Part 1 - How This Athlete Turned A Devastating Setback Into A Successful Career

Welcome to this edition of the million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

Hello everybody. We're talking to need Nina Sasamon Pogue from Charleston, South Carolina. Hey, Nina, how are you?

I'm doing great, Larry. Thanks for having me on.

You know, we're going to extend this to like a five hour podcast because you've just done so many dadgum things in your life.

As long as I can have a glass of wine while we talk, I can go five hours.

Congratulations on a life of achievement. I was thinking back, I was watching a little bit of the Arnold Schwarzenegger thing on, I don't know, Netflix or whatever it is. And he was talking about one thing I remember his father said, and be useful, that big Austrian thing, you know, he was telling him as he was leaving home and everything. But you have really made yourself useful in life and you got a drive in you that has sent you from athletics, television, business, speaking, writing and nonprofits, things like that, philanthropy. And so did start with athletics. Is that where it started?

Yeah. You know, I was born in Navy brat. I traveled, lived all over the place, moved with my family, youngest of four kids and I found was hyper from the get go. So my mom had to channel that energy like so many young athletes began. And so put me in dance, which lasted a moment before they put me in gymnastics because I had more energy than dance could hold. And so I have since then I have had some discipline and some focus that has come through that sport. I think that has really launched me into a lot of fun new adventures. And I like to think of life as this adventure I'm on and think about what big next thing I could do.

It does give you a certain advantage being dependent, you know, military dependent. I was the oldest of three in a Air Force, Air Force dad. And so we moved early in his career. He made somebody man at the Pentagon who was in charge of moving. And so whoever that person was, they made sure we moved at least once a year. And so where all did you go in your travels?

So I wasn't as bad as once a year as Air Force can do at times. I was Navy, so it was every three years. And I was actually born in Key west back in the 60s when, when there was a base in the keys in the 60s. I was born there and then I moved all up and down the East Coast. So I've Always been stateside. My dad was always stateside. He was actually a mechanic that worked on helicopters and then became chief of the boat and then went to officer candidate school. So not the regular route that some people take. And then we moved to Georgia, New Jersey, Florida, and then back to Florida and up to Maryland and then back down to Florida at one point. So Jacksonville NAS was kind of my childhood. A lot of the years there in Jersey was a little bit of my childhood too. But yeah, so that was my. The Navy piece. And you do you learn how to make friends quickly, you learn how to jump into new situations. But I also moved away from home when I was 13 and moved into an Olympic training center. So my moving in that part of the Navy, unlike my brothers and sisters were they kept doing that. By 13, I had moved and was in one spot all through high school.

Really? Yeah, that is. And where, where was, when did you get. How long did it take you to be in gymnastics? To the point where it was obvious you had real potential and it was decision to make about are we going to move her to where she can really get top level coaching?

Yeah, I was 13 when I moved away from home. I think the last two years in Florida. So 11, 12, 13, 11, 12. Those years I had won like the Florida State Championships. I'd come in the top for a couple of years and it was obvious that I had some real potential. And I think my coach saw that in me. I was one of those fearless athletes that would try the harder skills and would go for anything. I didn't always win because I didn't always land them, but I had the level of the skill level to certainly move up. And So I think 10, 11, 12 probably is when they saw that in me and my coaches, you know, created that opportunity for me. And so what was that?

What was that like? What did that do for you as far as formative experiences? Obviously, in making you more independent, outgoing, probably. But what did you notice and what was the first thing you noticed? That this is going to be different now?

I think looking back, I see it more so than I did at the time. At the time, I was excited about the opportunity and I was just a kid and wanted to make that team. I can look back now and see it made me fiercely independent. You jump in and take care of yourself. There's nobody that's going to step in and take care of you. You learn incredible time management and discipline if you're going to make it. And you have to take that on yourself too. So it certainly Changed me to be able to step into that situation. I moved from Florida. My parents were in Jacksonville, Florida at the time. And I moved to Silver Spring. Maryland is where the training center was at the time. One of the many before they had Colorado Springs, before everybody went down to Texas with Bella back in the day. So I had that opportunity to step in and just become a whole new person, I think, and really step up my game. I lived with my coach's family at first. His name was Greg Weiss, who was an Olympian himself. His son and daughter both went on to be Olympians who were younger than me. So it's been. And I jumped in with a. Was surrounding myself with champions and people who thought and worked and had that level of discipline to work at that level. And it certainly became part of me.

