[Gina Gardiner] ​​​​​​​Step Into Your Genuine Power As A Conscious Leader

Welcome to Exit the Matrix Stories of Success with your host Jane Slack-Smith, where we celebrate the incredible journeys of individuals who've transcended their limitations and achieved extraordinary success.

Hello, I am your host Jane Slack-Smith of the podcast Exit the Matrix Stories of Success, and today I have an incredible guest. But before I get to that, I just want to say thank you and acknowledge you, the listeners. These podcasts are 20 to 30 minutes between you and I, enough time for you to walk around the block at the end of the day to get your 10,000 steps in. So you can listen to it and be inspired to find the sliding door moments in your life as well. And today my guest is Gina Gardner. Now Gina's story of multiple sliding door moments that we'll get to in a moment are extraordinary, but right now she's a multiple international best-selling author, a motivational and medical change catalyst speaker, a syndicated radio host, empowerment award-winning spiritual mentor, transformation and leadership and media trainer, and coach for over 30 years. Now she's a master strategist and she helps individuals basically achieve happiness, success, and fulfillment. What's better than that? She helps business leaders, coaches, CEOs achieve the highest standards of holistic and profitable success. And she also hosts an incredible radio show, the Gina Gardner and Friends syndicated radio show, which attracts millions of listeners a month. Gina is an incredible inspiration. But before we get into all of that and actually talk about what she's doing now, I want to go to you, Gina, and welcome you firstly to Exit the Matrix Podcast.

Oh, thank you so much for having me on the show. I'm really happy to be here and really excited to be talking to you.

Well, I have to say, Enlightened Leadership: Conscious Creation for Leaders is an incredible topic that I'm sure we can dive into a lot in the future. But right now I want to hear about a sliding door moment or moments that occurred in your life where things shifted and things changed forever.

I suppose the biggest, most dramatic moment, um, if you take me back to February 1983, um, I had just become the deputy head or deputy principal of a large school very young, and we'd spent 6 months strategically planning how we were going to move this school. I had been appointed to be the catalyst for change. And in February, we get a week's holiday, and I love to ski, uh, went off skiing. And in those days, it was very much the style to have the longest ski possible. And I'd had new skis for Christmas, and I proceeded to wrap the extra 10 centimeters around my neck several times. And on the Thursday, I'd had a bad fall, and so I said to my friends, you go off tomorrow. I'm going to go and do some gentle slopes, get my confidence back, and I'll meet you for lunch. And I met them at lunchtime and they said, we found this wonderful run, come and join us. It was a fabulous day. One of those days where the sky is so blue and the mountains are glistening with snow. And off we went and I followed them and then we turned a corner. And it was pretty evident this wasn't where they thought they were going to be. So instead of being a 6-kilometer red run, we were at the top of the Schindlergratz, which was a black diamond run, and it was full of 6-foot moguls. Now, for those of you that don't ski, a mogul is where the wind has— and the weather has eroded the snow, which has frozen and melted and frozen and melted. Into bumps and they can be the size of cobbles, 1 or 2 inches. These were 6-foot monsters. And there was nowhere other than skiing at the top of the mogul and sliding down it. There was no way of getting down, no way of going back. I'd skied black runs before, but I have to say this was like nothing I'd ever done before. I skied the first third quite successfully. And then I mistimed a turn and I fell. And it took me about 20 minutes to retrieve my skis and then get down, ski down to where my 4 friends were each sitting on a mogul, rather like an elf sitting on a mushroom. Wow. So I took my skis off, sat on the mogul, um, they were all having a smoke. I've never smoked, but we were just chatting. And then I think because it was so hot the top of my mogul gave way and I started to fall and I rotated and there was nowhere to land and I just kept bouncing. And the last thing I remember is a scream and everything going back black. Oh my God, I came to further down the mountain. In hindsight, you know, it was quite useful in that with the skiing, the fall, the skiing and the fall, I was almost at the bottom of the thing. Um, I'd knocked myself out, which I I think saved my life. And eventually they got down to me, and with their help, I got back to the hotel. I was determined not to, not to use the blood wagon. And we were traveling home the next day. Terrible journey. Got home, my mum took one look at me and carted me off to A&E. I got a bad concussion and I trapped a nerve in my neck. Well, I'm— it's a long story, so I'll shorten it. I got back to school having then gone to skiing again with children. We'd gone to Switzerland, and over the week I'd become more and more like Quasimodo. Went up to my bed on the last evening and suddenly found that I was paralyzed down one side.

