Katie B Happyy - Author / Motivational Speaker

This is episode 186 of the Empowered Team Podcast. Hey there. Are you looking to grow as a leader or grow leaders on your team? If so, then our leadership series is for you. It's running all year long. It's free webinars to teach you about various topics in leadership that can really expand your growth, elevate your leadership, and be able to really serve those around you. If that's something for you, then opt in to our Leadership series, our free webinars that will be going on all this year.

Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast where we explore how to optimize your performance in career, sport and life. And now, your host, executive coach and life strategist, Kari Schneider.

Foreign. Katie and I am so fortunate to be here on the Empowered Team podcast with Katie. Be happy. Now, before we get started, I just have to say your name. Your name is so good. Katie, Be happy. Like, come on. Did the name change happen at some point? I don't know. But before you tell me though, I have to let everyone know that you are an author of this incredible book. I was in stitches, bent over laughing just to start reading it. I couldn't believe it. I was like, you are kidding me. When I read the first few paragraphs and like, come on. So cheers to chaos. Eight tools for the Puffy eyed and powerful. You are a yogi. You have a background in just some very powerful offerings through yoga, being an ambassador with Lululemon, offering retreats. You're the CEO of your company and obviously an author as well. So tell us more about you and start with the name thing because like, that's just too cool. Katie, be happy. I love it.

It started as a really funny opportunity to make fun of me. To be honest. I'm originally from New Jersey and the east coast of America is just so much more crass. And I moved out to San Diego, California, which is the opposite. Where I grew up in sarcastic jokes was the way that you showed love. In Southern California, everyone is a lot more soft. Let's just say there's just a little bit nicer to each other's face. And at least in New Jersey, I always feel like, you know where you stand. It's sometimes not rational, but you know where you stand with people. And out here it's a little bit more pleasantries because people are genuinely, you know, they're in the sunshine, they're a little bit happier, but also that it's just nicer to live like that, I think. But when I first moved out here, they kept calling me Jersey. They were like, whoa, you are too much. You got to roll it back a little bit. Because we don't. We think you're joking, but we can't tell. It's a little dense. And there's a lot of Katie's, you know, there's my generation. I think there was four Katie's in my class. And so Katie B. Was always the thing. And then it just kind of transformed into, okay, I was so Jersey, the opposite of happy. So I was KDB happy. And it just kind of stuck.

That is awesome. That is awesome. So a couple of things there. First, I love how you're. Yeah, they're kind of soft out here. Just. And, and I'm growing up in northern Canada. I tell you, it doesn't take long to get soft when you go somewhere where the weather's that nice. It's like I suddenly got soft. What happened? I don't know. But, but you're that whole Jersey background, the sarcastic, the, the witty, the humor that shows up in your book right away. And it is fun and funny. It's awesome. And it's, it's intermeshed with some challenging stuff with some harder life realizations and stories. So, so super cool. So, so what, what else about you? Because you've got a background as a yogi. Tell us a little more along those lines. Like how did you get where you are now? You came from Jersey, you went to California, but there's a whole bunch in between.

Yeah, it's a pretty big jump. I think I wanted to get as far away from New Jersey as possible when it came to college, just to get a shift. My mom had passed away when I was in high school of breast cancer. And so it was a pretty trying time to lose my mother. I mean, I feel like any time to lose your mom is bad, but when you're a hormonal asshole, which we all are as teenagers, all teenagers are very self centered because that's the only world that they know, you know? And I refuse to believe that my mom was actually going to pass because she had been fighting breast cancer for so long. And so when she was 43, she did lose the battle. And it was a hard experience for me because I have a big Italian family. She was one of seven. She was very matriarch in her position of the family dynamics. And so I kind of needed to get away a little bit mentally, emotionally, to deal with some things on my own. And so that's what drove me out to San Diego. I think once I got here, I realized that you can't just run from your problems. I mean we know that in concept, but it nothing got better emotionally. And so one of the outlets I found because I've always been an athlete of some sort, I loved running, I did gymnastics, I was always into like I did cheerleading, but it was very time intensive for a reckless senior in high school. So I did the majority of it. And then I decided I went to like the Florida Nationals and did all of that fun stuff, but living every day as if it was one of my last, having seven days a week, four hour a day, cheerleading just wasn't my cup of tea at the time. So what was the most similar to the sensations I got was yoga. And it was interesting because no one not known nowadays more so. But back then in 2008, a lot of people didn't refer to yoga as an athletic whatsoever. And although there's no yoga competition.

Yeah, yeah, it's supposed to be the opposite. Take the competition out. Yeah.

