Finding Resilience And Success After Change With Nina Sossamon-Pogue

Life happens, and not always the way we expect it to. Every single day we face change, stress, and uncertainty. What if you could learn to thrive no matter what life throws your way? Resilience expert Adam Markel and his inspiring guests explore breakthrough strategies to fully embrace change and build the resilience required to become change-proof.

On today's Change Proof podcast, we have Nina Sosman Pogue, a speaker and author with a fascination for resilience and success after change. A former Emmy Award-winning TV news anchor, tech exec, and member of the USA gymnastics team, she shares that failure went along with all of those wins as the backdrop for her speaking, her podcast, and her amazing book, This Is Not the End. Really wonderful book title. You're gonna love this conversation today, so enjoy. All right, Nina. So we've gotten to hear your extensive bio, and I know we're gonna unpack that bio a lot more during our conversation today. Already have a sense of that from what we said in our pregame. But here's my first question to you. What's something, just one thing actually, that's not a part of your standard bio that you would love for people to know about you?

About me, I actually recharge all alone. I am one of those people that gets a lot of energy from people. I just did a huge event, 3,500 people, and I love

resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And in times of massive change and disruption, the kind of rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience but that of our teams. So right now we have a opportunity for you to find out just how resilient you are. Some years ago, my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilience leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. How resilient you are.

Loved it. I had so much energy, but it took me 2 days of kind of being on my own. That's where I do my best recharging and my best thinking. I don't share that with many people because they expect me to be so out there. But—

I know, right? I mean, there's some bit of a surprise. And you and I are simpatico right out of the gate because I will often say that to audiences when we talk about energy, when I'm speaking about that topic in relation to resilience as an example. I will say to people, so how do you recharge? Because our definition of resilience is not about endurance or grit or grind or any of that stuff that we know at this point doesn't work. It doesn't work long-term, but it's recovery and the rituals for our recovery that produce longer-lasting resilience. So I'll say to them, so how do you recover? Do you recover with other people or do you recover on your own? I say, so you might be surprised, me standing on this stage or wherever I am at the moment, right, talking to a whole bunch of people, that my method is just as yours is, Nina. I have to be alone. It's a solitary experience, and I consider myself an introvert in that respect. I get energy back. I regain it through my own practice that's more internal. And other people, like my own brother, my own flesh and blood, he has to be or wants to be in crowds of people, loud music, all that energy, which I get. But that's how he actually recharges his battery. It's interesting, isn't it?

Yeah. Like a big concert, I love to go in for a bit, but it sort of exhausts me and I need to be on my own. And I've had such a public life in so many different aspects of my life and been out in front performing, even in my young days as an athlete, performing out there, that people think I would just be all out there all the time, but it's not. The other thing that came through my head when you asked me that, I was going to say, well, I'm working on my handstand right now. Because I have this thing where even if I turn 100, I still have to be able to stand on my hands. And so I'm in a crunch time between now and Christmas by the end of the year because I've been slacking off a little bit.

Good for you. I mean, I was a swimmer in college, aspiring to be a much better swimmer than I actually was. I had a few moments. I made my parents proud because it seemed like anytime people would show up to see me swim, I was just like— I was like shot out of a cannon. When they weren't there, not quite so much or whatever, and certainly not in practice, which is a whole other story. But it's funny because there's an element of, I have to still be able to do a flip turn. I still have to be able to swim when I'm in the pool with other swimmers. I'm gonna go back and forth using flip turns. And so you have to be able to do a handstand.

Yes.

And you also were a gymnast in college, but not just an ordinary athlete like I would call myself in that arena, but you had some other kind of experience. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that, Nina?

Yeah, well, I was on the US team before college, so young in my career. I'm like 15, 16. I was on the US team back in the day with Mary Lou Retton and Bart Conner and that group. And so I went to Japan and Hungary and Germany and Australia, like all over the world. But then I didn't make the Olympic team. I call that one of my first big thises, one of those moments where my whole life went in a new direction. But then I was a college athlete and I blew out my knee. I was one of the top recruits in the nation. I went to LSU, big SEC fan. It was a great gymnastics program. And I blew out my knee my freshman year. And then I like to say I kind of went on to graduate in boys and booze for a while. But yeah, I blew out my knee and really had a difficult time trying to figure out who I was without gymnastics because it had been my whole life.

Sure. And just like swimming, I think these 2 sports actually have this in common. You get started— like, if you're going to be super successful in that arena, more often than not, you're not a late bloomer. I got started in swimming when I was in my Sophomore year in high school. But these kids that I was swimming against even then had been in AAU meets and been swimming since they were 5, 4, 3, I don't know what, but they were babies. I'm sure you got started in gymnastics when you were just a little tyke, right?

Yeah. And then I moved away from home at 13. I moved into the Olympic Training Center at 13. My parents were in Florida. It was outside of DC and Maryland. I moved into one of the training centers. And so I've kind of been on my own since 13. I'm fiercely independent. But yeah, it becomes your whole life. You know, you don't go to school like the other kids do. You had to be up early. You probably swam in the morning before school, swam after school. I did stretch and strength in the morning, then we'd go to school for a few hours, we'd train all afternoon. There was no dating in high school. There was no dances or football games. The first time I went to a football game, I was working in television and they asked me to go cover a Friday night, like, high school football thing. It was my first time ever going to a high school football game was as a journalist.

Wow. I want to bring something up. Actually, I didn't expect this to happen, but I'm really thrilled that it's come through. So When I'm delivering a resilience keynote talk, often I will make references. We're all storytellers. You're a keynote speaker, and you're in front of the public a lot, as I am. And people, to grasp any concept, but certainly not just an ordinary concept, if you're trying to sort of spin something differently, turn it on its head, create a new paradigm, help people to just get a new insight, you really have to sink a lot of that deeply. And storytelling is just one of the greatest ways to do that. Right? It's the thing that people can remember. For more than a year now, I've been talking about Simone Biles. I don't use it in every single event, but I bring it up where it feels appropriate to talk about what she modeled at the Olympics in the— I guess it was a year ago this past summer.

