RTL Episode 64: How to Choose Your Mindset
We're kicking off 2022 by recapping some of our favorite episodes from the past three seasons. In six special podcast episodes, we'll highlight some of the best tips and advice from our previous guests. In this first episode, we're exploring our overall wellness as it relates to our mental health and mindset. In this episode you'll hear from:
Lynette Lovelace, founder of Lifetherapy
Bogdan "Shark" Grebeniuk, former amateur boxer & cancer survivor
Adonica Shaw, author and founder, Wingwomen
Danny Bader, best-selling author and speaker
Tune in to be inspired by their responses to life's challenges that range from divorce to being clinically dead. You will walk away empowered to reframe your perspective on life.
Lynette Lovelace, founder of Lifetherapy
@lifetherapyofficial
Bogdan "Shark" Grebeniuk, former amateur boxer & cancer survivor
@shark.strong
Adonica Shaw, author and founder, Wingwomen
https://www.adonicashaw.com@adonicashaw
Danny Bader, best-selling author and speaker
@_dannybader
Episode 64 Transcript
Josephine Atluri (00:09):
Welcome to Responding to Life: Talking Health, Fertility, and Parenthood. We're kicking off 2022 by recapping some of our favorite episodes from the past three seasons. In six special podcast episodes, we'll highlight some of the best tips and advice from our previous guests. In this first episode, we're exploring our overall wellness as it relates to our mental health and mindset. You'll hear from Lynette Lovelace, founder of Lifetherapy, Bogdan, "Shark" Grebeniuk, former amateur boxer and cancer survivor, Adonica Shaw, author and founder of Wingwomen and Danny Bader, bestselling author and speaker. First up is Lynette Lovelace, founder and CEO of the wellness brand Lifetherapy. The fundamental belief of Lifetherapy is that intentional self nurturing has the power to ignite positivity within us. When we change our mood, we change our perspective and the way we show up in our lives. Lynette's company mission is rooted in her own experiences, particularly when faced with a mother's worst nightmare, the near death experience of her two year old son.
Lynette Lovelace (01:24):
So Logan was two at the time, and he had a lot of allergies and asthma as a young child. So he started presenting with kind of these rashes and hives all over his body. You know, we had him in and out of the ER, I don't know, maybe maybe seven or eight times over a two week period where we kept taking him in for the hives and he, you know, certain things weren't adding up, he was falling asleep like while he was eating and just, you know, things that, you know, as a mother, you know, aren't right. And finally late August, I ended up taking him into children's or, you know, children's in the city and literally refusing to leave. I was like, look, there is something wrong with my kid and progressively, he was kind of getting worse and worse and by worse, I, I mean, there weren't a lot of symptoms other than extremely high fever, these hives, but no other known, like they didn't really know what to look for.
Lynette Lovelace (02:28):
And lo behold, when we finally ended up going in for a CT scan, because they could not find the source of the infection. As a matter of fact, they treated him for Kawasaki disease, which is not lightly treated because it is where they take the blood out of the body and they put it back in through a filter because it's infected and they basically told me, look, if this does not bring the fever down, I mean, they thought it would, they said, you know, we right away we'll know if this is what we have because the fever should come down and it didn't. And we decided to do the CT scan of the body and they came basically, this was on September 10th, which is pretty incredible when you think back to this time of, of our lives, which I'll touch on. But I mean, they literally, like, I remember it like yesterday, like this big, huge doctor walked in with about seven other people and everybody sat down and they just said, you know, we have very unfortunate news. He [Logan] has a tumor in his liver taking over three quarters of the liver. It does not look good. We can tell you by seeing this stuff that we do think it's cancer, we've already called the top guy, blah, blah, blah. He's on his way back to the hospital.
