0014: How to live courageously in full confidence daily, despite the trauma from your past with Motivational Speaker & Best Selling Author Lorie Tensen

Ea interviews episode 14 inspiration, transformation, success stories and the imperfect action round seven days a week. Join Mario Ficcini for today's expert Authority Effect interview.

Welcome everyone to the expert Authority effect. I am excited to share with you today Lori Tense, best selling author and motivational speaker. She has written a number one best.

Selling book called Take my hand out of my pocket.

And I really want to tell you her story and I know it's inspiring and I don't want to take any away any of her thunder away get a copy of her book. It brought me to tears, literally. I remember when we were working on it and she was telling me what she has overcome and I would like to think I'm positive but who I have on today's episode, she's more positive than me without a doubt in my mind. And I don't say that lightly because most people are frankly negative and they just deserve what they get. But she has overcome so much and.

She'S gonna bring it to you and.

That'S why I invited her on the show. So Lori, I know you can see me, I know you can hear me and from the bottom of my heart, thank you for being here. This has been a long time coming and you're making me do it again just like we did on the calls. So Lori, I'm excited you're here. I'm excited to bring you her up but first we're going to thank our sponsor.

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Lori Tensen. Lori, we're gonna have a great episode. I'm excited to have you here and I want know what made you want to write your book? What inspired you to start your speaking career, start publishing and become the author that you are now.

Frankly, it was all about therapy for me. It was time. I had gone probably 30 years without therapy because of what I had gone through. So it was personal therapy. I wrote the book for me.

Well, I am so glad you did and I want you to.

Can you share with our audience, tell them your story. I didn't want to take it away from you in the introduction but.

Why don't you elaborate a little bit more about your story and what You've overcome.

All right, well, I'll try to be brief, but it is quite a story.

I am biracial. I'm half Honduran and half black. And when I was a baby, seven months old, I was adopted into an all white family.

In Minnesota. A very small town, a farming community of about 650 people in the town and maybe about 1,000 farmers in the surrounding area. There were no other people of color within probably about 150 mile radius. We were a good two and a half hours west of Minneapolis St. Paul. So I grew up in a very insulated and isolated farming community. And when I was about 12 years old, it was. Oh, gosh, I would say it was spring of 1979. I just totally dated myself, told everybody how old I am. My parents sold their farm and bought a grocery store. And in August of that year, 1979, I had just turned 13. Just a couple of months previously, I was helping my parents in the grocery store. And in the back of that grocery store was what we called the meat room. And this was many years ago. And this was a time when grocers still sawed meat into, you know, they would have a whole half side of a beef or something like that, and they would saw it into steaks or, you know, whatever. But they also ground their own hamburger. And so they had this huge hamburger grinder. And my dad told me to go to the back room and get started on the cleaning in this meat room. And I absolutely hated the room because it was scary. It was just so incredibly scary to a little girl. And for some reason, on that day, it was August 15th of 1979, I decided that I was going to tackle this great big meat grinder. And there was a part on it that was just a little bit, I always say, wonky. You had to push that part out really quickly and then you could proceed with the cleaning. Unfortunately for me, I went. I naturally, I was born right handed. And so I went to push that part out with my right hand and. And did not pull my hand back quickly enough. And so I turn the machine on, got my fingers caught, probably about 2 inches of my.

Pointer finger and my middle finger. And I immediately shut the machine off. So probably this is gross and bloody, but 2 or 3 inches of my fingers were sticking out of the machine and. And it hurt.

So badly, I can't even describe the pain. And I'm a kid, I'm on my own. My parents are in the front of the store. So I start screaming at the top of my lungs. And my parents, it was so loud, they came running to the back room, and I had leaned over and shut the machine off, but my screams were so loud that my poor mother thought the machine was still on. So she leaned over me and flipped the switch, thinking she was turning it off. And.

Unfortunately, the rest is history. And so right now I have a right arm amputation about 3 inches below my elbow. And that is my exciting story.

And I know that's what you share in the book, too, and.

That started on at an early age. So what inspired you to tell that story? I know you said it was therapy for you, but there are so many people that have every advantage for them, and they can't seem to overcome themselves or something else, and they just struggle or flip through life, what, you know, whatever you want to call it, they're just kind of there. And then there's people like you.

Who.

Have traumatic trauma, whatever you want to call it, a bad experience, a horrible experience, a life changing experience. And you still find a way to say, you know what? I'm gonna move forward from this. When, Realistically, and I'm so sorry it happened to you. And you said one thing. You said, unfortunately for me, I'd say fortunately for you, because I know in every adversity is the seed of greatness. And I think it's where a lot of your power comes from. I never would wish this upon anyone, and I really wish it didn't happen to you. But you're an amazing woman and you've overcome so much. And there's. There's other stuff that if you want to touch on it, you can. I know it's on the back of your book, but what inspire. How do you just.