2021. Yeah, like it was a weird year.

Yeah, exactly. It was still sort of pandemic, and Japan was somehow able to put on a delayed version Of the Olympic Games, right? And I thought it was pretty astounding what she did. I mean, it was clearly controversial. For folks just to catch up, if you don't know, Simone Biles, she took herself out of the meet right at the start of this meet. And Simone Biles, again, for those of you that don't know, Simone is like, you just have to say Simone. She's like Michael Jordan, just have to say the first word, first name, and everybody gets it. And she's just one of the greatest Olympic athletes, gymnasts, that's ever, ever been. And I think the world was shocked, and a lot of people were shocked, and a lot of people became critical. And then a lot of people also came to her aid because she had, at that moment, as I understand it, was just not fully there mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, perhaps. She just wasn't at her best. Had something described as the twisties. I didn't know what the twisties were, but basically, you could tell us better. In fact, let's start this conversation about Simone. I have a certain through line I want to get to with it. But so what's your take on what happened? What happened to Simone a couple of summers ago when she had the twisties?

Yeah, I'm a huge fan of her as a person and as an athlete. And I would say not just one of the best gymnasts of all time, one of the best Olympic athletes of all time. She's really quite something. Having been an athlete at that level, and I've defended this often because I'm in a world of athletes often, and I think that it's very different for people to think about if you get the yips In baseball, they call it. My first husband played pro ball.

And in golf, too. They call it the yips.

Or in golf, you can get the yips. Or in any sport, you could just not be on your game. But if you do that, you don't die. You don't paralyze yourself or die if you get the yips. If you don't know where you are and your brain's not connecting to stuff that you don't have to think about, all that stuff that runs in the back of your head when you're in the middle of it, you don't think about how high you lift your arms and when you twist and when you come out of that. Your brain just knows it. And if you are in a moment where, like, nothing's connecting, you can really hurt yourself or you can kill yourself. And the stuff that she did, she could do very much bodily harm and put herself in a position that's super dangerous. So I think the fact that she was strong enough to realize that that is what was going on with her body— it's only happened to me twice the whole time I was an athlete, and I was a gymnast for many years. I remember once as a very young gymnast in the middle of a twist, Just opening up. I remember it because I knocked my coach who was spotting me. I knocked him in the face and he was angry. And then I had one other time where I did it in a vault, which I think is where she was having that experience too. And you're way up in the air, and if your kinesthetic awareness— like, you don't know where the ground is and you're just lost. It is cold chills through your whole body. It's hard to even explain what that feels like. You have no idea what's going to happen next. Usually you're so sure. It's just— second nature. You've been doing this your whole life. You go up in the air, you spin, you flip, you know where the ground is. Like, you don't think about it. It just is. It's really chillingly frightening. And I can't explain it more than that, but it's something that unless you've experienced it, it's really difficult to explain. But I have great respect for her because so many athletes would be like, I can get over this, and you just can't. Something's disconnecting.

Yeah.

So I don't know. I defend her a lot. It's not like getting the yips or having a problem in another sport where you're just not going to win. You're going to hurt yourself, and it's not going to be small. It's not going to be a small injury.

Terrifying.

Doing the things that she does.

This is something maybe most people that are listening to this have never heard me say before. So this is something— I'll answer the question. What's something people don't know about you that you want them to know? I guess I want them to know this now. I met my beautiful wife, Randi, a long time ago in a child psychology class at University of Massachusetts at Amherst. And I was a sophomore. She was a freshman. I was coming to that class, and the reason we met was because I had to borrow a pen. And I picked up pretty quickly that I could borrow the same pen from her every single day, which—

There was a lot more than a pen going on.

It's a couple of decades later that we're together with 4 kids and stuff. So I guess it was a good decision. Yeah. I didn't have a pen legitimately the first time because I was coming from gym class. I had a very tough class right before this intro psychology class, which was trampoline. And I was learning in that class how to do back summies, not just from the trampoline, but from The mat.

Yes.

So I'll never forget, at some point, we were out walking in town, and I said, you know what? I can do a back somi now. And it was nighttime. We were on grass, just walking in, like, a quad or something. And I said, watch this. I'm gonna do a back somi.

Oh.

And I did what you just described. Like, I threw my arms back. My body went up. I completely started to think about what it was gonna be and froze, opened up, and landed on my neck. And good thing I didn't really eff myself up. Thank goodness. What's that?

Thank goodness.

Thank goodness. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, it was a pivotal moment, I think, for her as a leader. And I consider her very much a leader, Simone, not just of that team, but across the globe as an athlete, as a woman, as a person who has done some and continues to do amazing things with her life, to take a step back in that moment to say, I'm on pause here, I'm taking myself out of this meet, was really profound because I feel like she took a step back even in the midst of that criticism. And then a week later, as folks may recall, the story goes, she got back in the meet. So in that interim period, other gymnasts were able to step up because she stepped back. Right. And in fact, I forget the name of one of the gymnasts, but Somebody else won a silver medal that wouldn't have even been in the meet had it not been for the fact that Simone took herself out, which was, again, thinking about not just her own safety, but the success of the team. And a week later, she puts herself back in the meet and gets on the balance beam and wins, like, a bronze medal, which was what she won in Rio, I think, as well, which is— you tell me. I want to know what you think is the hardest event for you. I can't even picture everything I see, but to do that on a balance beam, Is just insane.

Yeah.

Right. Was that the toughest event for you?

I always say floor was my best event because you can't fall off it.

Because you can't fall off it. Right.

Beam was very difficult. Beam was one of my top events as well. But bars was what I was the weakest on. Yeah, beam is just a head game. That's like putting. It's a lot of it's in your head when you're on the beam.

So she comes back—

another golf analogy.