Lynette Lovelace (03:47):
So as you can imagine, you know, you're just kind of shaken out of this. I thought I was basically in for some random flu and you learn something that you just, you know, you can't really get your mind around. So the next morning was his biopsy to find out if it was, you know, a solid, we were, you know, what were we dealing with? And that was September 11th. So not only was the world falling apart - they literally shut down the hospital and I just have that, you know, I was like the psychotic mother running up and down the hall - I didn't care who was jumping out of a building my kid was dying in front of me - and they were telling me, I'm sorry, we can't go in and do the test, the hospital is on full lockdown. And it just, you know, you think back, and it's just this series of things you can't quite put your arms around to believe are happening.
Lynette Lovelace (04:40):
You know, still, it's just, it's funny to this day. I don't, I don't have a lot of I don't understand what the rest of the world went through with 9/11 because I was so, you know, paralyzed, right? He ended up being in the hospital for quite some time - several months - and really, and truly, it was a very fluke, they, he's still kind of a case study there now where they believe a staph infection got somehow in his portal vein and landed in his liver. And that's just where it settled. And thankfully that it, I guess, picked that or organ, at least because that organ is, you know, can rehabilitate itself, unlike some of the other ones. So, yeah, that was that all this negative. We have to get to the positive.
Josephine Atluri (05:37):
We do. We do. I know.
Josephine Atluri (05:40):
But he's, you know, he made it through and he's in his twenties.
Lynette Lovelace (05:43):
Yeah. He's, you know, we, we, um, he's 21 super healthy.
Josephine Atluri (05:49):
As a mother myself to seven children, I can't even begin to imagine how Lynette rebounded, but here's what she took away from this experience.
Lynette Lovelace (05:57):
What happened with Logan in the midst of this, you know, as he got healthier, but was still hospitalized because he was on a central line for quite some time for the infection that we had to keep him in the hospital. But what happened was eventually as he got stronger, I had not left the hospital in probably I don't know, six or seven weeks, I had never left. And the pediatrician came to me and she's like, look, you have to go home. Like, I'm here, your husband's here. He's completely stable. You have to go just, you know, get your mind in a different, you just have to step out of here, go home, get a shower. And ironically, I went home that day. I drove home and I lived about a 45 minutes from the hospital and my girlfriend and met me there had made me just a warm meal and I took a bath and I literally remember driving back thinking, wow, like what a difference it makes to kind of reset your mind. How a simple act of a warm meal and a bath, how you can just change perspective and really that, that tell you that that was a defining moment in my life.
Josephine Atluri (07:00):
Not only did Lynette bravely face this challenge and cultivate her resilience, she went on to start her company Lifetherapy as her way to help others choose their mood and spread hope.
Lynette Lovelace (07:11):
You know, creating Lifetherapy and those products was really like my own healing in a bottle, if you will. I mean, it was my healing that I designed this, you know, beautiful self care line for the better good of a person having a wonderful experience through that touching point every day. I mean, I took that very seriously how my brand and our products gave me the opportunity to have a touching point with women every day, you know, be it, you know, in the shower or putting on a lotion or perhaps lighting a candle as the line grew. And it was just having a, I mean the lotion, although I think our formulas are quite amazing, the lotion's not gonna change your life. It's the way of life. It was trying to teach that lesson of the tagline of the company is choose your mood. You know, we have a choice every day in how we are going to tackle whatever happens to us. And you know, for me, I think it's, you know, from the minute you get up, you put your feet on the floor and you know, how are we gonna approach the day? And that was really my intention of spreading that hope to people.
Josephine Atluri (08:25):
Another courageous guest of mine whose life story inspires many, myself included, is Bogdan "Shark" Grebeniuk, former amateur boxer and cancer survivor.
Bogdan "Shark" Grebeniuk (08:36):
At practice we had a swimming set. It was six 50s and we had to build our effort from one to three. And from four to six. Obviously not unusual to have a high heart rate, right, at the end of a race. But I feel that my heart rate is very elevated and it feels different than normal. So there was a nurse and I grabbed this lady and I say, something is wrong with me, help me. And that was it. She told me to have a seat on this bench, but at, at some point I was just laying on this bench. They called an ambulance. This lady was, you know, trying to measure my blood pressure and stuff, doing all kinds of things that I don't know what she was doing, but things were, things were going rough and I felt like, I felt I was on the edge, you know? I was fighting for my life, you know, it's crazy.