Yeah, being around that level of athlete is transformative. I remember being down in Portilla, Chile in September around the. Where they have a lot of the Southern hemisphere. So it's winter down there in September and a lot of the ski national ski teams are down there before the World cup season begins. And I remember we were talking to a guy who, he had gone and spent a year just traveling with the French or one of the national teams, and he was one of the guys who carries the skis, puts the, you know, the poles up, you know, to put the course up and everything. But he spent a year around them and they said when he came back he had become such an extreme skier just by being around these people that they made him head of the ski school.

Yeah, there's something about surrounding yourself with excellence. It's hard not to let it rub off on you a little bit. When everybody else is committed and getting up early and going hard and excited about what they're doing, it definitely becomes part of it.

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Notes arc to life. You know, you grow, grow, grow. And then, you know, we're not here forever. But it's the same thing with careers and especially in an athletic career. And I'm seeing my. I've got a therapist, actually, Rolfer, which most people don't know what that is. But anyway, she's got. All three of her kids are like hockey talented hockey lunatics. And the boys have been in Switzerland and Toronto. And you know, she lives in Aspen, but you know, they train in Denver if they're not Pennsylvania or somewhere in Canada. But now it's kind of getting with the older ones, it's like we're probably not going to be pro level now. Where do we go? You reach the point where it starts to gradually become obvious that laser focus on making the team, winning the competition and all just not going to be able to make that happen. Was that a hard thing for you and when did that start to dawn on you?

Well, it dawned on me very quickly. It didn't dawn on me over time. So I was on the US team, traveled to Japan, Hungary, Germany, Australia in the USA Sweats. Mary Lou Retton was my era. So my maiden name is Rofi. So we were. I actually roomed with Mary Lou some. That was because it was Rofi and Retton and we both began with R. Not because we were like number one and two or anything. But the first year, the first year Mary Lou won the USA Championships, I won Miss Congeniality. So I was in the mix. But I wasn't winning one or two right there when I was on the team. But I loved representing the US and being part of that 20, 25 athletes that were out competing in our red, white and blue sweats and being part of that world in the 80s. Now I went to that year leading up to 84. I'd been to Hungary in the year before and done really well in an international competition. So leading up to 84, I was set to do real well. I had grown some. My skill level was not exactly as high as it should have been, but I was still in the hunt. And I bombed a qualifying meet. And back then they didn't do like they do now, where they kind of choose. You either made the score or you didn't. And I bombed a qualifying meet and didn't make the team in 84. Just I wouldn't make it to the trials, one of the qualifying for the Olympic trials. I bombed and I thought that my life was over. I thought I'd wasted my whole life. I thought everything was ruined. The ripe old age of 16. I had never been to a football game or a high school Anything. I had just lived for this sport and I thought, this is the end of my life, you know, because it's so big when you're a kid. And then I, you know, I pick myself up and I did get a college scholarship. I competed for LSU. Great D1 school at the time, still a powerhouse in gymnastics. And I had some great success there. And then I blew up my knee. And so here I lost my whole sport. Then it wasn't just first, it was not making the team, losing that identity of possibly being an Olympian, you know, after being on the COVID of magazines as an Olympic hopeful, you just, it's crushing. And then to lose my sport altogether. Yeah, I kind of didn't know who I was without gymnastics, and so I struggled along those lines too. So very obviously that was kind of the end of my career. It was a career ending injury. So it didn't sneak up on me. That was it. I was a freshman in college, one of the top recruits, and my career was over. And so I had to figure out a path forward. And I'll tell you, I married an LSU baseball player. We had these little super jock kids, and I could see in them at that same point, you know, when I could, were they going to make it or weren't they? My son played, you know, college ball, but then had Tommy John surgery. And that look on his face when the reality hits that you're not going to go pro. My daughter was a gymnast, got too tall, became a dancer, like a bun head ballerina, danced in New York. But came a point in her career where she had to go in another direction, too. And thankfully in my life, I had raised my kids to this phrase, we all go pro in something else in life, we all go pro in something else at some point. So that was always a backup plan. There was always, we're always going to go pro at something else. And they. My daughter works in AI in New York and my son's in his fourth year of med school. They've decided what else they're going to be great at and use that same discipline to jump into that. So it didn't sneak up on me. It was taken from me very quickly. And then I made sure with my own kids that I always had that exit strategy, part of their plan.

One thing we can point out here that I think would be helpful to people that are, we're all in this together, everybody's growing, and it doesn't matter how long or how successful you've been, you have to reinvent yourself constantly. And you Got to stay flexible. You cannot allow yourself to get rigid. A lot of times we allow ourselves. We make ourselves rigid. When we find a winning groove and we're for a period of time to win a contest or whatever, we go in lockdown, and you get real rigid. But that's going to be for a period of time. Don't get carried away. These are seasons. And flexibility serves you well because life changes so much and so unpredictably. You know, like you said, you've been in broadcasting for over 20 years, and we were talking about getting the microphones and everything working to start this up. We were talking about the millions of things that could go wrong. It's always unpredictable. You got to be flexible. You got to be flexible.