Yeah, right. She comes back into the meet to get into the head game of the beam and then wins a medal for her country. But I think It was profound because when we think about resilience, which is the conversation you and I are gonna have today, I thought she just demonstrated and modeled this so perfectly in a world where people are exhausted and people are depleted. And they think because it's been the training and the programming from the past, from other people, from their culture, even where they grew up, a lot of people all over the world believe that there's points, there's extra points to grind it out. Somehow you get extra, you know, extra points in heaven for being, you know, for just gritting it out, right? She was a great demonstration of she took a step back so she didn't have to have a setback. And that was profound, I think, as an example for all of us, because not only did she get to recharge and recover, but then she was able to get in and do something really valuable for her country and for herself as well. So I would love to start this conversation with your personal definition of what resilience is and what it looks like for you. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, you hit the nail on the head right there. The definition of resilience that I use is from Center of Resilience. It's the ability to learn and grow stronger and adapt in a positive way when something happens in your life. It's that adapt in a positive way that I really lean into when I'm speaking and talking and thinking. And it's the adapt piece. I mean, there are a lot of people who speak on grit and persistence, and I believe in those things have a place. But during the pandemic, when everybody couldn't like just double down and go hard, everybody had to go. Oh, that's why this word resilience is so important, because I have to actually adapt. I have to figure out how to adapt in a positive way to what's going on, because I can't just double down or go harder or grind my way through this. So that's the definition that I use. And the piece that adapt in a positive way is really key for me. And you hit the nail on the head when you said this long term. So I talk a lot about lifetime learning and future success. So that adapt in a positive way is how you get to future success. Life changes. Everybody has challenges. Some people's are a lot bigger than others, but everybody has challenges. And your ability to adapt and find success on the other side has a lot to do with how you handle the thises, I call them. We can get into that later. But this long-term success is when you can see a future where the things that you want are coming into play and you can take yourself out of it or make an adjustment. So you have this long-term success. Here's a fun thing. I do this lifetime timeline. And if you think about Simone, since we just talked about her, so she's now 20-something. She's young. So I'll use my own life because I know my own math and I'm not a math whiz and it would take me a minute to do her math. So when I lost my sport, I was 19.

19.

When I was 19 years old, okay, that event in my life— gymnastics had been 78% of everything I'd known in my life. 78% at that point. Now, when I was 50, I had a news career and a journalism career and then had a tech career. When I was 50 and I look back, that was less than like 20, I think 26% of my life. And if I live to be 100, it's going to be even smaller. So that percentage of how big, of course it feels huge in the moment, but if you look at the lifetime and being resilient for a lifetime and continuing to adapt in a positive way as your life throws challenges and changes at you, that's that long-term thinking that we get into. One of the things that I like to share is this fun thing that an accidental boyfriend brought up to me. But it's— and I talk about it in my book. Imagine when you're 10. Remember summer when you were 10? And like, it just felt like the longest time in the world when you're 10 years old and summer's just stretched out in front of you, like all this time. And you have to wait 2 weeks to go to summer camp and stuff. Like, summer is big when you're 10. And then when you're 40, maybe you have a 10-year-old and like summer comes and you're like, where'd it go? It came and went so fast. It's the same thing. When you're 10, that year of your life, that whole year, is 1/10 of everything you know. So, of course, it seems huge. But when you're 40, it's 1/40th of the same 365 days, but the math totally works against us. And that's why it seems like life is going so fast, I think. Yeah. So just a fun mind game to think about. And when I think about Simone, back to her, I mean, this was a point in her life— she has a huge, amazing life ahead of her. She's going to do so many fantastic things outside of gymnastics. I mean, she's going to be a force to be reckoned with for a lifetime. And that was a moment that she didn't have to take herself in a really bad place. So there you go. That's my thought on that.

Or force it. And what's really— again, just to stay on that for one more second, you know, it's— the world is looking at her. You think about our decisions in life where we made a mistake or we failed at something or whatever the case might have been, or we made a difficult decision. It's not like you literally had the cameras of the world On you and analyzing in real time whether you were a quitter or whether you were brave or what did this mean? I mean, it, it's just quite a surreal experience to imagine being literally in her shoes at that moment.

Yeah.

And to have the courage to do what she did. Again, a great learning lesson because so often it is that I run into people, we have a resilient leader assessment. That we typically use as, as part of our process when we're getting ready to deliver a workshop or a keynote. And more than 5,000 people across the globe and business leaders mostly have taken this assessment. And the scores are really quite shocking in so many respects. They're baked into 4 zones: mental, emotional, physical, spiritual. But people so often, the one thing that's consistent across those things is that people try to to just force things. They're exhausted and depleted in part because they're trying so hard. I don't lack in tenacity or persistence, but it's what you said, Nina. There's an element of that that is like we're making a cake or something, and there's an ingredient that's called persistence, or an ingredient called tenacity or grit. It is certainly not the most number one ingredient. It's not the most Prevalent. It's not the one thing you're gonna taste more than anything else in that cake. But yet people think that's the case. And so we drum it into people's heads not to quit. And yet we're living in a world where there's a term called quiet quitting now.

Right.

On the back or on the other side of the great resignation or the great attrition. I mean, like, there's something in the marketplace that we're being told about the paradigm that people have been living when it comes to this thing that we're calling resiliency. I'd love to just get your take on that. What do you think the reason is, or is there a collection of things that you say would have contributed to this prevalence of people resigning or people that are quietly quitting? And I mean something other than what we've heard, which is it's those millennials or Gen Zs that just don't have any backbone or whatever it is that you hear older folks sometimes say about that Those generations?

Yeah, well, I probably qualify as older folks, but I don't think it's the millennials or the Gen Zs. I think it's part of what you said. It has to do with the way in which we look at the word quit. And if we think about resilience as adapting in a positive way to change, we all went through this big change and we had time to sit back and rethink our lives. So I think the great resignation is not coming from, I don't like my work anymore. I don't want to go back and sit in an office. I think as a collective unit, every generation, Friends of mine who are in their 50s who are still in corporate America, who are vice presidents and CEOs, I have the same conversation with them. They're like, I just had time to sit and think. I feel like I need to be doing something different. I feel like the world has changed and I need to make a change. So I think the word quit is— we've got a bad taste in our mouth for it, but we're just choosing to do something else. This quiet quit, people are looking for other things while they're trying to figure it out. I think that not just as a nation, because this is global, we all went through this pandemic for the first time in history. Remember how you used to have— everybody had a 9/11 story. Like, you could say how that changed your life and everybody— you'd go to a party and like, I know where I was, and everybody has their story. This is global. The whole world went through these, we could say, the stages of grief and went through this big change, this big this, I call it. But on the other side of it, I think we all had so much time to sit and think about what was important to us. We looked at things differently because the world was different. We looked at things that we thought were important because some of the things we thought were really important went away. I mean, I'm a public speaker. Conferences went away. Like, that was a big part, like standing in front of audiences of thousands of people. Like, that went away. So I had time to think and go, wow, what's my message without that? How can I help and make a difference on the planet that I thought I was trying to do if there's not that? So did I quit and go do something else? Some people— I didn't. I waited. I adapted and then got back on that same horse. But other people adapted and chose to go in new directions. And some people are still figuring it out and they're quietly quitting while they figure it out. Some people are still in a little bit of denial, like, wait, I went to college for this. Yeah. I got a career in this. I worked my whole life to get to this point in my career. And like, now what? So everybody's on their own journey, every generation. I think this quiet quit is just a lot of people who are still thinking through that and don't want to actually quit because they've been told not to be a quitter. So they're trying to figure out what to do without quitting because that's a bad thing. Or maybe they can't find the next thing. They're just stuck in this in-between. They're like in the Upside Down. I don't know. They haven't quite figured out Stranger Things reference.