Wow.

I eventually got back to school in May, and I was not right, but I knew if I could get to the end of the, the term, mid-July, I'd got 6 weeks to really recuperate. And I quite literally limped my way to that, doing school and bed. That was all I did. Got to the end of the term and thought, great. 8 days in, very, very early in the morning, there was a phone call, and my principal, my headteacher's wife, was hysterical. She'd just found John Hughes, my lovely headteacher, had died in his sleep.

Oh my.

So instead of it being a 6 weeks of gentle recuperation, helped arrange the funeral, had to let the staff, the parents, the local authority know, and prepare to be acting head. Um, and I was appointed acting head in the January of 2000— of 1984, 1984. And the sliding door moment really was a series of sliding door moments because my life was never the same again. Um, and whilst I did walk, um, after the, uh, the, the initial accident, my mobility became more and more, um, restricted. Um, and by 1987, I was using a wheelchair to get around school.

Wow.

Um, 1996, I ruptured a disc, was— became completely wheelchair-bound. And then it took 2 years to walk to the bottom of my little garden. And then I ruptured another disc and I was completely wheelchair-bound till 1984— when, uh, 2004 rather, um, when I had a spinal stimulator fitted. And it's taken till today. My mobility is the best it's been. Still use a wheelchair if I go out, but I can manage the house and gardens and short distances. And the reason I sort of rattle through that, and I don't want people to think that you know, there were pretty dark days. But I think the sliding moments that really are important are realizations. The first was a decision that I made right from the start when I became the head. I wanted this to be the best school it could be. I'd been unhappy at school as a child. I'd worked for two terrible headteachers as a teacher, and I was determined that this was a school where children would be excited to learn. And that the staff would really engage in providing a safe and a great learning environment. Hmm. And so what changed for me was I wasn't teaching in a class, I was teaching adults, but I wanted to imbue them with that sense of excellence. And we bandy that word around a lot. But for me, how did we, um, how did we embody excellence? How did I enable people to have radical responsibility for their own performance and a shared responsibility for the team? And the gift of my disability was I couldn't physically get into the classrooms. Right now, why was that a gift? Well, I couldn't micromanage. I couldn't be standing behind people and saying, you've got to do this, you've got to do that. I had to find a way of enabling them to stand in their genuine power, but at the same time do that in a way that empowered other people. And it was the, the, the, the approach was incredibly successful. We were on the best 100 schools in the country twice during my tenure, one of the first Beacon Schools. And I'd like to think I'd have done it anyway, but the sliding moment was that through the accident I had to find a very different way, a unique way. And I was forced into that. And I think if you listen to this, sliding moments are often very uncomfortable in my experience, very uncomfortable, but there's always a huge gift if you look for it. And for me, the gift of that sliding door moment of being on that mountain of the snow giving way was out of that, I have been able to develop a way of leading, which is completely reliant upon you leading yourself first and then modeling what you want for other people. And I've always felt that, that it's important for leaders to lead by example, but I think I'd have found a pale version of what arose rather than, you know, it's the, the deluxe version, if you like. And that came out of necessity, not because of anything else other than the fact I fell down a mountain.