Bogdan "Shark" Grebeniuk (09:42):
I remember my, my friend who I was swimming with - we were swimming that practice together. He climbed out of the pool when all of that was happening to me. And when I was laying on this bench, he was kind of behind the bench, holding my head like this so I was looking up at him while this nurse was trying to do all kinds of things. They were like call an ambulance, and they called an ambulance. My parents came to the pool even before the ambulance came. It took ambulance about 40 something minutes. And I think they shot me Epinephrine, which is adrenaline, and did something else. And then they got me out of that state, right? When I was, I was really not right. You know, something really wrong. So after all of that happened, they told me that I had a cardiac arrest. Cardiac arrest basically means heart stoppage. My heart was not beating for about 40 minutes. And my blood pressure was zero for about 40 minutes as well.
Josephine Atluri (10:56):
So in October, 2019, you were diagnosed with stage three lymphoma. How did you respond to the news initially in, in the next coming days and weeks?
Bogdan "Shark" Grebeniuk (11:10):
Yeah, so my initial reaction was shock, obviously. Because the thoughts in my head were like, why, why me? Like, I've, I've been an athlete my entire life. Always tried to eat healthy. I've never done drugs. You know, why me cancer? Why? I have nobody in my family with cancer. It's not genetics, you know? So I was just, it was a shock.
Josephine Atluri (11:46):
After being pronounced clinically dead. Coming back to life. Here's the inspiring way Shark responded to the news, many years later, that he had lymphoma.
Bogdan "Shark" Grebeniuk (11:55):
We reacted emotionally like this, but initially, but that emotional reaction lasted for about two to three hours at most. Okay. After that I collected myself and my wife was totally with me on the same page. We said, you know, who, if not me and I, I just realized that I'm in the, I'm in the perfect position and I hold a unique key to show people how to deal with this stuff, you know? When life throws obstacles like this at you, how do you deal with this? So I got excited. I got excited to show people, how do you fight cancer? And I was like, okay, I'm gonna share everything that I'm going through on my social media. I'm gonna share on Instagram, I'm gonna create a YouTube channel, any kind of value I can provide for people who are fighting cancer or whatever, any kind of deadly diseases or depression or whatever they are going through.
Bogdan "Shark" Grebeniuk (13:11):
If I can help them, I wanna be that person who helps them - even if it's just one person, great. I wanna do my part here and do everything I can to, to give back and be helpful. When I first met my oncologist and she told me about our treatment plan and she said, I'm gonna have to do chemotherapy. And she said, I'm gonna have to do 12 rounds - once every two weeks. But the reason this excited me is because 12 rounds [a] championship boxing fight is 12 rounds. And I was like, amazing 12 rounds, just like a championship boxing fight. And I promised myself and everybody on social media, everybody who was aware of the situation that I would not cancer out before the 12th round, I would be in remission early. And that's what I did. I, I currently have done - I just did my seventh round three days ago, but after four rounds, I did a pet/CT body scan, and after four rounds of chemotherapy, my body was already cancer free. So I'm in complete remission. Cancer is dead now.
Josephine Atluri (14:32):
Shark's life changing experiences shaped his warrior mindset. Here's his advice for how to make the most out of each day that you are alive.
Bogdan "Shark" Grebeniuk (14:42):
You only have today, period. Your life is not so many years. Your life is today. This moment is all we got. And then when this moment is gone, next one comes and then that one is gone. And then guess what? Next one might never happen. And people forget about this, you know, like look at Kobe Bryant. That was just another reminder for everybody that you can, you can be on top of the world and have all the success and money in the world, but regardless of who you are and how much money and success you have and happiness, and you might have the happiest biggest family [the] next moment is not promised - to you or anybody. So I would recommend to listeners to remember about this live one day at a time and take every single day to get better in everything that they do.