I actually really enjoyed just getting better at something that I didn't know much about, but it felt a little familiar to gymnastics in that way. And then the sweet spot was the emotional release because I think I was just going so fast that I never gave myself the opportunity to just be. And in yoga they ask you to hold the stretches two to three minutes, some of the deeper ones longer. And in those moments you have to really sit with yourself. You have to get to know yourself. And in my early 20s and even into my late 20s, I was really invested in that journey. Like how do I get to know my emotional self more? Because I wasn't familiar with sitting with any of that stuff. So I became a yoga teacher when I was 23. I was working for nonprofit, so I was an international business major and I was trying to save the world by raising money for Susan G. Komen and for Make a Wish foundation and for all these great nonprofits that I was really invested in helping. But when I started teaching yoga, I watched what happened to someone minute one to minute 60. It was instantaneous shift. That one hour completely changed how someone their demeanor was. And I knew that when they went back into their lives, went back home to their kids or went back home to their spouse or whatever, they are going to be a little bit more grounded, a little bit more open, a little bit more loving. And to me that was the magic that I was looking to influence because it didn't have to be as grandiose as my young self wanted. Instead it could just be small, like person by person. And that's the precipice of where it started. Obviously, in the start of a nonprofit, you don't make that much money. I was making maybe 40 grand a year. So I did the math and I was like, if I leave my 9 to 5 and just do yoga full time, I'm not really losing much here. So I can take the risk now.

Right.

And it just built. I've stayed out here. I never thought I would, but sometimes when you, when you get stuck in the sunshine, it's hard to go back. And I've built a company where instead of just doing yoga, I like to call it a workout and a work in. So you get opportunities. Yeah, you can come to my classes or you can go on my app and do a lot of the stuff with me too. But then you can take it also to the next level of an international experience. And that's really where my international business got to spread its wings within my yoga, because then I was able to run trips to over 40 countries over the past 15 years. And they're like self development trips where it's not just movement, but you do journal work and personal development. A lot of the stuff that you talk about on your podcast, some of those things are what we integrate into the trip as well as sightseeing. Have fun too.

So if you, for some people listening, the idea of healing and using yoga to do it might.

I'm sorry, hold on. I pod. My ear pods checked in.

How do I turn my Bluetooth off?

And turn Bluetooth off. Okay, I'm sorry about that.

When people are listening and they think of, and people have gone through some crap, they've lost loved ones, whether it's to cancer or not, what you went through was probably, I'm just imagining here was probably one of the hardest things you've gone through in your life. And in going through that, you know, part of you makes it sound like, okay, I got into yoga and then I did all these things. And clearly to me anyway, the yoga sounds like, okay, that was a pivotal thing to really help you heal. And when you, especially when you're describing it, for someone who goes from that minute one to minute 60 in a class and they've come out a new person or a different person, what did it do for you? Like how, how is this, how is this, How is the use of yoga something that had you heal?

Yeah, I, I don't think I realized that even within my athletic life, I was still moving quickly and were never really asked, at least in my life experience, you know, an overachiever in school and trying, you know, the president of this and the straight A this and the volunteer this were never asked, like, what is it like to just slow down? And human doings were checklist next thing and you're just. Especially if you're a child that goes through K through 8 and then high school and then you hit the marks, maybe if you go to college. There's always this checklist that tells you what you should do next. And then there's this weird sensation that people have when they come out of whatever their school checklist was. They're like, wow, I get to decide on my own. Like, I. It's really sitting in what that meant. And there was so many roles that I figured I could fit. There were so many things the checklist said I could do. And yet something was so natural about yoga for me. It just made so much sense to ask people to calm down for one hour is just 4% of your day. So it's just asking people and guiding people to slow the movement. Even though it's a good workout, it is. Especially the yoga that I teach is power yoga. There's push ups and there's handstands if you want them. But realistically, it's the sweet spot at the end of class where that lasts like 15 minutes. My a type personality is calmed down enough to meet my head, where my body's at, just being where my feet are at and giving myself the opportunity to let things flow in. As we're recording this, this is the first week of daylight savings, I think. And so there's this opportunity where we have a little bit more sunlight at the end of the day for sunset to be like, okay, what do we need to clear out so that can come in? And that's what I feel like yoga is. It's like flossing out the gunk. When you floss your teeth. No one sees the cavities being removed when you floss your teeth. But over time we know that it helps to prevent it. The same with yoga, if we give ourselves that space, if we just put in the practice of flossing our teeth, then we're preventing future cavities or future losing our minds or whatever it is. And that to me is something really sacred that I'm lucky to have found so early on as an outlet to, you know, sobbing. If anyone's an avid yogi, they know like, half Pigeon is a great one where people just start sobbing because we hold a lot of emotional tension in our hips. But I wasn't into the woo woo namaste stuff in the beginning because I was like, let me just do this practice and be good at splits.