How do you decide I want to overcome this? Because there's days even I, you know it. My life doesn't suck. I'd like to think I'm positive, but I remember there were times when we were talking and you brought me to tears, like you're not doing now, because we're on camera and we're live. But if you could distill the essence of if someone's in a struggle, whether it's mentally, physically, spiritually, emotionally, physically, how do you overcome. How does Lori say, I'm Lori, watch me overcome. And you didn't even touch down your two great kids yet.

Oh, just wait.

All right. I was 13 when this happened. I was just a kid, and I did not have any counseling. This was a small community, and I love my parents dearly, but counseling wasn't a thing in 1979 or as I was growing up. My parents are incredibly tough, wonderful human beings. And.

When I was. When I first went through this, and probably Until I was 18 years old, it was just this mantra inside my head that.

Said, just carry on. And that's what I did. But from adulthood 18 until I was in my late 30s, without even really being conscious of it, I struggled. I was unhappy.

Everything that I did was directly related to what had happened to me. I had my first child, my son, when I was 19 years old. I was just about to enter my sophomore year of college when I found out that I was expecting a baby. I had to drop out of college when I was about 21 years old. I hadn't finished because I had to support this baby, this being that I chose to raise.

And so again, I just, you know, sucked it up and kept going. And then, you know, I got to be in my 20s, I got married, I had another child.

I spent, oh, gosh, over a decade as a stay at home mom. And on the surface, it looked like my life was pretty darn good. Lived in a great big house, my former husband had this amazing job, so I got to be a stay at home mom.

But inside I was a mess. And I. I reached a point in my late 30s where I was so depressed. I was anorexic. I was, you know, I'm 5 foot 9 and I weighed at my most 119 pounds. After having two children.

I was so incredibly depressed and miserable that I knew.

I had to make a choice. I was either going to live or die because I had thoughts of suicide running through my brain daily. And I was on antidepressants. And that was in my late 30s. And over the course of about six years while I was in therapy.

Was the first time I had ever cried about what had happened to me. It was the first time, first time I'd ever talked to someone about my accident, about being adopted, about being raped in college, about becoming a parent when I was only 19 years old. And it took six years of really, really tough therapy.

Before I was okay, before something inside of me changed. And I made a very difficult decision to end my marriage. And we had been together for, I would, close to 25 years. But I knew that that was part of my healing because every decision I made, and I said this before, every decision I made was because of what had happened to me at 13 years old. And so it wasn't until.

It was summer of 2008 when my daughter and I were. We were going to Go to Atlanta to see REM at their final home concert. And I remember vividly boarding the plane. And for the first time Since I was 13 years old, I felt joy. I had never, ever used that word to describe my life, ever. Never. And I just felt so incredibly joyful. And in that moment, even though I still had two more years of going through a pretty contentious divorce and other things that I'll talk about later, I decided that I wanted the rest of my life to be joyful. And that's what I've done.

Like I said, I went through a very contentious divorce. It was very difficult. In my 40s, I believe I was 42. I went back to college to finish my undergrad, graduated at 44.

Took some part time jobs because I wanted to still be available for my daughter. She was not ready to graduate. And when she was a senior in high school, which was 2017, I went to grad school. And April of 2018, I walked across the stage with a 4.0 GPA and received my master's degree in social work. 52 years old.

Congratulations. Thank you.

And what I've learned, quite frankly, is it is so easy, it is so much easier to be happy and to be joyful. And I wake up every morning in a good mood because I'm just so incredibly happy at the life that I have. And I believe I told you when one time that every night the way that I go to sleep is I think about everything that I am grateful for. I heard this or read this a couple of months ago. Someone said, what if you were to wake up in the morning with only the things that you had said you were grateful for the night before? And I just went, oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. And that's what I do.

I love it. So for anyone out there that doesn't think they could overcome what is one thing you could say that would help them.

Just stay focused, stay positive. You mentioned the gratitude, but what is something else that has really helped you that you've implemented to be a daily habit? What's one thing that would really help someone that may be going through what you went through?

Well, let me preface this by saying.

Something I discovered, actually. It was right before the Christmas holiday in 2017. So I was finishing up a semester, I was writing, finishing writing a huge paper.

And.