Now, a quick word from our sponsor, Your Success Club. Your Success Club is a group of vibrant abundance seekers. If you subscribe to exitthematrix.io, we are going to drop you into the club room, which which has lots of goodies, resources, and a free gift just for subscribing. Now back to the podcast. You know what strikes me about that, Gina, and, and thank you for sharing that because, you know, I was right there in the, in the perfect ski day with you when, when you're describing it, is that it, it strikes me if we're talking about school, you, you had an experience yourself where it wasn't ideal and then you wanted to create a difference. And, you know, even in the coaching and the work you do with leaders and coaches and CEOs today, it's the, the end result of the people that the teachers work with and the leaders work with that is where that transformation really manifests. You know, the kids not only benefited from, I guess, your unique and new and novel radical type of teaching of the teachers of how they could turn up and how they can be empowered. But by seeing you rolling around the school in a wheelchair, having just fallen off a cliff and had, you know, multiple times— and I mean, it sounds like you're paralyzed with the kids on a school journey as well— they got to see the tenacity and that resilience of someone who is going through a difficult time and experiencing them in a day-to-day life as an example. So I imagine that on many levels, you know, you were, you were affecting not just the teachers who were teaching the kids, but the kids in that example as well.

I think it's interesting that we— I worried hugely, what would the parents think? What would the local authority think? What would the kids think? I have to say, the children were the least, um, of the worries. Very occasionally somebody'd say, why, what are you using that for? And say, my legs don't work very well. Okay. And they'd trot off. And there was never any any thought of treating you any differently because you were in a chair. Where one of my particular pet hates was, particularly when you were out in town before I had my electric chair, my friends would take me and somebody would come up and would use that voice, "Would you like a sweetie?" As if because you're in a chair you've got no brain. Or you'd be at the bar with the money and they'd ask the person who was pushing you, "Would she like a drink?" Right. And I, when I got my own, um, travel electric chair and, you know, became much more independent, um, you'd be in lifts and people literally pat you on the head. And I thought of having a great big sign on the back of my chair saying, 'Don't touch, she bites.' I didn't quite get around to it. I just find that so extraordinary, someone would pat someone on their head.

But the next thing I'm really interested in is that, I mean, you had a You had a choice so many times during that period, from like 1983 to 2004 virtually, where you didn't take— what did you call it— the blood bin, whatever it's called. Someone take it. Blood wagon.

It's called in skiing circles in Europe.

It's straight on to the, the, you know, back to home. And, you know, your parent, your mum says, I think we need to do something about this, like there's, there is a lot of moments in there where you kind of what would seemingly be pushed through, and a lot of people are going like, you should have probably gone to the doctor straight up. But you push through these, these situations, and you, you must have had a choice. So some dark days or some moments when you're like, like, seriously, you know, maybe it wasn't just the parents and the, you know, officials and the teachers going to take me seriously, but 'Can I do this?' Like, did you go through that?

I think, yeah, lots of moments. I must say that once the spinal stimulator fit was fitted, it wasn't instant. It took me 3 years to walk from my bed to the bathroom, which is 10 steps.

Wow. Okay.

And it's still slowly improving. My mum used to call me bloody-minded, and I think there is a lot of benefits of being bluddy-minded, quite frankly. And if I'm told I mustn't or I can't, I question it. But there were some pivotal moments. I met somebody in hospital and we became friends. And one of the things that I found that when we left hospital and I spoke to her, it was always a whole catalog of nobody understands how hard it is, nobody understands my pain. And this went on for a while. And there was a time that my mum had just died from cancer. And the conversation with her, 45 minutes about her. And then, and she finally said, and how are you? And I said, I'm really struggling at the moment. My mum died last week. And she said, I'm sorry, and then went straight back to her. And I'd like to think that in the interim time that I had not seen myself as a victim. But that was another really powerful sliding door moment for me in that I was then very mindful. I'd like to think I'd done it before, but if I had, it had been unconsciously. I was very consciously mindful that actually I want to be good company for other people. I would— and everybody's pain is their pain, whether or not it's lesser. It's not competition, it's not a comparison, you know, my pain's worse than yours. And in the choosing to focus on the good things in life, the interesting thing is, of course, that your pain diminishes. When you focus— whatever you focus on gets bigger. So I think that's a really big lesson for anybody out there. If you're focusing on the fact that you are in pain, or you have— whether that's physically, emotionally, financially, whatever— you get more of what you focus on. It gets bigger, it expands. And so focus on being grateful, focus on, you know, what's, what's working. For me, it's a big can-do. And there's a couple of other experiences where the can-do moments were so powerful. So after my second back operation, and I, I literally could not stand at all, I was in hospital for 6 weeks and I came out and 4 days later I was back at school. And I was back at school because if I was at home, unless my carer had filled the kettle and put a cup out for me, I couldn't make a drink. So I was limited to daytime television, and I have to tell you, it doesn't do anything for me, or reading. Or I could go into school. I already had an electric wheelchair. It was already set up for me. Yeah, I had people there who could do the carrying and the lifting, and I could do something that was really helpful and useful and feel feel whole even though the body was misbehaving badly. And so I was part-time for 3 weeks and then I was full-time. Yeah. 6 months later, I went to see my consultant who said, I think we might talk about you going back to school a couple of hours a week. And I just laughed. And he said, why are you laughing? I said, I've been full-time back since, you know, the third week in September. Um, now my quality of life, and I'd like to think the people I was working with, was very different than if I'd stayed at home and I'd focused on being an invalid. Now it's not for everybody, and I'm not suggesting that everybody should do what I did. Yeah, not do as I do. You have to do what's right for you.