So you can check the, check the list off once you got it done. Right. Like I achieved it. High fives. Here we go.

Got. Yep. Got splits, got handstand.

Cool.

And then the more you practice, just like you said at the beginning of the podcast, you realize there's no competition. It's actually just a practice of coming back home to yourself every time you're on the mat. That it's introspection of like, okay, let's clear out what's before me and let's move forward into what's next. It's a great opportunity to self analyze in a way where we may not get that outside of the classroom because the world is asking you to do so many things, but the yoga, the pose is what you're doing and the yoga is who you're being right to yourself. Practicing that.

Yeah. And it's. I love that, that opportunity that you're pointing to and that self analysis in the sense of. It's like analysis with allowance. It's. It's the, that being. It's such a beautiful thing. It's one of those things that, you know, I, I haven't had yogis on our podcast before. I've had a lot of athletes, like Olympians, pro athletes, just different guests who have this physicality and this desire and this achiever mentality. And we use it for, for business. We use it for teaching the lessons and the mindset of. For the achievers to really have the life that, that we want. And what you're describing, the reason this is so intriguing to me, your book, just how you, how connected to yoga you are, is because it's this form of physicality that is meditation. It's this me, it's this physical meditation, this physical form of meditation. And right now, to me, so many people, especially achievers, especially throughout Covid, so many people who are being depended on are struggling. And if they're not taking care of themselves, then the other people who rely on them are also struggling even more. And what you're offering, and especially in looking at your book, you're offering just these simple, simple options to serve people's wellness, to serve not only their mental wellness, but their physical wellness, to serve them, to be able to be.

It's.

It's so powerful. It's so cool. Thank you.

It's one of the gifts that my mom had given me for leaving earth so quick is because I Got a chance to see her pass, literally take her last breath. When you see someone take an inhale and then they exhale and they don't inhale again, you're like, this is it. This is all we get. And it's not that I hope everyone gets the opportunity to see someone exhale one last time because it's so real. It's just like, this is it. Then she's gone. And I knew she was gone. And I was like, okay, if life, if that's it, right? And who knows what's next? And that's a whole different debate. But the idea is if this is all I got and I don't know when my last breath will be, I have to utilize this time and space to be the most present and connected, but also the most giving and not producing. But like you said, I have goals. I want to achieve them too. But if I'm moving so quickly through my life that I can't enjoy what's right in front of me, I might get hit by a bus tomorrow, I might take my last exhale. So that we need these tools and practice to really sit back and analyze and say, okay, can I take today and just enjoy what parts of the day were good and enjoy what I can? Because at the end of the day, none of us get out alive. Right?

Yeah. I got goosebumps when you describe that because it's. It's so true. And it's. It's as simple as a breath. It's as simple as a breath to be right here. It's so powerful. Yeah. And we don't get out alive. It reminds me of someone wrote on my whiteboard at one point in our facility, the, the past is history, the future is a mystery. The present and the present is here and now. That's why it's called the gift. Or that's why it's a gift. Yeah, the. The present. So anyway, I didn't say it very well, but that's. That's the. You get the idea.

I do.

And it's exactly that. It's the now. It's the we don't know where none of us are getting out of this alive. And sometimes we act as though, as though, you know, we have forever. We have. We have all the time in the world. So you had a real life changing event a few years back and an experience that really had you maybe forced you to slow down or forced you to. So tell us about that. What was that like?

I was at what I would call one of the peaks of a mid-20s, yoga person. Like, I was touring the festivals, the Wanderlust, and I was in India. I'm teaching, and I'm feeling like on top of my achieving self within the profession that I had chosen. And it was an August morning right after I had run. I run an annual tubing event in my mom's memory back on the east coast every year because she loved to river tube.

And.