I'm literally—

They're just stuck in this place where they haven't made a decision yet. I think that's what the quiet quit is. And I think it's going to be years before people come out and figure out exactly Mentally, and how this whole experience has changed them.

It's really—it's a lot of things. And two of the things that came up for me when I was listening to you speak about it, I think are really important. One is something actually, and this is a shameless plug for the book Pivot, right? That I wrote.

Everybody hated that word during the pandemic, so it's so fun. That's the name of it.

It is. Well, this book came out in 2016. This is the softcover reissue of this from Simon Schuster, which came out last year, which was great because we were able to update the content to. speak to things that we learned in the pandemic. But, and yeah. Wow. The pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources Resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. I wish I only had a nickel for every time the word pivot was appearing somewhere. There's a chapter in this book that talks about the sunk cost fallacy in that book. And I think there's an element of that where people do feel like they've got so much time in on something, you know, so much time doing something or schooling that they paid for, a student They're still indebted to— The

time they were away from their children to get to that point in their career. I mean, yeah, along with the student loans and the college and the— all of it.

And that's all collectively kind of referred to as a sunk cost. And people think that somehow or another there is a sunk cost to things which doesn't enable them to then make a change, to pivot, et cetera. I wanna get into the nitty-gritty of your story because you already indicated to us that you had an early life disappointment. Serious one in that you spent 78% of your time focused on becoming an Olympic athlete. And by age 16 or 17, you didn't make the team. So then you go to college and have an injury. And that sport— I'm assuming we're still talking about gymnastics— at 19, you lost your sport, to quote what you said earlier. Yes. And again, just that is a major pivotal point there. But that's not the end of those kinds of roads that you get to a place where it's either the road has changed or there's a dead end or you changed, intentionally changed your path. I'd love to have you track a few of those for us.

Sure. I call them my THISs. So there's the capital T, capital H, capital I, capital Ss. Those are the big ones that take your life in a new direction. And I have 5 of those in my life where I really lifetime of planning and going in a direction and had a plan and a path I was on, and then something happened. There was nothing I could do to get back on that track. Something was going to have to change. Those are big thises we all have, like getting fired, your company going under, or, or getting divorced, or getting a horrible diagnosis, or death in the family. Like, those are big thises. And then there are these capital T-H-I-S-S that, like, take us off track for a little while, but we can actually get back to the goal we had. And then the little thises are the ones we handle every day, like Spill coffee on yourself and you've got to go change your outfit to get out the door, or your kid's school calls in the middle of a big meeting and you have to deal with it. Like, those are the little ones. But these big disses, I had some big ones. So the first 2 you mentioned, not making the Olympic team and just the devastation around that and the embarrassment. I just thought I was a failure and the shame and all of that that went back with having to go back to my family who'd sacrificed and my friends who'd all been talking about it. I mean, it was like morning announcements in high school, embarrassing, like, And then I had to go to college and blowing out my knee in college. We have a lot of athletes who go through this, even without an injury. They just lose their sport at the end of their career because there's no place to go play professionally. And back then, it was like my bumper sticker and my sweatshirts and— like my bumper sticker on my car and my sweatshirts and stuff. Nowadays, it's your Instagram, it's your Facebook. It is out there. It is very much your identity and how you identify. So to lose that at the end of a long athletic career is very difficult to figure out who you are. without that sport, having given your whole life to that sport. So that was a struggle. And then I did find my way out of that. I mean, I didn't make all the right choices, but I made some, thank goodness. And I found journalism, and I became a journalist. I became a reporter and then a news anchor. And I loved doing that. It was— put all my energy and passion into it. It was very successful. And then at one point in my career, I literally won Charleston's favorite— I'm in Charleston, South Carolina at the time, and I won Charleston's favorite news anchor for 7 years in a row. Like, everybody loves Nina. And the next day, I get called into the boss's office, the general manager's office, and they literally handed me a box and let me go. And it was just nationwide budget cuts. Now that I've worked in a big company and I realize you have to do forced ranking and look at everybody's numbers and make some hard decisions, that was a hard decision they made. But they let me go like the day after I won this thing. I thought I was going in to get like a bonus or something. Totally, totally nailed me upside the head with that one. But they handed me a box and said, thank you for your 10 years with this team.

Pause right there. I just want everybody to just Sit with that for just a second. Literally, wherever you are in this moment, just sit with what that feels like, because we all probably have known something like that. But that's a pretty big deal because not just because it's a position of some importance, but you're out in the public. So you're literally one day you're sitting behind the desk and you're this news anchor that people love, and the next day there's somebody else sitting in your seat behind that desk.