Bogdan "Shark" Grebeniuk (15:48):
Eat better. Take better care of their body. Work out. Read books. Take care of your mental [mind], right? Grow [and] mentally expand your knowledge about things. Grow spiritually, I would recommend. Spiritual growth was a huge part of my warrior mindset that, you know? Getting out of depression, there was a couple books that helped me get out of there and ever since then, I felt the power of books and how spiritual work really takes you to that next level in life. And ever since then, I don't stop. I listen to books, audio books, I read paper books. I meditate daily.
Josephine Atluri (16:40):
Another phenomenal guest who also had a near death experience is Danny Bader, a best selling author and sought after speaker who had his life transformed after he died when 8,000 volts of electricity ripped through him and then he came back to life.
Danny Bader (16:57):
And I was working for two brothers and one brother and I were lowering a ladder, metal ladder, late in the day in July of 1992. And I asked, you know, I saw these wires and I kind of sensed, we might be close. And he said, no we'll be okay, we did it this way this morning. And we hit the wire by about a quarter of an inch, half inch. So very, very small margin of human error. And that wire tragically had about 8,000 volts of electricity in it. It came down the ladder, it went into both of our bodies and it pretty much killed both of us. And I came back, my friend didn't that day. So yeah, quite the journey after words, you know, the guilt and all the, all the feelings of you know, despair and hopelessness and all those things after, after my buddy, you know, passed. He was a wonderful guy, husband, dad with three kids.
Danny Bader (17:47):
So that, yeah, that that event certainly is a, is a big mark on my timeline, if you will. So, you know, the accident happened. I came back to life, my friend didn't. [I] had a very weird, interesting, beautiful experience at the accident when what I believe my soul left my body. But the way that I made sense of, of it was just to, you know, rely heavily on my faith. Now that didn't happen initially - I was really [mad] at God because I, I thought God got this wrong. You know it was kind of like, how can you let bad things happen to good people? We've all heard that phrase. So I, I severed the relationship with God and you know, I looked for some healing in other very unproductive ways if you know what I mean. But ultimately I came back to the support of my wonderful mom and dad and my sister and my brother and my girlfriend at the time.
Danny Bader (18:40):
And thankfully just pressed on. You know, it was one instance though I can remember that was very, very powerful for me. I was down in the Outer Banks in North Carolina in October, and I was pretty much at the end of my, my proverbial rope. I just couldn't take it anymore. Nobody understood what I was going through. And I was contemplating getting a hose and putting it into the tailpipe of my Jeep and just driving onto the beach down there and run it through the window and go to sleep and I looked at the hose and I didn't buy it, I kind of got spooked when this lady came by, you know, cause I'm looking at hoses and I'm trying to the things you think about, I'm thinking about what color should I get? How long should it be? And you know, crazy that you're thinking about self destruction.
Danny Bader (19:24):
And she came by and kind of spooked me out of my funk. And I went out and got drunk because that was a good mode of dealing with everything those days. And I remember I was in a phone booth - I was coming back to my motel room and I walked past this phone booth and I went into it and a lot of young people have no concept of what this is, right? Anyhow, you, some of, you know, it was that square box with glass and put money in. So I went in there and it was kind of like I was divinely drawn in there. It had this, this mystical light shining down on it. And I called my mom and she said, when are you coming home? We can't wait to see you. And I'm, you know, half drunk or maybe three quarters drunk.
Danny Bader (20:06):
And I said I'll be home in a couple days. And when I walked out of that phone booth, Jo, something in [me] that little voice in my head and all of our listeners have it, you know, it said, I wonder what it's gonna be like when I get better? And that was the first time that I really held a very useful thought, a positive thought about the future versus, you know, being stuck in the past and all the blame and all the guilt. So working through it was just, you know, it was a matter of time and it was a matter of you know, really being okay that I felt like [crap] a lot in life. And you know, that's just part of that journey. Don't, you know, if any, if anybody's going through anything difficult, the worst thing we can do is go, oh, don't worry about it. You should feel better. Don't feel like that. We, we gotta feel like that. You know, that's, that's part of the journey, but we need support.