And so we do this tubing event that raises money for cancer survivors now through my foundation. But I was, like, feeling so on top of the world. And I woke up a couple days later, Monday morning, with my face paralyzed. But at the time, I thought that I had just, like, maybe had too much salt or maybe whatever it was from the day before. My face, I could feel it, but I couldn't move it. And so I went to go teach, and one of my students was an ER doctor, and she said, I don't think that's an allergic reaction. I think that's something called Bell's palsy. So I let it go for the day, and she said, if it's still like this in the morning, go to the er. I went in, and the doctor was like, so crass, had no bedside manner. He's like, you have Bell's palsy. It's a facial paralysis. So the cranial nerve is inflamed and can't fire. So my eye was literally stuck open. I couldn't blink. My mouth was stuck open. I couldn't move my lips. So only the left side of my mouth would move. And if I wanted to drink or eat, I had to hold my lips together. And basically it's frozen, right? And I go to him and he says, well, 80% of people heal from it, so there's not much that we do. We'll give you some steroids that will hopefully take the inflammation down. I was like, wait, 20% of people don't heal. I just woke up this way. My smile didn't work. I have huge horse teeth, you know, like, my smile wasn't working. I only talked like this. And he was so crass. He's like, yeah, you're young. You'll probably heal, but you'll hear the 20%. You don't hear the 80%. And it took me for a tailspin. And that's a lot of what the central part of the book is, is how to identify myself without the ability to smile back at somebody. We forget how many facial cues we're giving as we talk, whether it's like the cringing of your eyes. Or like, subtle smiles up or down. And with my inability to move my face, also people staring at me, kind of funky, like, what's. There's something wrong here. How I could then, at that point of what I'd call superficial peak of my career, take my outside and not make it as important. How could people find and feel my smile without me being able to actually smile back at them? And over that journey, it wasn't. In the scheme of things, it wasn't long. But six months is a really long time to feel that way, I think. And especially for someone who sits in front of 600 people a week in classes. And although there's no, like, why, you know, inflammation. We know that inflammation in the body is when we're in disease. We've got something's wrong. And it depends on each of our genetics and what we eat and what we do and what we've experienced. But, you know, cancer is inflammation, essentially. And we don't know why these things are caused. You can't pinpoint one moment. It's a compilation of many things. So they'll often say that Bell's palsy is caused by stress because typically older people or pregnant women or people with low immune system will catch this virus that infects the nerve. So the why really was eating alive at me. And at the same time, I had to figure out if I am that 20%, how am I going to continue living a life that I've been talking, that I live and been saying that I've been living, but, like, really putting that into practice.

So with. Did it last for six months? Is that it. It lasted for. And did you notice anything getting better or were you. I mean, there must have been points during that time where you're just like, okay, there's. There's not much difference or any difference. Is this. You know, what is this going to look like? Is this a forever thing?

Yeah. Well, they say as long as it's not Bell's palsy caused by, like, an accident, if it's the one that's caused, like a virus to the nerve, then they say if you get anything back, any sort of movement, like an eyebrow twitch, then that's a good sign that the rest of it will come back. Every single person that I've Talked to, about 40,000 people get it a year in America. George Clooney had it, Angelina Jolie had it at some point, but they obviously went into hiding. They say if you get any movement back, then it's a good chance you'll get most of it back. So it took me about four weeks until all of a sudden, I could, like, kind of move the side of my eyebrow. And that was a really transformative day a month in, because I was like, okay, you know, everything I've been praying for and asking for, at least I had something to hold on to from people who had healed. They were like, if you get a little back, it's mostly likely going to come back. So it came fully back within six months. My eye was able to blink around two months. And that was the hardest part, is you have to either tape your eye shut or put eye drops in every two minutes or else your cornea will dry out. It was just. It was a nuisance. I couldn't run outside because the wind hurts your eye. And running with one eye was really hard. And realistically, actually hot yoga was one of the only things I could do because it was already humid in there, So I could go a little bit longer without putting the drops in my eye. But I would say six months for full healing and two months for some of the more manageable stuff to come back. It's not like there's so many people that have come out of the woodworks at this point that have permanent issues like that where there's some sort of facial dysmorphia or they were born that way, or one of the girls that I work with at a studio here, she just had a really bad skiing accident and a tree took out her eye. So, like, there's. I feel really grateful that it did come back, but I do believe somewhere that it was given to me because I sat in front of so many people for them to kind of look at me, and I'm like, don't take your smile for granted. I just woke up like this. You know, some people, it would really, really wreck them. And that's where the idea from the book really came is. Because how can I give people some tools and guidance that we're not just our flesh? And I know we say that. I know we know this, but there's a $60 billion a year industry that's trying to tell all of us to be tanner, to be blonder, to be. To paint your nails. Like, who decided that painting our nails was a thing. Right? I get it done. But there's an industry that's telling us we're not tall enough, thin enough, strong enough, flat enough, whatever it is. And. And that's the hope, is that the book makes us feel a little bit less alone in that journey. And also that really, what Matters is not it all fades on the outside and we all don't get out alive. But also that how can we make people feel our smile through our actions and our words? Because that's what's lasting.