But at some level, that mental, and you know the, you know, you talk about being grateful and being grateful for one step. And I know, you know, there's a saying that says that pain is inherent as humans going through human experience. We are going to have pain, but suffering is optional. And so many people, you know, as you say, where, you know, focus goes, energy flows. Like you see that and you speak to those people who bring you down, or it is all about the issue, the pain, you know, And then you speak to people like you that go, yeah, like, you know, I can't walk, but I can sit here, not walk and watch Oprah, or I can go to school and, you know, make a contribution and inspire other people. And, and that's that sliding door moment, that decision where you go, yes, I'm in pain, but I have an opportunity to do something. And for others who are listening, it may not be that they can, you know, get off out of the wheelchair and, you know, go to work or whatever. It might just be, you know, taking an extra step a day or, you know, doing something for someone else rather than concentrating on yourself. And I think that's, that's really powerful, you know, that can-do attitude that you had. I imagine, you know, life would have— you possibly could still be sitting on the lounge, right? Having gone back for only a couple of hours a day. But you know, that, that kind of part of rehabilitation, a lot of it is mental.

Which leads me to the next sliding door moment, which is, it's, it's such a powerful one still when I recount it for me. But also I've, I've spoken to many, many people about it. In 2004, I was given an ultimatum by my consultant: stop working a 15 or 16-hour day or you will be housebound. That for me would be kiss of death. Now, not only did I run my school, but our budget was dire. And so I went out and earned an income for extra special needs and technology. So I worked for the government as a workforce reform advisor, advisor, and all of— never more than one job at a time, but I was a head teacher for 20 years. So I was an Ofsted inspector. I worked for the National College of Leadership as a trainer facilitator and also for the London Institute. And when I left a headship in 2004, which was around the time I had a spinal stimulator fitted, and I was very, very ill for months after that— they'd nicked the dura so that the spinal fluid kept leaking out— and I, I then decided, what am I going to do? And I took myself off to do a research project across industries looking at what were the issues around developing emerging leaders and senior leaders. And I did lots of, of other training. I became an NLP Master Practitioner, did more coaching training, and I ended up at the Excel Center in London for a Tony Robbins course. Tony Robbins, a big American, probably the most successful coach mentor in the world. And I was very, very cynical. I'd done all of my NLP coaching with the same organization, and I wanted to see different people using it. So I'd been to lots of people, some Some were rubbish, some were okay, couple were really good. Anyway, there I was at the Excel Center, 10,000 people, mind-blowing. And Tony Robbins on the first morning was talking about a course he was running in California and I really fancied it, but I completely dismissed it. How would I get there? I didn't have an electric travel chair at the time. How would I travel on my own going abroad? I hadn't done it and I dismissed it. In the evening, they did the firewalk, and by this time, I was 2006, and I could walk with help. I could walk a few steps, and I was determined to do the firewalk. Those of you that don't know, that's walking over hot coals in bare feet, and if you are in the right mindset, you don't get burnt. So imagine the scene. We're in the car park of the Excel Center. There are rows and rows and rows of people walking along across these hot coals, and with somebody holding my arm both sides, I did the walk on hot coals. I was really chuffed, as my kids at school would say, I was chuffed to little mint balls. And as I sat back down in my wheelchair, which was facing the person coming next, the guy behind me was a double amputee, no legs below the knee. He tipped himself up onto his hands and he walked the hot coals in his hands. And in that moment, I realized I was self-limiting. That night I went and bought my ticket, I bought my flight, I went and did the course, I did all this stuff, became a senior leader for Tony Robbins. And he taught me that however much we're doing, we can always choose more if we're in the right mindset. And so my challenge to your listeners is, how are you self-limiting, saying I can't because, or I'm scared, I haven't done it before. And I would say to you, the only thing that gets in the way of most things is you. How are you self-limiting? What are the things that you're telling yourself? What are the stories? So you are the author of your own life story. For goodness sake, make yourself the hero or the heroine rather than the victim.