Yeah, they went younger and blonder, cheaper. So that just did. But What was really weird, and I'll tell you, I talk about this in my first book, they handed me this box and walked me out. And I said, have I done something wrong? They said, no. I said, we talked about my non-compete. There was all these things around it. But then I walked out of the station and I didn't know what to do because I had done 3 shows a day for more than 10 years at this point. And so I had a sitter at home with the kids. I had 2 small children and a husband. I was the breadwinner. And then I didn't want to go home. I wasn't ready to see kids yet. But I couldn't really go out anywhere because everybody would've been like, wait, why aren't you doing the news? And I didn't know what to say. So I drove. My parents live in the same town. They moved here when I, when I had small children. And I drove to my mom's house and took a pair of her sneakers. They weren't home. Took a pair of her sneakers out of her closet and they were like a size too small. And I put 'em on and I went and walked on the beach for like an hour, like trying to cry and laugh and figure it out. Like, just what am I gonna do? I had no idea. But I just didn't know what to do with myself. I wasn't ready to answer any questions to anybody. And of course, part of my deal was, you can't tell anybody we let you go. We have to say we parted ways amicably, and then we'll pay you. That's how they, you know—

Well, that's how they get you to sign the release agreement. Right.

So I ended up sitting on the beach for 6 months and hanging out with my kids until I went across the street and got a job at the other TV station. But at first, it was so devastating. I mean, it just such as out of left field. And I thought about quitting. You know, I thought, how did I get to this point? Did I waste all this time? Just like we all do. Was this a waste of time?

Yes. It's that soul moment, like searching and evaluating. I mean, there's a lot of things involved in that. I've taken that walk, Nina. I know what that walk feels like. I know what the drive feels like when your vision for something doesn't align with someone else's vision who has more power. And it's a lonely moment. It's incredible.

Because it's your dream. It's nobody else's. It's your dream and goal, your ego. It's your own stuff.

I left the law in a very lucrative practice I built over 18 years to pursue a dream, which is really what that book Pivot was about. And to then also come to that moment when someone else held the cards to say, well, you can still pursue your dream, but it's not going to be here. It's not going to be with us. It's not gonna be—

you're great and all, but bye-bye.

Yeah. So that's a lonely moment for sure. Yeah.

Yeah.

And one of the greatest moments, I mean, so I want it to be about you. People may already know my story or not, but what was it like to come out of that moment? Because I know for me, it was, as I look back on it, not just pivotal, but just one of the greatest moments of growth and not necessarily the growth I would've chosen. Alright. To be Like, really honest about it. But I wouldn't now change any part of that. So how do you feel about that now, looking back?

Yeah, it was a gift. I'd probably still be in that job. I'm fiercely loyal, and I would have probably just stayed there and done that same job forever. It ended up being a gift. I had time to be a parent to my kids in a way that I hadn't. I had 2 little ones at the time. I think they were 2 and 4. And so I had time to spend time with them and think about the kind of parent I wanted to be, what I wanted my future to look like. I'd been so busy working, I hadn't done that homework. I did go back into television. I decided I didn't want to move out of the area I lived in. I wanted to stay there. And I had this offer. It was half the money that I used to make. I mean, literally half. And I had been divorced, so I was like single parenting at the time. Like, how do I pull all this off? But I remember being in that house for a while. I had a new house about the same time this happened, and I was like painting murals on the kids' walls and Cooking, like all the stuff no one has time to do when they work a full-time job. So yeah, and like spending lazy days with them on the beach in the middle of the week going, oh, is this what it's like to actually just sit back and be a parent? So really valuable thinking. And I was fortunate enough that the other TV station in town had an opening. And I was good friends with some folks over there. And they're like, come on over when your non-compete is done.

And you won an Emmy, didn't you?

Yeah. So then I went back and I won an Emmy at the other TV station, just kind of as a It's okay to stick

it in just a little bit. We're not perfect. So

it was a little bit of a gotcha. But yeah, so, but the learning for me, it was one of those changes that was, again, not my doing, just like not losing my sport and other stuff. But I came out so glad for the change on the other side because I would have kept doing the same thing forever. I kind of think the universe keeps going, okay, Nina, you figured this one out. Go do something else. Yeah. Same thing with my marriage. I went through a divorce, which just statistically, you've got listeners out there who've been through that one. That's a big this.

1 in 2, approximately. Yeah. And it's the same thing.

It's the end of the dream that you had, like all the dreams that you put in place when you went down that path and put a lot of time and energy and resources and emotion into that. So some big ones. And then the last one.

Yeah, I was just going to say the sunk cost thing also applies there because there are people who are in marriages. Again, I want to say as a disclaimer, here. This is not a call to action for anybody to go get divorced. Okay? When we make decisions, sometimes it's just the littlest thing that sometimes can be that thing. I was meant to hear that today kind of thing. So I just want to— this may or may not be that moment. But we do tolerate a great deal in our lives. And sometimes we tolerate mediocrity. We tolerate things that we know don't work, or that there really is no future for. But we tolerate it for the usual reasons— security, safety, fear of the unknown, and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. So We can pivot by design, or sometimes the universe handles our pivots for us. Right?

Right.

So you had one of those. So then the marriage ended, and then, but that's not even the end of the story of your pivot.

Oh, no. I have one more, and, and I won't go deep into it, but I was, again, I was back on TV, and I was very public. And then I was involved in a car accident in which I was the driver. And it was the middle of the day. It wasn't a drunk driving thing or anything, but I was the driver in this accident. And it was truly an accident, ruled an accident. But I went down a very dark place because I was so public and now I was this person who had been involved in this thing. And there's a lot to it. It's a lot, very heavy, that we can talk about, or you can read my book. It's in there. But it was a really difficult time for me to dig back out and figure out who I was there. And I had a moment where I didn't even want my timeline to go on. Like, I couldn't figure out, like, I don't want this to be part of who I am after I was like everybody's favorite news anchor and this world-class athlete. Like, everybody loves Nina. I didn't want that to be part of my story. So I went through a really difficult time to figure out how I put this in my brain and made it part of who I am. And that was probably the biggest— that's what sent me down this new path. And I went back on TV, very public, stayed on TV for a year, but then I got out and got into tech. And I will tell you that resilience piece, having gone through that journey and good therapists and all those things, big into stoicism, cognitive behavior therapy, it's kind of a mix of those things in my brain. But I will tell you, going through that journey, made me sort of bulletproof on the other side. By the time I got into tech and was working in a SaaS company and learning something new and really diving into that, we were running, doing this roadshow and doing the IPO about 8 years into that journey. And other people were just falling like flies. It was very difficult. It's a very difficult time. Grown men, like, in tears, like, I can't do this. And I was just like, you can totally do this. Like, come on, I got you. Let's go. Just move the things forward. Because I had been through such tough stuff, this didn't seem that difficult. to me. So there's something about that resilience piece. And I talk about it— if you can picture a heartbeat EKG going up and down, like the downs are those low parts and the top parts are the stuff you're happy about. And that's just life. It goes up and down. That's how it works. And you wouldn't want to flatline anyway. Some people have lower lows and higher highs, but every time you get back above the line, you're a little stronger. So that concept for me—

The stoicism. How does the stoicism inform that? Because it feels like there's a an element of philosophy, really, that you're talking about, right?