That's. It's really powerful. And I love how you said that it was given to me, that it was given to me to show the people I was in front of. And that's such a huge paradigm shift from stepping into the victim role of why is this happening to me, which I'm sure is so normal for all of us to feel awful about it and have that questioning and that anger and all of the processes that happen there, especially with the loss of your mom and going through a bell's palsy. Do you think that there's something that was the catalyst for it leading up to it? Do you think that it was, you know, still a physical manifestation of healing from your mother's death and you just run the event that was around your mother? So do you think that part of it was some of that emotional processing? Do you think that? Because what I've found physically, personally, and with so many different clients that I've worked with is that it's. Our body is manifesting whatever it's hanging on to whatever the emotional thing is. And that sounds a little crazy, but I, I'm a, you know, I've got background in physiology, right. And so, yeah, an emotion is just a frequency in our body and that frequency in our body is coming through our nervous system and our nervous system is hanging on to that if we haven't allowed or processed that emotion. So if that emotion never got processed, it got hung onto for a really long time, ultimately for a lot of people. And I've seen this with people in police force and ptsd. I've seen this with people who've been in teaching a long time, but in really toxic environments or just various types of leaders who are achievers and go, go, go and do all the things and then something physical stops them. I mean, that's definitely happened to me. I dropped foot and nerve damage and all kinds of things from mechanical back crushed discs. But. But ultimately something physical often stops those people who are constantly trying to go and do. And inevitably, for the most part, I've seen that there's something emotional that wasn't dealt with or has been either pervasive and continuing within their lives. Was there something like that for you?

One of the main reasons I teach as much as I still do, I'm 35 and I still teach 15 classes a week. It's because it's selfish therapy that, like, I think a lot of us that are givers are very in tune. And I think more people can own this, that it's good for me to be able to be in front of people and talk out my stuff like I do a Monday mantra. And it's a theme that I want to say 15 times that week. So hopefully by the end of it, I've worked through my own stuff and I definitely know that around that time, me and my partner, who I talk a lot about in the book, we were hitting like a three year mark. I think I was 28 or 29 when it happened. And I now know, looking back, that he was trying to pull away. And what was so profound about that experience is that probably my subtle body knew that that was happening and I just didn't want to admit it. But because I needed him so desperately, like, I really had to lean on him in that healing time and I was so scared and so vulnerable that it was the connection that we needed. He needed to be needed and I needed to give way to some vulnerability that I hadn't been with him. Now, though, I won't spoiler alert as we journey through the book, but it does chronicle different parts of that experience in that relationship that I think a lot of people can relate to. And I know that a lot of that heartbreak I was feeling was probably a manifestation in the nervous system in.

My face, for sure.

I love exactly what you're saying and I fully believe in all this stuff. In yoga, they believe that there's 72,000 energy lines and if you go to acupuncture, they work on the same lines. But Bell's palsy specifically is attached to C7. It's the cranial nerve from C7 through your temple area. And in yoga, we believe that the pathway to clear your your heart out is only 12 inches from your heart to your head. So it's really important to do a lot of neck work and opening and. And I've only now learned this since I've had Bell's palsy. But what an interesting thing. Like my heart might have been broken in certain ways and it was manifesting like in the next space, right? It was stuck in C7, who knows? And I love to make reasons like, I love this. This is part of why I like writing. This is why I like theming. It could be everything. It could be the heartbreak of losing the one woman in my life that I loved and respected so early. It could be a Compilation of so many things. And yet I do know specifically that summer, I'm pretty sure that my partner was going to leave me at that point. And I just didn't want to admit it because there's a difference between our heart and our head. And I had to learn that the hard way that our heart wants something that maybe your gut knows isn't necessarily right. Bell's palsy brought us closer together at that point.

That's powerful. That's powerful. You just pointed to something that we've been working on in some of our coaching groups off and on, and we'll be going into next month too, which is you just described a masculine energy, a masculine man who was probably faced with you being in your masculine energy, not allowing yourself to open up, not allowing a feminine to become magnetic, but really depolarized because he's masculine. You might be acting masculine, not able to be vulnerable, not able to lean on him, not able to show your true feelings, all of those things. And it's such a, it's such a pervasive issue that I see with so many different people, especially women who are in leadership roles and are in business because there's so much masculine energy that gets developed and, and practiced instead of the feminine energy that can still do just as much and is even more powerful. But we live in a world that we're taught that this masculine way of dealing with things is the way to get things done. And so then we act in that way and it doesn't, it just, it wrecks our relationships in a lot of ways.