Josephine Atluri (20:50):
After navigating through his life altering experience, here are three tips Danny has to offer on how to respond to life's challenges.
Danny Bader (20:59):
Within resilience I think it's very important to surrender because oftentimes when we need a really heavy dose of resilience, there's a bigger force out there going on. You know, there's COVID, I often use the analogy of getting caught in a rip tide out in the ocean. And you know, when you're in a rip current, best thing to do is surrender. Don't fight it, just go with it until it lets you swim sideways and then save your energy. So I think it's really important to surrender and know that the world has some bigger forces sometimes that are outside of our control. The second part is to have some vision look past the difficult time, stay in it. You got, you gotta work through it, but also see the other side and say, this is not gonna last forever. At some point - six months, nine months, a year from now, this is gonna be how I am. And then the key to it all is action. What action can I take in these rough times, it's continuing to move me, move me through it. So yeah, just you know, slow down, surrender, welcome - as crazy as that sounds - welcome the opportunity to grow. See the other side with some vision and make sure that you're getting your [butt] out of bed and taking some good actions every day.
Josephine Atluri (22:09):
We don't necessarily have to go through life or death situations in order to learn lessons from life. Adonica Shaw, founder of Wingwomen, a health focused company, author and advocate for women's self-care shared her lessons on how to surrender self-limiting beliefs and behaviors in order to access a life that you love.
Adonica Shaw (22:30):
Earlier in my life, I had kind of prided myself on being in control and being poised and being this kind of like Michelle Obama, Oprah esque poised character. That was always so carefully poised and carefully in control in so many different environments. I suddenly found myself in these situations where that persona needed to crack and break off and fall away from me, except I was in very, I had to say strong resistance, as these things were happening, it wasn't until I got to the point where I'm like, you know, know what, if you are praying a prayer to the universe, to God, whoever it is that you acknowledge as your creator, your maker for them to create change in your life, to remove the things that no longer serve you to create a radical shift. You can't be praying for that, but then being surprised fall apart or break, because you don't realize your prayer might be being answered.
Adonica Shaw (23:36):
But in order for me to get that answered prayer, it required me to give up that picture perfect persona and stop trying to race and try to change people's minds. Like, no, you don't really believe that. And I'm this don't say that about me. It got me to this place of these things did happen. I'm a work in progress. These are my values and it's totally okay if you don't agree with them. Yes, I did go through these really difficult experiences, but that's how I am today and getting to this radical place of acceptance purely by letting go of that mask and surrendering up to be whatever I was gonna be in my best and fullest version to the universe, to God, and recognizing that my power was within whoever I was gonna be once that mask was off. Because once I did that, I actually started to attract my tribe, my people, my followers, my base, whatever you wanna call them to me so much more radically and more quickly than I had by putting on that show. And so when I let go and I surrendered, my prayers were answered.
Josephine Atluri (24:43):
Adonica wrote a book called "Depressed to Daring" sharing her insight on how to channel one's inner superwoman. Here are three tips that she shares on how to do just this.
Adonica Shaw (24:52):
Well tip number one is to set boundaries. You know, one of the things that I struggled with very early in my career and quite frankly struggle with, from time to time even today, is setting boundaries around the things that are within my scope of work and within my scope of energy, you know, and so not overcommitting myself to things just because I'm excited to be asked and not taking on projects simply because somebody's flattering me and saying, oh my God, you're the best person for this. Instead keeping those boundaries up and keeping that time available to myself, if there's a project or something that I really wanna invest myself into that I've got that space open. So that's thing one. Thing two is having a self care routine. For me now, I have a self care routine in that I have dedicated time every single week on my calendar.
Adonica Shaw (25:52):
That's untouchable. That is just my me time and whether I'm hitting pinatas - and I can't really do it right now, but, animal therapy - going out and, you know, working with horses or going to a ranch or to a place where they may allow you to help or volunteer with animals, that was incredibly therapeutic for me through my divorce process and post divorce therapy process. And so I have time dedicated that is just purely about me getting into my feels, feeling everything that I need to feel, evaluating things and just spending time alone. So that's thing two. And lastly, the last thing is to being open, to evolve and to change. I feel like the trap a lot of women find themselves in is that it's like, oh, well, if I don't do it this way, I'm gonna let down my mom or I'm gonna let down my family, or I'm gonna let down my family line because every woman in my family has always done it this way.
