Reinvented

To kick-off Season 2, I speak with my friend and founder of The New Happy, Stephanie Harrison, about the science of finding true happiness.

0:45 – The “Old Happy” and why it doesn’t work

7:45 – Stephanie’s personal happiness journey

12:15 – Meet the “New Happy”

15:00 – A technique for diagnosing your problems

21:30 – The anatomy of a crisis and making “space” when you’re stuck in the middle

28:30 – Finding “win-wins” across the short-term and long-term

32:30 – New Happy @ Work

42:45 – Finding YOUR definition of happiness

47:00 – Where to go next: practices to explore

Welcome to Reinvented, a podcast about the art and science of transformation.

In Season 2, we’re exploring how to design a better life – one that makes you happier, healthier, and more fulfilled.

I hope you enjoy this season of reinvented, and don’t forget to click follow if you haven’t done so already!

Get in touch

To conclude Season 1, I share my personal story of overcoming adversity and what I’ve learned along the way.

Special thanks to Ron Duren, Jr and Tara O’Brien of the Forging Mettle podcast for allowing me to re-air our interview.

1:50 – My resilience journey: Shoulders, back, and cancer

4:30 – A product of my upbringing

7:30 – Learning the lessons without the pain

11:30 – An introduction to post-traumatic growth

14:30 – Leaving the cult of perfectionism

19:15 – What’s my “why”?

23:00 – Reasons for humility

24:15 – What I’ve learned about resilience and how to build more

31:15 – Writing my failure resume

36:30 – Where to learn more about my work

38:30 – My most painful failure and what I learned

Thanks so much for listening!

Jenny Wu has accomplished more in the first 15 years of her career than most of us will in a lifetime.

The key to her success? Finding a way to “fail her way up.”

Jenny and I relive some of her biggest career setbacks, talk about what she learned, and explore how each of us can make better career choices.

1:20 – The most millennial resume in the world

2:30 – If you’re not failing 90% of the time, you’re not trying hard enough

4:45 – The immigrant struggle + a rebellious personality

7:30 – Theoretical career choices vs. real-world data

12:15 – Being scared to make the wrong decision + not quitting soon enough

13:00 – Cultural norms around resumes, quitting, and failure

15:00 – Economic rationale for millennial behavior

16:30 – Reliving her favorite failures

19:00 – How you react in the moment vs. with the benefit of time

20:45 – Landmark = turning point in reframing failures

21:30 – Needing to prove yourself vs. finding unconditional love

24:30 – Reframing your failures and forcing yourself to tell a new story

30:00 – The rationale for moving into the social sector

32:15 – Features vs. flaws and finding the right fit when you’re an “acquired taste”

40:00 – The role of mentorship in career development

42:30 – The impact of privilege

46:00 – Finding what works for you

49:00 – Does failure teach you more than success?

Thanks so much for listening!

Erica C. Barnett is the author of Quitter: A Memoir of Drinking, Relapse, and Recovery.

I speak with Erica about the cultural norms and social pressures behind her drinking, what she learned from each “failure” on the way to recovery, and how getting sober changed her life for the better.

1:00 – Social drinking vs. having a problem

2:30 – Are “addictive personalities” a real thing?

4:30 – The prevalence of alcohol use (and how it varies by region)

7:30 – When Erica realized that she had a problem

10:00 – Why sheer willpower and effort wasn’t enough to get sober

12:30 – Creating a new mental environment and healthier habits

15:00 – Learning from “failure” every time she tried to get sober

19:30 – Why there’s no single path to recovery and where Erica disagrees with the conventional wisdom on recovery

24:15 – CBT, mindfulness, therapy

27:00 – Sobriety vs. recovery and defining success for you

27:45 – How Erica’s life changed once she got sober

30:15 – Making amends… and why everyone should do it

34:00 – Additional benefits on friendship and relationships

35:45 – On whether Erica could have received the benefits without facing adversity

37:50 – When things started to get easier, building confidence, and returning to normal activities

40:30 – Possible next steps if you think you might need help

43:00 – How to help loved ones who are struggling with addiction

Dave Fuehrer is the CEO of GRYT Health, a company run by cancer survivors and caregivers that’s changing the face of medicine.

As a senior in college, just after winning the New York State Natural Bodybuilding title, Dave was diagnosed with cancer. Dave beat cancer that year, but he would battle cancer again just a few years later.