Yeah, I, I, I appreciate everything I learned from, from what I was going through with him. And I definitely, that's one of the tools in chapter two is about just being able to be vulnerable because even my mom, I remember, you know, she would always hide how bad it was. And I wish that this sounds silly, but I do wish that she had her and my dad had told me and my brother that it wasn't working because when she did pass, she was on a trial drug that was supposed to give her another six months and they didn't tell us and instead it shut everything down and she died within three days. And I didn't know that that was the Hail mary and my 14 year old self was like, wait, she's actually going to die? Because she was always so steadfast and never like wanted to, wanted us to see or experience the fact that she could die. And so I think a lot of it stems from that too. And you know, like you said, owning Your own business or being in that space, you want to hold a certain level of respect. But luckily, yoga has softened the Jersey crass, the alpha, a little bit. I'm not saying I'm not still that way. I'm pretty bossy. But.

But you own it. Yeah.

And that's part of it, is just owning all of the. The chaos. That's what the book is for, is to make us feel less alone, because I'm very honest. Sometimes too honest, embarrassingly so for my poor father and grandmother. But it's a good thing, and I hope that people feel less alone from it.

But it comes out in the book and it's freaking fantastic because people need more of that. That's truth telling, but in a way that has somebody's back. So it's not truth telling to just, you know, get in somebody's face, but truth telling so that it serves somebody. And. And that's where some of what comes in your book. There's. You refer to yourself as a broken badass. And there's another part, too, that. And I love this part. It's. It's basically telling other people to go in. The book is cheers to chaos, but cheers to whatever. Cheers to the thing. That's the thing for a person. Tell us about that a little bit.

It's asking us to honor everything as a gift and not saying that. I actually. I'm a firm believer that I'm not happy every day, which is the funny part about my name, I think. You know, every three days I'm really happy, and then those other two days I'm making it, I'm medium. And I believe that we can't create happiness every day. And that's actually not the goal. There's more suffering and there's more pain in this life than there is good, especially as we get older and experience so many things. But we can create purpose and meaning in everything that's given. So instead of, okay, yes, it sucks that my mom died. It's painful for me to think about even 25 years later, but at the same time, I can live as if her death had meaning. And now it's just a narrative that we create. It's not something that anyone else can give to you but yourself. But I'm writing the narrative that she died so young so that I could live a life more full and that she raised the compassion level of everyone else around her that was left without her and realized how quickly life can fade from us. And that's the same thing when it comes from children. That Pass young people that leave too early. My story is that they raise our compassion level and help the people around them live more fully. And so what if I could create the narrative every day? Okay, well, then, now my 501C3, that's in my mom's memory. The Be Inspired initiative is to take cancer survivors down on a healing retreat weekend. So the same retreat that I do for people going through transitions or just wanting to get out of America for a little bit or out of wherever they live for a little bit to get into a new country, that same retreat I give to cancer survivors. And I would have never done that before. I would have never done something like that if my mom didn't pass. Like, everything that we've been through creates something, but it's your choice to suffer through it or to take that pain and make it like a stepping stone into a narrative that. That works in your favor.

That's so powerful because, you know, people don't realize that they get to decide. People think it's happened to them. And I know I'm generalizing, and this might be distorted for a lot of people because they. They do take ownership or they do take personal power, but so many people operate on the narrative that. That happened to me instead of that happening for me. And so the fact that your. Your narrative becomes around the gift that you were given, what it's taught you how you can give back, now you're physically manifesting that in giving it back to other people. Had you not gone through what you went through, you wouldn't offer something that's healing for people who are in need or fundraise for people who are in need. And so it's. It's really neat to. To hear that personal power because it's ownership. It's like I could make. You could make the narrative that talks about how awful it was for you forever and your whole life is going to be awful because of it. That's an option. And that's an option for so many people. And yet your narrative is one that not only empowers you, but empowers the people that you touch because of how you're delivering it. So that's really, really cool. What's one of the. What's one of the favorite stories in your book?

Well, so the intro chapter, I won't give away, but it's hilarious. I wrote it the way it's supposed to be because if you get through it, it's only like three or four pages, but if you are into how honest it is, then you'll keep going. If not, then that's fine. You don't have to read it.

It's freaking hilarious. And I'm like, what for guys haven't heard of this for girls.

Right.

And that's enough of a teaser right there. Everyone heard of this for guys haven't heard of this for girls in Europe. And. Wow. Yeah. So that's enough of a teaser, I think, right there.