Yeah. I'm a little nerdy geeky when it comes to Stoicism. Marcus Aurelius. I wear amor fati. I wear it around my neck. And I think none of it's new. What I'm telling you, none of it's new. I just reframe things in a way that somebody might hear it differently.

Plato said all learning is remembering, right? None of this is new, right?

We get that. So my fun thing is, like, Marcus Aurelius said this stuff back in the day, and then we had Emerson. I'm also a big Emerson fan. What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. I wear that on a bracelet on my arm most days. So, I'm a big Emerson fan. That's my favorite quote. So, Marcus Aurelius, and then comes along Emerson saying the same thing in different ways. And then Dr. Seuss, if you go through, Dr. Seuss has almost all of the same things as well, just said in a different way. So, I call it Stoicism. It sounds real fancy, but it's just the same stuff people have been saying for years about how you can think about the world around you and how you react when something happens or how you look at the world and you Use your own thinking to create the future that you want. I mean, it's amor fati, like love fate. It is. That's very much the life that I've chosen to embrace.

Right? Yeah. And I'm putting the word for me. I'm putting the word philosophy on it because I think my personal philosophy is vitally important to my attitude, to my outlook, to the adaptability that you mentioned earlier, my capacity to adapt to. the world as it is, and the world as it is won't be the world as it is in a minute from now, in a second. And that's the thing that we— I don't know that we're really brought up to embrace. In fact, I think we're brought up to embrace quite the opposite, that we're constantly sort of attaching ourselves to things, wanting them to stay the same, and being resistant to change and forcefully Often, like resisting it, but with a lot of energy, which depletes us further, you know, ultimately changes the law of manifestation in the universe. So to resist that is literally to resist life itself on some level. And that's self-defeating.

Yeah. And the best laid plans, you can have wonderful intentions when you get married. You can have amazing plans when you start a company. Like, things happen. Nobody planned for a pandemic. It happened. So your ability to, when something happens, adapt in a positive way to whatever that is— and I call it your ability to handle the thises— how you handle the thises is directly related to your level of success and happiness in the future. Because your success is a scary word. It's kind of like quit. It's one of those words that's been thrown at us a lot.

Yeah.

But my definition of success and your definition of success and someone else's may be very different. So when I say success, I'm talking about whatever your goal or goals— even setting goals. Goals change. We've been told so much to set these goals. Even goals can change over time. You can change your mind. I had a thing, and I actually talk about this quite a bit too. My kids, I put all 3 of them through college and I paid for everything because I had a scholarship and that's how I had to have that to get through school. So that was a thing with me. I would pay for wherever they go. So all 3 went to college and I said, here's 2 rules. One, you can't get anybody pregnant or get pregnant because I want you to finish with a clean slate and be able to do whatever you want to do. I just— so if you do that, then money train stops. And then 2, no tattoos. No tattoos on your body. Don't commit to something before you're going to finish with college. You have to get through college without writing it on your body because there's something about that commitment that they feel like now set that goal, they have to go do it. Like you have to stick to this thing. And it's just clean slate. I just wanted them to clean slate on the other side of college. And those were my rules and my thing, but it was my way of giving them the grace or giving them encouragement to change. Like, if you've changed your mind about your major, change it. If you change your mind— you have this time in your life before you're a certain age, and even at any point in your life, to change because you choose to go in a new direction. And I didn't want them to feel like they were so committed to something that they couldn't, you know, had to stick to it or be persistent. I'm not against those words, but I do think if you want to live a really full and rich life. There are sometimes you have to change. We change as humans. The world around us changes. I mean, I was back with bag phones. Like, remember bag phones? I was a reporter with a bag phone and a radio, listening to the police radio. Who would know that it would all be in my pocket? Like, you don't even have to watch the news anymore. It's one of the reasons I got out of television. Like, no one's going to watch local news. Some people still do. I have many friends who still work in the business. I love them and I love that industry. But most of the time, people have all of it in their pocket. They don't even need it. So anyway, change. I had this whole thing around it's okay to change. Don't feel like because you said one thing once, you have to stay with it forever.

Yeah. I mean, it really is amazing. And it's a bit of an oxymoron because the greatest constant in all of life is change. So change is constant. Like, you go, what? These are seemingly—

So it doesn't have to be a bad thing. Yeah.

Inconsistent. incompatible even, and they're not. That's where I think we have to understand what is vitally, not just what is true, capital T truth, that that's the case, but what is our philosophy around it? You know, personally, do we see success as something that means avoiding failure? Because a lot of people, I think that's their philosophy, that to be successful, I have to avoid failure. Or does someone like you, like me, and many, many other people that we know who've succeeded multiple times and continue to achieve whatever the outer the external world would define as success, that success is really about how we leverage our failures. Right. How do we utilize our failures? Because that's, again, philosophic, but that philosophy, then it directs us in so much of our thinking and so much of our actions. So I wanna mention your book right here. This Is Not the End is the title of it. Yeah?

Yeah. This Is Not the End. And it looks like a typewriter on the front that says the end. Like the end of the story.

This is not the end. Yeah.

Yes.

Beautiful. I didn't stress it in the right spot.

And strategies to get you through the worst chapters of your life. And it's a little bit of my story, but a whole lot more about the reader. Whatever their big this is that they're going in, this, whatever you're going through, is not the end of your story. And I just help people. It's the book I was looking for when I went through a really difficult time. I call it an airplane read. It's an hour and 10 minutes or so from beginning to end. And it's hard to write a short book. It's what I realized because it took me a long time to get it down to something that was consumable for someone who's going through a difficult time. But that's what it's designed for.