This interview is a raw, honest conversation about losing your identity, learning to turn inward, and the good that can come from living through adversity.

3:30 – “Growing up, my father’s motto was: ‘The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.’ That belief in ourselves and in accomplishing things has always been a core part of my values.”

5:15 – “The real difference for me now is having lived through trauma, I have more ability to be empathetic with how my parents made it though trauma to arrive at those values… we don’t arrive at values willy-nilly. They’re shaped through the fire that we live.”

9:15 – “I just felt that something was different but didn’t really realize what was going on or know. And of course, we all think we’re invincible or certainly more impenetrable than we are in our 20s.”

9:45 – “I’m only now – and it’s been more than 15 years – really reconnecting with those moments because I blacked them out.”

10:30 – “Cancer is like a shovel to the face. It is just a completely numbing experience.”

11:30 – “I gained 50 pounds from the anxiety I was repressing.”

13:00 – “I don’t want to just go back to who I was before. I want to learn and grow and help others as a result of going though all that. And for many people, that isn’t comfortable.”

15:00 – “The possibility of going through another different type of tumor wasn’t in my mind at the time. I reacted to it the same way I tried to the first time, which is to just power through it… that whole going back into that experience was way more traumatic than I was able to understand at the time.”

17:15 – “Here I am, sitting at a kitchen table, broken, and I remember vividly saying to them, ‘If this is what the rest of what my life is going to be, I don’t know how long I want to be around for.'”

18:30 – “I didn’t react well immediately and I think we all have to forgive ourselves a little bit and be kind to ourselves with how tough those moments are.”

22:00 – “That’s what I thought I had to do as a man – project that I’ve got it, and I can handle it, and it’s not more than I am, and I don’t need help – and those things weren’t true. I really needed help.”

24:15 – “Life isn’t the way we planned. In small ways and big ways, it’s never going to be that life. But the way we can turn those things into who we really are meant to be, that to me is where we find our purpose.”

27:00 – “Even now, all these years later, being okay with who I am even when it differs from the way people expect me to be, I’m just finding peace now in that, and it’s a new place of resilience that I didn’t know was beyond some of the things I worked through in the beginning.”

28:30 – “We don’t know what help we need until some somebody shows us.”

30:00 – “Those moments of real compassion and empathy happened because I learned how to start opening up and then people met me there. Just that process of starting to open up and asking for help, people will show up and meet you in ways that we never can expect.”

30:30 – “[GRYT Health] is a community of people around the world that live and are free of judgment for how different each of our own experiences are and we come together to empower each other to get through that pain but also find our identity, live our lives, and also advocate for ourselves and for others.”

41:00 – “As patients, we are the experts in our experience. For a regulatory body like the FDA to acknowledge patients being the experts in their life, their lived experiences, is really starting to change healthcare in wonderful ways. One of those ways now are actually guidelines that say new treatments have to be developed by considering how they affect the people on them.”

42:30 – “Cancer and many diseases in general were every different 40 years ago. A cancer diagnosis 40 years ago was more or less a death sentence…. we’ve gotten to a point where just treating is not enough… we have to think about what they’re going through and how this will affect them and what that experience is.”

44:45 – “Our team with GRYT is more like a family with people who really empathize with what we’ve each been through, and by extension, want to share that empathy with others.”

47:20 – “To really affect people and affect humanity, and be a part of things that are bigger than ourselves, it is not about our individual ability to do those things, it is about our ability to respect and hear and see others.”

Thanks so much for listening!

As a child, Scott Simon was severely bullied. In his own words, he felt small, insignificant, and afraid.

Years later, during his senior year in college, a small door opened for Scott, and his life began to change.

This episode is about saying “yes” to the things that scare you. This episode is about using your fear to create a lifetime of joy, happiness, and wellbeing.

2:45 – “My main emotion when looking back on my childhood is one of fear.”

3:20 – “[Being bullied] made me feel like, the more visible I was, the greater risk I was in… I literally felt and wanted to feel invisible for most of my childhood. And that’s an awful feeling to have.”

5:25 – “We always have those moments in life where somebody opens a door for us. We’ve given the opportunity to take on something that we don’t think we can do. If we, in that moment, can just say yes, as opposed to no, you never know what happens.”