You got to be ready for anything. Yeah.

And the thing is, you know, that's. It's not just in business, but, like, not just athletics. It's entertainment. You see all the people who started out, they were going to be a dancer, and then they turned into a singer, or they were going to be a singer and a musician, and then they turned into a dancer, or then you saw the people, like, wanted to be in. You can admire. You know, it's kind of like I wrote a blog post 5, 10 years ago about what's the same thing between Regis Philbin and Kim Kardashian. What's the same thing between. They both wanted to be in show business and had absolutely no talent whatsoever. And so Kardashian was a hairdresser for Paris Hilton. And so she said, well, I can go to parties, wear nice clothes to parties, and stay in shape. And she just made that an obsession and made herself a thing from staying in shape, wearing nice clothes, going to parties, schmoozing. And then Feldman did it from the announcing, and they worked. They found a way in that they were flexible. And so the thing is, don't focus on what you don't have, because you're just gonna, you know, the. You're gonna get washed out into the ocean on that. But it's just like, see where you can divert and what. Let's say that phrase again, where we're all gonna go pro in something, right? Is that what you said?

Yeah, we all go pro, and we're athletes. We all go pro in something else at some point. There are very few athletes that can continue athleting way into their 50s and 60s and 70s, you know, but even.

In business, you see people that started, you know, one of the big communication tools in business right now, internal communication tools, and corporations Is slack. I don't know if you're familiar with slack.

Yeah, slack. Well, yeah, I know slack.

Well, then, you know, slack started off as a video game, and these guys were going to do video games, and then they, you know, they were needed to communicate with each other. They were at different locations. So they started this thing, and then slack, the communication thing, turned into the big product. And so be flexible and keep your eyes open, but keep running. So what you did, how quick did you shift to, like, I got to get a scholarship, I've got to do here, you know, was it a hard thing for you to make these early adjustments because you're setting the pattern for your life as you went through these things. And so did you have people you know, did your friends stay with you, a lot of support around you, or did you have to figure it out? You're all of a sudden, no one's talking to you and all the option you almost taking your phone calls. What's.

Yeah. So early on as an athlete. So when I. When I didn't make the US Team, I was just a teenager. I had my parents around and coaches around, and they helped redirect me to college. But when I blew out my knee in college, it was a different ballgame. I was on my own, and I was not in a good place, not in a good headspace. I was. I would get up and take my Percocet with a shot of Jaeger and go to pt. I was not making good choices. And so. And to keep my scholarship, at the time, I had to work in for the athletics department in some way. And they had me working in the laundry room. My coach was not. My coach was none too happy that her top athlete had blown out her knee. So I ended up working in the laundry room. And not, like, washing cute little leotards. I was working underneath the pmac, like basketball, football, washing jock straps. I joke sometimes. My claim to fame almost became that I washed Shaquille o' Neal's jock strap. I mean, that could have been it. I could have just stopped it. The. The overlap is there. I don't think he actually went that year was there, but a couple years later anyway. So I was in a. I was very much alone. And the other athletes, my roommates and friends, they're all going to practice, and all the people around me were athletes, and they're all going to practice. And I would crutch over and do the laundry room. And at that time, that the laundry room was underneath the Pete Maravich assembly center here. There at lsu and I would switch out the laundry, and then I'd lean up against the wall outside to get sunshine and kind of watch the other athletes walking by. And, you know, no one stops and talks. It's kind of like you don't want to be part of that world. One, I didn't look very inviting. I was not a happy camper. And two, I was. I was an example of what could happen. So you're really alone in it. And I had one guy who was an athletic advisor back in the day, before they had mental health coaches and all the things they have now, who stopped a few times and said, how you doing? And I, I'm sure, said something snarky like, great, can't you tell? You know, because that was me. But he would stop every once in a while, and then he finally sat down after a while and he would talk to me. And he's the first person who got me thinking about what else could life look like? I had never thought about it. I had been an AT gymnast and an athlete my entire life. I had never thought about what life was going to be like on the other side of that. And he was the one who said, well, what do you like to do? What are you good at? What? What else? You know, you got a whole life ahead of you. What could that look like? And he steered me towards this instead of the laundry room, the sports information department, and then journalism. And that's how I ended up on that journalism path, because I had that one person who took the time to have that conversation with me. So sometimes one person can make a huge difference. And that's where I found journalism. I fell in love with. I was started out as a sports reporter, and then I got into political reporting and general assignments and then became a news anchor. And I had success in television for many, many years. And that was that journey, though it wasn't an easy one. But those early days of overcoming and now being able to look back and realizing I. Something in me was able to look ahead and say, oh, what could this next chapter look like? And just that thought, it's carried forward with me because I'm always planning my next chapter.