Yeah.

And I have no idea who that guy is, but my goodness me, I want to give him a hug and a big thank you.

Yeah, that's amazing. I've got goosebumps. But that observation that, you know, there's always someone worse off, but there's always someone worse off, but there's often those people are doing it better than you are. You're sitting there going like, who am I to complain? I'm just going to suck it up, put on my big girl pants and go on. And I want to come to what you're doing now because it seems to me that Being a dedicated teacher and, you know, that initial crafting the minds of children to have an experience of learning and a love of learning that you didn't have as a child transformed into you seeing yourself as a radical change agent for the teachers and teaching them how to embody what they could do and empowering them. You've now done coaching. You've been through, you know, Tony's work. Et cetera. How are you now, you know, affecting the mindset of people? Well, yeah, what, what kind of practices are you teaching people?

So I work with individuals and couples, but I also work with business leaders, and that's probably where the bulk of my work is. And so the first thing I do, I suppose, is I hold up a mirror and say, you know, let's look at what's going on. Let's look at, you know, what are the issues. But also that the way in which you get those results can either keep you limited or it can enable you to get even better results. And for the most part, it's probably easier to share you and share an example. So I want to work with, always work with the senior leaders, the senior decision makers, because if you try and make change upwards, it can happen, but it's much more difficult if you've got the senior leaders on board and they are truly walking their talk, magic happens. Anyway, I started working with this guy and I said, so what's the issue? If only I could get the right staff. If only the dent— because it was a dental lab, the dentist did what we wanted them to. If only the economy was better. If only, if only, if only. And he looked at me and expected sympathy. And I said, well, and what contribution are you making? To all of these if-onlys. And the reality is that we BS ourselves big time, that we can blame everything that's going on outside. But one of the challenges that he had was that he— everything went through him. He was the arbiter of quality, and the staff didn't trust themselves because on some days he was very hail fellow well met and everything was wonderful and he was their mate. And other days, if he was stressed or in a bad mood, then it was never good enough. And so part of this was recognizing that you are not only part of the problem, but you are very much most of the solution. Yeah. And so over the— and for me, it seems to be there's a magic figure about 9, 10 months. It's— I don't think it's any accident it's the same time it takes to create a baby, because then the, the they talk about it 28 days to create a new neural pathway, a new way of thinking. But in my experience, the moment people get stressed, they go back to the old way of being.

Absolutely.

9 months is enough time for people to have periods of stress where you support them to keep the new way of being. And so by 9, 10 months, it's really established. And so So, what we created through his changes was a learning environment where everybody was engaged in their own learning and the learning of everybody else. Thursday was learning days, and everybody in the organization, whether they were the secretary or not, they then were involved in bringing to the table something that they'd researched, something that they'd learned. They worked in teams instead of silos, and he did not have to be the fount of all preferment in terms of quality, because there had been very clear discussion. What does excellence look like in the context of this? And I think that's the big thing. If you're a leader, whether you're a parent leader or you're a business leader, we bandy these words about. What does excellence mean? Because the chances are, if we started to talk about excellence in any particular context, our blueprint would be slightly different.

Yeah.