7:05 – “It isn’t really about the skydiving moments in life. It’s about the small steps forward that build one on another.”

9:50 – “Once you can get past that first 15-20 seconds of terror, or more if you ruminate on it beforehand, most of the time you realize you actually love what you’re doing. When you’re in that moment and you’re doing the thing that you were so terrified about doing, you have this tremendous sense of joy.”

10:20 – “It’s like anything else in life. When we put the effort into something that is hard, the feeling that we have afterward is this tremendous feeling of freedom and joy and release.”

16:50 – “Every chance that I had to make a decision about pushing myself in some new way, I took it on. That year absolutely transformed me.”

17:35 – “I re-did my childhood in a year.”

21:05 – “It’s such an underrated concept to sit there with a blank page in front of us and begin to dream about what life looks like.”

24:35 – “We all run the risk of having deep, immersive, even epiphany-type experiences, knowing that a shift has to occur, and then getting re-immersed in life and getting back into the comfort zones that have guided our life previously.”

26:05 – “What we want to do is protect ourselves from pain, anxiety… we have to push ourselves through that comfort barrier. That was the piece that stuck with me.”

29:35 – “I am a glutton for action.”

41:35 – “More often than not, most of us have a tough conversation that we need to have with somebody…. and we’re avoiding it.”

48:35 – “I have chosen to role model vs. mandate. My children revel in what I do and how much I care about it but don’t feel any pressure to follow my path. That is the beauty and challenge in parenting. To honor who our kids truly are and to allow them to find their path.”

52:05 – “As parents, if we can embrace this sense of allowing our kids to say yes to their own journey – and that takes faith and it takes courage – at the end of the day, we end up with kids who feel empowered and like their life is an adventure.”

54:35 – “Allow yourself the permission to be human. The permission to feel the fear, the anxiety, the chaos that surrounds us… to not stifle it, numb it, or pretend that it doesn’t exist… once we honor them, we can start to figure out those ways to take small actions in our lives that are going to allow us a sense of control, a sense of freedom.”

Thanks so much for listening!

In June 2018, Allison Pullins found out that her 3-year-old son, James, has Marfan syndrome, a genetic condition that affects his connective tissue and has serious implications for his heart, eyes, and skeletal system.

In this conversation, I speak with Allison about about what it’s like finding out that your child has a rare genetic disorder, the challenges of living with a chronic disease, and how Allison has found meaning from this experience.

18:15 – “His aorta was almost 3 centimeters big. He was three years old. My aorta, as an adult female, 5′ 3″, was probably about 3 and a half. So it was big. And I knew enough to know the implications of this.”

19:00 – “I was devastated. I was just devastated. It was like my brain almost shut off… I kept having to tell myself ‘Allison, you’re here. This is happening.'”

23:00 – “We got the genetic confirmation back two weeks later, but honestly, the diagnosis didn’t matter to me at that point. It was in his body. His aorta was huge. It was there. I didn’t necessarily need a name for it.”

24:40 – “When we got the diagnosis, I had to face the fact that it would only get worse. It would only get worse. This is the painful thing about chronic disease.”

25:30 – “I had to accept the fact that I am a mom of a sick kid who is not gonna get better. It was a radical, radical acceptance. It was radical. The journey was very difficult. The first year after James’ diagnosis was a very dark time for me and my husband.”

26:30 – “When you’re faced with this kind of grief, with this kind of loss, the only way through it, is through it. You gotta walk through the fire.”

27:00 – “Whenever I look my kid in the face, I know he is sick, and I know this could kill him.”

27:15 – “I had never felt that side of unconditional love where you don’t just love the person because you love them. You accept that they are non-permanent, just like you are. Just like everything is. That added this richness, and frankly beauty, to how I loved my kids and how I love people in my life.”

29:30 – “This realization and this experience is my superpower. I have so much more courage and bravery than I ever realized I had.”

32:00 – “Every single day is an opportunity to teach my kids to be more resilient, to have compassion, because they’re gonna need it.”

38:15 – “We’ve got these gigantic brains that can think of the past and the future, and it’s really to our detriment a lot of the time.”

38:30 – “Realizing all I have is this present moment with my child helped my parenting because I could bring that focus and concentration to look at my children and respond to them.”

43:15 – “In this process after James’ diagnosis, I discovered some ugly things about myself.”