Good. And I think, too, that what's important about each of these chapters. So my partner's like, who are you to write a book? And I'm like, you're right. Who am I to write a book? I think, personally, everyone should write a book. When I was a little kid, I just wanted so desperately to see my name on the back of a book binding. Like when girls dream about weddings. That's what I was hoping for.

And.

And. But I do think everyone has a story, Everyone has a narrative to tell, because all we want in this life is to feel less alone and more connected to each other. And so these eight chapters are an opportunity for you to just see a little bit of yourself in any of the chaos. And cheers to your own narrative and your own chaos. And it's not like I am not a certified therapist. I don't want to be. I just. I believe that I was given bold confidence in my truth and authenticity because of my mom's death, because I know I could die tomorrow because life's too short to be afraid of that kind of thing. And so whatever that means, that's what I was hoping to give through it.

Yeah. You know, you may not be a therapist, but your delivery and your experience is therapeutic and healing in what it offers other people. So I don't think that. I don't think that that can be discounted at all. It's very, very powerful. Your experience is very powerful. And you talk about fear a little bit. What's that been to you? Because there's been such a culture of fear in the last couple years with COVID And what do you. What's your take on fear?

So the last chapter, chapter eight, I go into the first year of lockdown and quarantine and what it was for me, and now being two and a half years out of it, give or take, I still feel totally different than when I first pre pandemic. Everything was flipped on its head because I was running an international retreat business. I was doing in person classes, and that was how I made my money and how I reset. And so everything I knew that was my identification or How I made financial resources was flattened. And so for the first time in my life, authentically, I started to get really small. Like I felt like my living room was closing in on me because I had never been in my house so long I was starting to clean the curtains and I've never cleaned curtains before, but I think anyone can relate to, to an identity shift happening on a global scale, whatever it was for them. And so it's taken me a lot and I would even say now I'm still not back to that place of try anything and do anything. I feel like there's this almost fear that the uncertainty that was always there but all of us were ignoring. A lot of us think that we have control over things in our lives when realistically we don't have a lot of control at all. We just like to have that facade. But when everything was so taken from us and everything we knew that was normal was shifted, that uncertainty that was always there became really front facing. And for me specifically, it's just been trying to reevaluate and get back up from being totally crushed and everything I fell back on. The other financial risk I was always willing to take is okay, if I run this retreat to Italy, if I run this retreat to South Africa and let's say it's a wash, I'm in the red a little bit. I don't make as much as I thought. I can always go back to serving tables or bartending. That was always something I did in college to make some extra cash. Well, even that was taken away, even my safety line of that. And so it was a really scary time for me trying to reevaluate. I've never seen so many red numbers. I've never had to tell so many people bad news and I've shifted. Luckily I have an app now that I was able to record so many things in quarantine that there's a way for me to virtually expand. But it's not the same. I don't have the same trust in my path and my love of adventure because I'm almost. I feel like I got broken up with or like dumped by the world and I'm just trying to learn to love myself again, but in a financial and personal way versus in a relational kind of way. I don't know if that, if that relates, but I feel like a lot of us had to redefine ourselves a little bit.

Well, it's interesting because ultimately you have a business and you are people who are entrepreneurs often are very identified and tied into their Own business and when. And business is almost a spirit, spiritual journey because there's. I don't care how many people think business isn't an emotional thing. That's insanity. Because any, any of the business executives that I coach, it's going to be their emotions that stop them from doing something or their emotions that is having them do something in the business. And the resilience required to get through the fear or get through. Through the challenging emotions is, you know, it can be almost as paralyzing. Those feelings can be almost as paralyzing as. Or as paralyzing as the loss of a family member as those. Those feelings are the thing that put us in. In a. In a completely stuck position often. So, you know, I. When you've developed your autonomy, you've developed your business, things are going a certain way. And like you say, you think that we all know and we can control what's going on in our lives when the reality is the uncertainty was always there. We just didn't know, we didn't have certainty. We were just oblivious. Oblivious to what, what our lives were. So it's really powerful. And do you find that now you're more hungry to get out there to do retreats?

You.

You're more excited to be in person with people because you haven't been able to as much over Covid. What does it look like for you now?

It's been a slower buildup to excitement than I thought. I'm finally. We've been back in the studio for about six months, so I'm finally feeling like myself. And I can honestly say it's within the last couple weeks because whatever situations it is or whatever I was trying to get through, I still feel like it could be taken away at any point because we've opened and closed the studios I work at many times.

Oh, it's good. No, it's not. Oh, it's good.