That is the point that we need to make here is like getting it in your head what that next chapter can look like. And if you get, you know, find people that have that experience that will share with you and ask those kinds of questions now you can also get off your fat butt and go on YouTube, you know, say, I don't have a mentor. Nobody. This Is not back in the 80s now, folks, this is get off. You know, this is what I used to tell my management to get off your butt and get, you know, take advantage of what's out there, which is mountains of stuff now. And we've always had books and tapes and courses and this, that, and the other. But now you got YouTube, and there's just so much wisdom packed into things, unfortunately. The great thing about the attention deficit era that we're in is that you have come up with these great things, shorts for YouTube, you know, these reels, you know, And, I mean, there's amazing things on Instagram, of all places, you know, which is usually entertainment and all, but I mean, really insightful stuff if you look for it. And so get out there and you can ask questions that way, Ask questions through social media if you can, and make contacts wherever you. You can go. But the information is really out there now. But you got to get out there and swim. But the thing you want to do is have a clear picture. Like you said, the reason you were floundering was they gave you a different picture. You're the clean, you know, you're the laundry woman now, and you get a degree and you do the laundry and nothing but. It's amazing how a clear picture of what the future can be, or at least an idea of what your future can look like, can really light you up and kind of change. It's kind of like the circuit board goes off in your head, isn't it?

Yeah. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. And sometimes there's a couple of speakers that talk about this. When people interview for a job and they put themselves in that role of the next job up, you know, once they don't get that job, they move on. Because now they can actually see in their head what that job looks like, and they're not happy there anymore. So.

Right.

So once you can see what a world could look like on the other side of it, then you can start moving in that direction. But if you don't ever open your mind to what could be there. I do a cool thing in some of my workshops. I do what I call your lifetime timeline. And I have people take a piece of paper and turn it sideways, you know, horizontal, and draw a line from across the middle of it and put dots. 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, all the way out to 100. So, right. Say I live to be 100.

One line, one line. 10, 20, 30,40.

Yeah, okay. And I always said, so that's if you live to be a hundred. So I can, whatever I'm going through right now, put a dot on there and go, this is where I am right now. Yeah, all the space ahead is blank. But here's a cool thing. Little math geek out for a second here. When I blew out my knee and I was 19, gymnastics was what I had known in life. So at that point, point in my life, everything that I'd known up to that, like that point was 75% was gymnastics. I mean, I'd been in the gym since I was, you know, four or five years old. So my, of course it felt like my whole life was ending. It's all I knew, 75% of my life had been in a gym. Now when I turned 50 and my kids left for college, I can look back and go, oh, that piece, that line on my timeline, it's only 28% of my life. It doesn't feel like everything anymore. And if I live to be 100, which I need to drink less wine and take better care of myself, but if I live to be a hundred, then it's only 15% of my life. Like, you can look at your life that way. If you look at that timeline and put parts of your life above the line and put what you have done, accomplishments above the line is how I put it. And then down below the line, put some things that you've overcome, I call it your reverse resume, all the stuff that you've overcome below. But you can sort of look at your life that way. And then you and I both can, whatever year we are, we can put a dot on that line. And the magic of that visual is all the blank space ahead.

Right.

And you could be there.

It helps you also to apply that to your career, whatever you're doing, you know, if you're, or your business, you know, if you start a business, a lot of times, you know, you're not thinking, you're just trying to get where we make some money, you know, see if we can prove we can do it. And then we could buy. Then you move up to some levels. But it's like, what comes after that? The more you can settle into a success groove, the quicker that you can get that long term picture out there. It's like, and ask yourself questions. Even if you say there's no question now, would I ever be to the point where I'd want to sell this thing or would ever be a point where we'd want to expand into another industry along with this, you know, and, or other products or would. Is there a time where we would reach a point that we go into another country? Possibly, you know, is there a point that. Where I would turn this over, I'm running it now, turn it over to a CEO, and I would step back and, you know, do other things. But the more you have this timeline in your mind, the better you can frame a lot of your decision making.

Thank you for listening to to part one of this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. Commit to your personal and professional evolution.

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