44:15 – “After James’ diagnosis, I felt so isolated. It wasn’t just because I was going through this thing. I know people were interacting with me and thinking ‘I don’t know how she’s dealing with this. Do I talk about it? Do I bring it up? I pity her.’ I felt the pity from people. And that’s what I realized I had been doing [with others, too].”

46:15 – “I have this opportunity and the shifted perspective to really dig into people’s tragedies and be there for them. Like truly. In a way that I just could not be before.”

47:30 – “If you haven’t lost something important to you, don’t worry, it’s coming. This is the human condition.”

50:15 – “I came into this with a very strong yoga practice that I had built since my early 20s. I had a foundation of mindfulness in the body and inside my own head that served as a great starting point for me.”

50:50 – “One of the interesting repercussions of James’ diagnosis was I really questioned my purposed in life… suddenly I knew, my purpose in life was to be the head of this family.”

Thanks so much for listening!

In 2009, Zach Osborne was a 23-year-old Army Ranger serving in Afghanistan. When Zach’s Stryker vehicle was struck by an improvised explosive device, both of Zach’s heels were shattered, his right tibia and fibula were broken, and he suffered a range of spinal injuries.

Over the course of the next year, Zach underwent 35 surgeries, battled serious infections, and had one leg amputated below the knee before miraculously recovering.

Afterward, Zach went on to receive his MBA from Stanford University, worked for the Boston Consulting Group, and started his own highly successful consultancy.

In this conversation, I speak with Zach about dealing with uncertainty, how his faith provided a fountain of hope, and why he doesn’t regret any of what happened.

5:30 – “It began a process of coming to terms with a new challenge in my life… prior to the explosion, I was 23 years old, king of the world… and then in a moment you’re on your back or in a wheelchair for the next year.”

8:10 – “There’s a point where you start to realize you’ve come to the edge of medical knowledge and you stare off into the abyss.”

9:30 – “I have so much respect for doctors and nurses because they have to walk the line between truth and hope.”

10:15 – “That [initial] adrenaline gave way to the realization that things are different.”

12:30 – “One of the things I was taught during my time recovering was that there’s pain in life… but one of the worst types of pain is uncertainty. When you just don’t know, it’s really hard, it’s really, really hard, and I was forced to come to terms with that type of pain quite a bit.”

15:15 – “Walter Reed, I am convinced, is probably the best place in the world to recover from an injury because everybody there has somebody they look at and is like ‘man, if that guy or gal can do it, I can do it.'”

15:45 – “You don’t have a ton of time to wallow because there’s always people there to encourage you.”

18:40 – “To be frank, the biggest source of [resilience] is my faith. I’m a Christian and that faith background gives me a very strong foundation of hope.”

19:20 – “I would not change a thing… I feel very fortunate for everything.”

22:25 – “You know what’ll really bake your noodle? Is when you think about ‘how many IEDs did I step on that didn’t go off.'”

23:20 – “What really connected the dots for me was when I realized, oh wait, this is my life, it was like this before I went to Afghanistan… I am grateful for that experience because it forced me to connect the dots between the two… this idea of ‘I could die at any moment.'”

24:10 – “At 23 years old, I came to that conclusion. What a gift at a very young age. This is your life and you need to live it as if you don’t know what can happen in any moment.”

25:45 – “Going through this forced me to come to terms with where I was sourcing my identity from. At the start of this, I was sourcing a lot of my identity with being in the military, the training I had done, the deployment… And then you get forced to sit in a chair for a year and not be active… and it was really helpful in terms of being thankful for those things but realizing that’s not what makes me, me.”

28:45 – “This experience has helped give me the resources to be more empathetic to folks [during Covid-19]… figuring out how to be empathetic to people regardless of whether you like them is a really powerful tool.”

32:00 – “One of the things to walk away from [the military with]… is perspective… At a relatively young age, you get a pretty unique perspective on life. What is actually stressful versus what is not, or what is dangerous versus not.”

33:10 – “Everything can seem like an emergency, or you can put things in perspective and realize they’re challenging problems but this is how you can navigate the storm and still present a calm, steady, reinforcing presence to your organization.”

Thanks so much for listening!

Overview

Welcome to Reinvented, a podcast about the art and science of transformation.

In Season 1, we’re exploring what happens when adversity strikes – from finding new sources of strength to rethinking your identity, and beyond.

Get in touch