Adonica Shaw (26:59):
And so while that is completely understandable, I think that there still should be something said about leaving space to evolve to make sure that those transitions are healthy for you, but as you're passing them onto your children or your nieces or whomever that they fully represent, the ways in which women can show up themselves in a way that doesn't deprive them of their emotional or mental health. So between those three things, I have found a lot of balance in my life and I try to teach others to do the same with those as well.
Josephine Atluri (27:35):
Lynette, Shark, Danny, and Adonica - what phenomenal human beings. There were so many brilliant nuggets of wisdom in each of these episodes, from how to care for ourselves, how to have a warrior mindset, how to surrender and live life to the fullest. I encourage all of you to go back and listen to the full episodes, to dive deeper and learn more from each of them. For now, I'll leave you with one last piece of advice from each of these guests.
Lynette Lovelace (28:04):
Like frame of mind is so important in any level of self care, right? We, how, again, go back, going back. How we talk to ourselves? What are we saying? Because ours is the loudest voice. The one we use every day.
Bogdan "Shark" Grebeniuk (28:17):
I will fight until my last breath and I'm gonna take one breath at the time. The one that I'm taking right now and fight to live the best life that I can live. Also learned in my meditations in the spiritual practice in the books that I read, I'm not trying to predict anything, you know? Yes, there are certain things that I want and I try to visualize them - how I want them - but at the end of the day, you have to let, let it happen to you in the most unpredictable way. So I'm not clinging to anything. I'm not, I'm not trying to hold onto anything and forcefully, pull it into my life. I know great things will happen. I just have to live my life the way I am living it in this moment and I know great things will happen.
Danny Bader (29:17):
That they should wake up every day and put a smile on their face, give themselves a hug and understand that this human journey that we're on is not the end of it. What I didn't mention in my accident is I saw the other guy coming down the ladder and I was yelling to him. And then my energy and my soul left my body. And it was joined with a source that I call God. And then I came back. So I know the challenges and the struggles that we have in this human world. We have to deal with them and, and they, they do mean a lot to us, but it's not the end of the game. So deal with them and trust that you are gonna continue. Look, I died. My body stopped and a part of me went on. Why would I be any different than you? We all have that energy inside of us. Doesn't matter what you call it. We just kind of keep that as your overarching perspective in life and then roll up your sleeves and deal with what you gotta deal with you know, as a human being. That's what I would offer to you.
Adonica Shaw (30:19):
It is okay to hold space for yourself and ultimately, that is what self-care is. It is learning a way to hold space for yourself and protecting it no matter what the cost is and then when people have something to say, like, you obviously have to deal with those conversations, but you shouldn't feel guilty for it.
Josephine Atluri (30:36):
Thank you for joining me for this special recap episode of Responding to Life. It was a real treat to revisit these conversations. It made me feel so grateful to have made a connection with each of these inspiring individuals. I hope you walk away from this episode empowered to reframe your perspective on life, choose your mood and respond to life more mindfully. Please tune in next week for the second installment of the six part bonus series recapping my favorite episodes from the past three seasons of the Responding to Life podcast. Thank you for listening to Responding to Life: Talking Health, Fertility, and Parenthood. If you enjoy the show, I invite you to share it with, with others and leave a rating and review on whatever podcast outlet you use. To learn more on how to apply mindfulness to your life, please check out my book, The Mindfulness Journal for Parents, available on Amazon. On my website, jatluri.com, you can also check out older podcast episodes and so many tips on infusing mindfulness into your life, particularly if you are trying to conceive, experiencing infertility, managing your mental health or navigating parenthood. I offer affordable online mindfulness workshops as well as private online meditation sessions. Thank you again for your support. And I look forward to sharing another inspirational story with you real soon.