But then if you talk about, well, okay, in the context of this, and I'll use another example, working with a hotel, lots of complaints about cleanliness, work then with the senior housekeeper, and we did a training session where if you're cleaning a bathroom, what does excellence actually look like? What are the behaviors you need to employ? Following that, that became the gold standard. No complaints about bathrooms. Do that for bedrooms, do that for corridors. So it doesn't matter what industry you're in, and I've worked across a whole range of industries. If you then actually work with your staff that you have a shared language around these values that most of the time they're on a poster behind the reception or in their own handbook, they then start to take on a life of their own and become living, breathing, real values. And as a result of that, standards go up and are maintained and developed even more.

What I love about that, Gina, is just the, the similar kind of experience with, you know, those little neural pathways that we create and we can reinforce them into a superhighway. But it does take a lot more than, you know, what people think it takes to actually make that a a default orientation. And by doing the exact same things in the bathroom and going, okay, what's the standard? What is the, the process, the procedure that we do so often? And then we transfer that to the bedroom, the front of house, whatever it is, you know, it's like you're creating those super connections that it just becomes the default way of how we do things around here, be it mentally or in the operation of a hotel. Dentist.

And it works in every industry. It is not specific to manual work or to— ultimately, it also works as a parent. You know, this is what I expect. This is why, this is how we do it. If you model it and then the expectation is clear, and if it's not met, then it's dealt with. And I think many people fail to deal with things when they're not meeting expectations. But you have to start with you first. Were my expectations clear and explicit and, you know, a reason given? And then did I hold people to account? So for example, teachers, when I interviewed them before we started, I'd say, you know, before we go any further, if you are appointed here, these are the rules. You work hard, that you— we don't do moods, that we are a team, that, you know, and so on and so on. So the first time a youngster would come in on a Monday morning after being on the lash at the weekend grumpy, I just very quietly take them to one side and say, remember the conversation? That's a mood. The children don't deserve it. Your colleagues don't deserve it. Drink all you want at the weekend, but bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when you come in on Monday morning.

Marils, well, thank you so very much for that. And before we go, I want to just throw in a fun question because we've had a bit of a heaviness there for a bit, but a fun question around What's something that's, uh, unusual about you or you'd like to share with the audience?

Well, for somebody who leads leaders and talks about, you know, really modeling things, I have a cat called Leo. He's definitely, uh, in charge. I'm his slave. He is very insistent. He's got the loudest stare. He demonstrates resilience, persistence, to an art form, and I had to say I capitulate.

Oh my goodness. So they do say that cats have slaves and dogs have masters, so it sounds like Leo is living up to it.

It's breed.

Well, thank you so very much. And look, Gina has been so generous with her time, and she's also got a very special gift for you as well, which is her Spiritual Blueprint. Now, if you go to yoursuccessclub.com.au and forward slash for short and forward slash Gina Gift, and that's Gina with a G and Gift with a G, then we will send you that spiritual blueprint, send you over there. And I hear that there's a masterclass also offered as part of that blueprint. So I really encourage you to jump on that. And thank you so much, Gina, for your time and for sharing that amazing number of the sliding door moments. And you really are an inspiration. Jane Slack-Smith.

Thank you, it's been a pleasure.

Well, that's a wrap for another awesome guest episode of Exit the Matrix Stories of Success. But just before you go, please care and share this with your friends. We would love for you to tell other people about Exit the Matrix, um, and, you know, share the information, the learnings, and even, you know, talk about what we've learned here today. You can catch us on Apple, Spotify, YouTube. We're pretty much everywhere the podcasts are. Leave us a review, and head over to exitthematrix.io, sign up and subscribe so I can tell you when our next awesome guest hits the, the, the, what would I call that, the waves. And, um, I'll give you a very special gift if you do. So thank you so very much to Gina. I really appreciate your time. And to everyone, as always, here is to your success. Bye for now.

Thank you for listening to Exit the Matrix Stories of Success. Make sure you subscribe to future episodes at www.exitthematrix.io. Until next time, here's to your success.

Sengkumulu adiwa, waila adiwa.