No, it's not. So even that, like, there's a little uncertainty there, I'm finally back to feeling that community aspect that I miss so much. Seeing the 50 people come through the class, feeling that energy together. It's finally only recently happening. But the retreats the same thing because I kept pushing them. So I was leading my retreat in India, March of 2020, and I had like six retreats lined up for the year. Greece in June, Italy in September, Thailand in November. And I kept saying to everyone, okay, don't worry, you know, it'll only be a few more months. Let's just push it. Oh, don't worry. And what ended up happening is it took me a whole 18 months to run Greece until we finally ran it last summer, September. And that was, you know, already a totally different situation. But both of those things at which I had so much love for, it's almost like I'm an abused version of myself trying to just tiptoe back in. And it's the first time in my life where I've. I haven't just jumped and saw what happened. I'm like slowly working my way back in. But it's also. Okay. It's not who I've been, but it's the only way that I can right now get back to any semblance of excitement because I'm. I don't know, I feel emotionally scarred from all of that because we never know when it's going to be pulled up again.

Yeah. And at the same time, you're such a powerful human that this is what you're offering and what you're delivering are what people need. So it's this greater purpose that keeps you making the steps forward, even though it's scary, it's challenging.

Yeah.

And. And I can honestly, I. I really understand that because I only run a retreat about once a year. Ish. Sometimes a little more frequently, but often less. And ours was postponed for two years and. Or for. It was supposed to be last year. It was planned pre Covid. And then it got postponed a year and. And then Omicron reared its head. Right. So I completely understand what that's like. And it's this labor of love that kind of has us rally and go, well, I got to find a way. I got to find a way. Because you know, as a human being, how powerful that human connection. And it goes right back to exactly what you say is that all we want is to feel less alone and more connected to others. And those retreats and the in person classes are how we get to feel connected with others. Even people who are in hybrid workspaces at this point, they're working from home. Great. And then it's easier and easier to work from home because they adapted to it finally. But then what they find is they don't realize how much human connection they're actually missing from not seeing each other in the office and not seeing other people, from making a. Making a little commute or whatever it looks like. So I really think it's powerful what you're doing, and I think that. I think that you've definitely got the resilience and strength to keep offering what you do. Because so many People need, need it badly. It's so powerful.

I appreciate you saying that. And that word resilience really sticks with me because you have to like yourself a lot to take chances on anything, whether it's getting back into the workplace or whether it's trying to look motivated in your at home office that you've been in for two years. It's right. But at the same time, it's an important journey that we're always going to be on. We're going to always be asking ourselves, what are we doing every day? The little success chips, I call them like that go into our piggy bank so that when life does pull the rug out again, we have, we have those chips to bet on ourselves. And, and that's what yoga is. That's what movement practices are. That's what 10 minutes of meditation is. That's what reading is for me. And these opportunities where I go to bed at night mostly proud of myself, I'd say like, you know, 60, 40, but mostly proud so that when I can get back on the horse, I can take a chance on another retreat. Even though it doesn't feel good, I don't feel 100% myself or right. But at least I can take that chance and I can be honest with people about that feeling. And then they're probably feeling something similar too.

Totally. And Katie, that's so powerful and I'm so glad you shared it in that way because that's exactly what people need to hear. It's just those little bits to keep, keep us all going. And it's, it's you believing in you. And by you believing in you, you, you keep going. And sometimes we just need to believe a little harder in ourselves. So I just want to acknowledge you. What you're offering is so great. It's a gift to the world. Now you've been, you've been given the gifts, but you're giving the gifts and the gift is your book. So I just want to give it a little shout out to it again. Cheers to chaos. Eight tools for the Puffy eyed and powerful. And you certainly are powerful. I really appreciate you coming on our podcast and point to your social media. How can people find you? You're on Instagram and Facebook and anything else.

Yeah, Instagram. Be inspired Life is my platform in spirit. In is the Latin root to inhale. So it's the idea that we have to live life to be inspired because we don't know when our last inhale will be. And so be inspired life on Instagram, there's an app that I have meditations. I also A weird thing that has happened from COVID is working with companies like you just shared that are now totally at home and need to reconnect the way that they used to at the water cooler. So I work with people on smaller companies for that kind of option too. But yeah, I would love any feedback. You can get it on Amazon or Audible. I read it myself. It's four hours. It's super easy read and it's good for anyone going through a rough transition.

And it's fun. It's fun and funny. It might be an easy read, but it's freaking hilarious and it has so much to offer. So if as a, as a gift as well, it's an awesome option. I love it. I love it. And I love what you're doing for other people who are cancer survivors and even like orphanages, India, Mexico. You're up to some big things and it's really powerful. So thank you for being you. Thank you for coming on and keep doing what you're doing.

Thank you.

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