So in the show notes for today's conversation, you guys will find links to find out more about This Is Not the End, as well as where it is that you can get a hold of Nina and find out more about her amazing message, her keynote speaking, all the ways in which she is serving the world. I have so loved our conversation today, Nina. I so appreciate your time and, and going there and going there. I don't know how much of what you shared with us is something— are things that you don't share typically. I mean, I feel like that one little piece where you told us about what it was like to leave the studio and not be ready to head home and just hug and kiss your kids as though nothing had changed or nothing was wrong, that is a very visceral moment and vulnerable. And I personally I can identify with what that drive feels like. And, and I think we all can. I mean, on to greater or lesser extent. So I appreciate you going there with us today.

My pleasure. The time zoomed by. It's been just great to chat with you and spend a little time with you.

Wonderful. Wonderful. We'd love to get your comments. As always, you can go to adamarkel.com/podcast, leave a comment there for me, and I will actually be the one responding. We don't have bots doing that. Nobody else is doing it for me. And not because we don't have a team to do it, but it's just, to me, it's a personal thing. If you take the time to do that, I wanna be the one personally responding to you. We also make the request that if there's somebody that you think would really benefit from hearing more about Nina's story, hearing any of the parts of this conversation, feel free to share. We love it when you do that. Share the episode, share something with a friend or family member, somebody in business right now who's dealing with the concept of change. And, you know, maybe they get some strength from this or some insight as well. And of course, Those 5-star reviews on the platform that you consume this podcast on, really, just— it's a blessing. We appreciate you taking the time to do that. So thank you so much for that as well. And speaking of blessings, I feel like this has been a blessing to all of us today, Nina. And I just, again, want to say thank you for your time.

Adam, thank you so much. And that's why you're so good, Adam, is because you do answer all those yourself and you do this as a passion. So I am honored to be a part of it and really appreciated the time we had today.

Yay. Way cool. Ciao for now, everybody. Okay. So just in full transparency, folks, this is an edit. Typically my conversations with people are not edited. I don't know if you guys know that or not, but in this instance, as we had closed out, Nina and I were having a conversation and she had said to me, hey, listen, I paused on sharing a particular story because I didn't know whether your audience would handle it or you would want me to share it, or just good old-fashioned professionalism and courtesy, really. And in discussing it, I just feel like this is something you guys would want to know and hear, and Nina's willing to go there with us. So Nina, I'm gonna toss this back to you, and if you could just pick us up at that point where you said you had an accident.

Yeah. And I sort of high-leveled that I'd been in an accident and went through a difficult time. But the story of the accident, what had happened was I'd already shared with you, I was now anchoring at a new TV station. I was best friends with my co-anchor and his whole family. Our kids were all the same age. And so I had taken a day off of work from the news so I could be like all the other moms. Grass is always greener. I want to go home and meet the school bus because everybody else gets to. And so I took a day off of doing the news and I went and met the school bus. And I show up, got there early because the bus came to my co-anchor's house. He and his wife lived on a big corner lot in a very suburban neighborhood. You can picture it. It was fall, gorgeous out. And the bus comes. I got there early and we'd been playing. They had a new baby about 11 months old. We'd been playing with their new baby who's adorable. She had 2 older boys and They were all just the best-looking kids and just sweet, sweet, sweet family. And so the bus comes and the kids— you could hear it coming around the corner, the noise— and the kids all pile off. And our boys were in the 3rd grade and they throw their backpacks and want to run around. And there's probably, I don't know, probably 10, 15 kids that get off the bus right there. So all the moms and all the siblings, it was a big party every afternoon and it was so great. I loved it. And then we all go to leave and I pile mine in the car. I'm like buckling in. How are you guys? How was your day? And in the commotion of everybody gathering up their kids and going in different directions, no one had noticed that my co-anchor's baby, my sweet friend's baby, had crawled under my car. And I backed up. And in that moment, obviously, everything changed. Now, I will tell you, it was weeks and months before we knew if he would live, but he did survive. He's great. He just turned 17. He ran for class president at one point. My son coached his Little League team. We got through this together. We held hands and walked down the hospital hall. My co-anchor and I, after weeks of nobody doing the news— think about it, it was very touch and go. So I was in a very dark place, and he was taking care of his wife in a dark place, and this baby in the hospital. And the weekend people had to do the morning show, and the morning show people had to do the evening news. And it was just this big to-do in our community. That was just heartbreaking for everyone. But there were prayer vigils, and we ended up going back on the air together and showed the community how to lead with love. And we talked about him healing, and we talked about his recovery and the amazing doctors, and we went down this journey together. But that journey of back on the air for a year together, and he did heal, and then he became this wonderful young man and sort of a symbol of hope in our community as well. And that journey for me, though, from everybody's favorite news anchor and this world-class athlete to the lady who was the one driving that car who ran over a baby, in a horrible way to say it out loud. It's never an easy story to tell, but the reality was that is what happened and I was now the villain. I was now the bad guy and I didn't want to be that. And so I went through a really dark time trying to figure out, how do I go forward and create success on the other side of that? That's my biggest resilience journey. And it's one of the reasons I really went down this long-term resilience path and all the research that I did because I was so strong on the other other side of it, when I got into tech and had great success on the other side, people would be falling out when things got hard. And I was just bulletproof. Like, this isn't a big deal. Nothing fazes me after that. And so I became this go-to person that people would come to and say, how do I get through this tough time? And that's when I stepped away from corporate, wrote a few books, and I wanted to help more than one person at a time. I really wanted to put in writing, do the real research, figure out exactly what I had done in all of these instances, And put it in writing. How do you do that? How do you get out of a really dark place and not just survive, but use that new strength to create bigger success for you on the other side? So that's my really quick version of that. And it's never easy, easy story to tell.

Gosh, Nina. And thank you for agreeing to stick around and add that postscript to our conversation. I'm glad we were able to do that because our listeners are amazing people. I get to hear from them often, and I just feel like there was a sense there that somebody would be like, yeah, why didn't we follow the proverbial breadcrumbs to that spot right there? And I'm glad that we were able to come back and just do that. So the book is This Is Not the End. And that book, again, is available where all the books are available that we find them. And of course, it'll be on the show notes. So again, Nina, thank you for coming back to share that. What is something that almost just unthinkable. Yeah. Nobody would really even consider how they would be, how they would show up, what it would look like for them or anyone around them in a circumstance as devastating as that. But you know that about yourself. And now it's no surprise that people ask you to share what it looks like on the other side of that. So thank you.

