciate every day. Because. Because. He was going to I was going to lose them. Cancer was going to win. So when I stopped resisting and I cared for him every day. It really it really was a profound, beautiful experience.

That’s wonderful. I’m very glad that you have that and that you’re now able to be able to pay that forward to other people because I do, I also want to be able to just reiterate that hospice is there to help the patient be comfortable. I mean, that’s that’s ultimately it. It’s to help them be comfortable in whatever way that involves. And, you know, because sometimes it it’s even helping them with getting into, you know, taking a shower or something or providing maybe, you

Know again for

A shower to

Be able to sit down in the

Shower. Right? Yeah. So it’s it’s all of these different things. So definitely if you’ve got someone you know who is facing end of life, definitely check into hospice. Don’t as as you say, yeah, don’t wait until the last minute because. When you’ve got some of these things handled, then you and your loved one can spend time connecting and so, you know, we were able to, you know, talk about comparing a different childhoods. Some of my sister’s friends were able to come over and, you know, and be able to she was able to be able to talk to them, you know, and kind of say her goodbyes to people and, you know, being able to be at home. And her thing too was she wanted to be at home with her cat. She wanted to do, you know, she wanted to die at home with her cat and she was able to do that. Her cat got up on the bed with her and he was right there with her for at the very end. So she got what she wanted, and that’s that’s

Really what we want to do. That’s what we want to do, right? That’s a gift that you able to do with your sister.

Yeah. Yeah. And I’ve definitely, you know, it was, as you know, it’s it’s not easy being a caregiver, but I wouldn’t have traded that experience for anything. And I’m blessed that especially that I was in business for myself and so that I could actually be there. You know, I didn’t have to worry about, you know, having a job that I had to take time off, you know, or get a leave of absence or something to be there. I could spend time with her and still even do some of my work. So it was

So, very good. Yeah. So really a profound experience is what you had. Yeah. And she died comfortably.

Mm hmm. Sure. Thank you so much for doing number one, for doing the work that you’re doing in the world. I appreciate it. Yeah, yeah. And keep up the good work and because people depend on you and it’s good to know that they’ve got someone like you with a caring heart to take care of you.

Thank you for saying so. I really appreciate that. Yeah. And thank you for asking these hard questions because they are hard questions and we we tend to shy away from them. And if we just become a little more comfortable with the inevitable, it actually becomes easier.

Yeah, that’s for sure, because nobody gets out of this life alive, not yet, no.

So it is we have that, including every one of us birth and death. Yes, we do.

Yeah, absolutely. So why not make it as comfortable as possible?

Right. And in acceptance, what I learned is when we accept and it takes time in the hospice team, takes that time with you to get to acceptance and and once acceptance is achieved. I’ve noticed the peaceful atmosphere that pervades people’s homes. It’s just it’s palpable the change when when we stop resisting and we accept and then really this loving atmosphere is present. So it’s acceptance and peace and love, and that’s really the beautiful death that I I so often get to witness.

Hmm. Wonderful. If someone is listening today or watching and would like to get your book, where where can they do that? Where can I get it?

Yeah. So love, death, love can be gotten on Amazon or Barnes & Noble. And also the publisher of Balboa Press. Dot com.

Wonderful. All right. Well, I’ll be sure, and I’ll have a link to that in the show notes as well just to Oh, I

Have a website too.

That’s just what’s your website? Please share

That. Yeah, it’s w w w dot Ellen Long Stilwell Dot Dotcom. Very good. You can also get the book through the website as well.

Ok, perfect. Well, we would definitely have that as well. So thank you so much for being here today again. You’re welcome, Gloria, sharing your information. I really appreciate it

And thank you.

All right, and thank all of you out there for watching. I hope you got some good valuable information out of today’s episode, especially, and I really appreciate all of you listening and watching. In fact, I want to even give a shout out to Kathy, who left a wonderful review for the podcast on Pod Chaser. So we appreciate that, and I also want to just put a quick plug in for good pods are what our podcast is available there. So if you haven’t checked it out yet, check it out. It’s it’s an interesting platform to connect podcast creators with their listeners, so I hope you’ll check that out and until the next time we connect. As always, I encourage you to go out today and the next day and the next day and live fully, love deeply and engage authentically.

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