It can be triggering for some people, so I'm careful about sharing it. I also know that it's important to share because no matter how horrible the thing is that you're going through, your big this, that you wake up and it takes up every inch of your brain and you can't function, whatever that big thing is that's taking up all of your energy. And like, there is another side to it. The good stuff doesn't last forever, like when you have a win, but the bad stuff doesn't either. And no matter how bad it is, you just keep going through that process. And I do like to share it because there's somebody out there that's in the middle of something that horrible. And even the really horrible stuff, you can have a life after it. It just takes some time to figure out what that's going to look like. You can't not put it in the story of your life because you're going to be different. But you have to put it in there somehow and figure out who you're going to be on the other side of it.

Yeah, I guess the last thing that I want to say about that is just that there's that statement people always say, this too shall pass. It's a thing people say at funerals, I think a lot of the time, or in places like that, in situations like that. And it always felt a bit hollow to me, that statement. But what I realized some years ago is that it doesn't just go in the direction of these awful moments in your life. It applies to everything. Yes. So there's an element of gratitude that you can also see because this too shall pass is the best of things in your life, the best of moments, those days that you wanna hold onto again, attach the way we get attached to things, put it in a bottle, save it, etcetera. It's like, But that will pass. That will pass. And this too shall teach as well. So it's like you're going to learn something that's valuable, not just for yourself, but for others. And if you just have gratitude in that transitory— the fact that nature is so transitory, it's changing so frequently that even pain will be transmuted into joy, and joy will then return to pain. Yeah. It's a beautiful cycle. Even though we don't want to sit in pain. I get it.

Right. And people can say, this too shall pass, and I've heard that as well. I always tell folks going through a difficult time, you're going to be okay. I always lead with that. Hey, you're going to be okay, which people need to know, but you're going to be different. You're going to be different. So it's not just that this is going to pass. You're going to be different on the other side of this, and that's all right. Yeah, it's all right. You can be different on the other side of this. You don't think that it's— you're not going to fix it and put it all back in a bottle the way it was. You're gonna be different on the other side of it. And there's a you before this, and there's a you after this thing happened. And you'll get to the after, and you'll be different, but you're gonna be okay.

Different doesn't mean worse or bad or anything, right? It's just different.

It's just different.

Just different. Wow. I feel like we should finish with a flourish, like with a French thing. Vive la différence, right?

Jazz hands.

Okay, I'll do it.

Okay, you did it. I made him do it. Adam did jazz hands.

Oh my God. Thank you for doing this.

Absolutely. I mean, the jazz hands.

Right? All right. Ciao again, everybody. Thank you so much, Nina. Bye. Ah, that conversation was one that I'm gonna be thinking about for some time now. Nina, wow. She's a dynamo. Clearly is an expert when it comes to what resilience looks like through personal and difficult life experience. Today, she shared with us a lot of what was going on in her world when she was Just a 16-year-old looking to make the USA Olympic team in gymnastics. We got to talk about that, about the disappointment involved in not making the team and where she was able to pivot and move forward, bounce forward from that position to becoming a college athlete, and how she had an injury that ended her gymnastics career in college at LSU. We talk about that. We talk about her Emmy Award-winning career as a news anchor. And again, same thing, what happened when unexpectedly she was canned from her job, only to find tragedy even just around the corner in her next job. Really amazing story, unexpected twists and turns. And obviously, you can see she's learned so much in all of those things, and not just in landing on her feet, but in taking the lessons embedded in many of those changes, those disappointments, even those disruptions, and using them, utilizing them as a catalyst to move forward in life and help other many, many people along the way. To me, that's the great alchemy that she's demonstrating. And I love just how clear she communicated, the stories that she told, the lessons she shared with us, including looking at the math, the actual math around Disappointment and the math around how you perceive it, how you frame it relative to the other aspects of your life. There's an actual equation, a mathematical equation that she uses and she shares with us. Really quite brilliant. We talk about her book, This Is Not the End, and she really unpacked some key principles there. We talked about the sunk cost fallacy. If you don't know what the sunk cost fallacy is, we're gonna unpack that for you as well. Talked about how it is that Simone Biles really models great leadership herself in a particular way. And we talk in depth about the gymnast's perspective in connection with what Simone was dealing with a couple of summers ago at the Olympics when she removed herself from the meet. Talking about the thises in life, which is really— so much of Nina's brand is centered around looking at the thises. My thises. The things that we deal with in our lives that often suck. Yeah. In the moment. And obviously, in the book Change Proof, we talk about the suck as something different, the rip current, the riptide of change. But these are other sucks that Nina brings to the table in our conversation today. I know you're gonna love it. And once again, if, if this is an episode that resonated with you, please share it with a friend, somebody that might be going through something tragic, whether it's a divorce or the loss of a loved one or the loss of a child or the loss of a livelihood or some other dramatic pivot. There are often big P pivots and little p pivots along the way. We kind of COVID the gamut in our conversation. And if there's somebody that you think would really be inspired by what Nina shared today, feel free to share that— this episode with those folks. Of course, we'd love to get your comments. You can always leave them at adamarkel.com/comment. We love the reviews, those 5-star reviews on Apple iTunes or wherever it is that you're consuming this podcast really help the algorithm to help us to help get this message out to the world. So we appreciate your helping us to do that very much. And if you've not yet determined how resilient you are in this moment, snapshot view of your own level of resilience today, right now, all you have to do is go rankmyresilience.com to rankmyresilience.com. And in 3 minutes, It's the best part. You're gonna get a snapshot view of just how resilient you are in this moment. And I will say once again, thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you for supporting this show.

Thanks for listening. We hope you now have even more tools and greater insights to build resilience and become change-proof. Remember to leave a review on Apple Podcasts, and you may be featured in an upcoming episode. For more resilience tips and strategies, strategies, including support for building change-proof teams, visit adammarkel.com. To get your own free resilience assessment, go to rankmyresilience.com.