And I had this epiphany, quite frankly. I remember I was sitting there and I was typing this paper and I thought, oh my gosh, I've really been through a lot in my life. I am, you know, one semester away from getting a master's degree, I have gone through death of a parent, divorce, emptiness.

All of these things. And I am resilient. I am a survivor. And I truly believe that all of us have that within us. We may not recognize it, you know, we may hit these huge transitions in life like death, divorce, or whatever your struggle is, and it might seem insurmountable, but what I really want people to know is that you have it within you. There is a seed planted deep within you, a seed of resiliency. And if you just open your heart, open your mind, and know that whatever happened in the past is in the past, there's not a darn thing you can do to go back and change that. It is what it is. And there's absolutely nothing you can do about the future because it hasn't happened yet. Be in the moment. Be present. Find that seed that lies within all of us and let it grow.

I love it. Beautiful, Lori.

So the last thing I'm going to ask you before we go to the sponsor is your book. What has your book done for your life, for your business? The speaking you've done? What has it done for you?

Well, that's kind of funny because when people ask me about my book or people say they've read my book, I'm always the first to say, oh, it's so amateur. It isn't some, you know, fabulous John Grisham novel or whatever. It's just me. It's really just a therapy session. What, an inch thick therapy session. And so it's amateur. But then I take a step back and I say, that's okay, that's great. Because what it has done is it's finally made me open up and be authentic. Because for all of that time, from 13 until my late 30s and maybe even close to my 40s.

I had, for some reason, decided I had to be this fake, shiny person, you know, when inside I was just really struggling. And when I finally, like I said, went through that process and really found me the person I was supposed to be.

It helped me to appreciate everything that I had experienced. And I look at that book and I am so incredibly. I'm proud of myself. I am very proud of myself and how far I've come in my life. I love being me. I love being me.

Well, I love that about you also, and I appreciate you for sharing. And I was shaking my head because I respectfully disagree. The novels and everything with John Grisham and whoever else, they might be thicker books, but so what Yours is real and yours is you. Those are made up. Yours is real. It. I've worked with thousands of people and not many people can truly be real. They're always putting some sort of mask on. And you are one of the few who not only took it off, you said, here I am and here's the behind the scenes. There was something you said when we launched it and do you remember when you were talking about the people who had known you your whole life but never knew.

That stuck out in me. How many people are we on on a daily basis? Oh, I've known them 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, whatever. BFD. How well do you really know someone you know?

Right, Right. That is so true.

I'm super proud of you. I'm super happy for you. And we have more. We're going to come back to the imperfect action round bonus. I don't even know what I called it. We'll be back after the sponsor and Lori's going to share with you some great insights and we'll be right back.

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All right, so we're back like I had mentioned. And we're back to the imperfect action round. And this is one of the fun parts where I ask you a couple of questions real quick. And there's, There's Spitfire answers, 60 seconds or less. And the first one is, would you recommend Publishing a book for someone, definitely.

Why it's so much fun. It's just so much fun. What's fun about it? Just the whole experience of it makes you think. It makes you really dig deep into your creative side. I don't consider myself a creative person. And now I can walk away and say, you know what? I wrote a book. And also it made it so incredibly easy for me to write all of my huge pages in grad school.

Very good. All right. What was your most memorable moment from writing the book?

Having the first real conversation with my mother about what had happened that day. We had never ever talked about it before.

What did, what did that mean for you personally?

It was eye opening, frankly.

You know, you asked how my life has changed since I wrote the book. I had forgotten that when I left my Hometown at age 18, I left without looking back. I stayed in contact with maybe one or two people outside of my family, but that was it. I disappeared. And I visit every other year, but I would always just visit my family and nobody else. And when I went back in 2000, I believe it was 2015.

It was during this, this summertime celebration that my hometown has. And.

It was unbelievable. For four hours I sat at this restaurant slash bar and person after person from my hometown would come in. It was non stop for four hours. And they would be in tears and they. I don't know how many people said, what happened to you? You disappeared. For 30 plus years, you disappeared.

And so writing this book and talking to my mother really made me take a step back and see that, you know what, this didn't just happen to me. This happened to probably 1500 people and possibly more. You know, we had a police escort to and from, you know, to the hospital. We had thousands of people sent me cards and gifts and flowers. It wasn't just me who had their light changed by this accident.

That was humbling. And that really forced me to take a step back and realize that, you know, our actions have consequences, whether they're good or whether they're bad. They affect more than just the person in the immediate vicinity. And we need to remember that.

Thank you. The last one. How has your book helped you with your speaking?

It's been great. I.

Have always struggled to talk about my accident because I never felt attractive after it happened. I didn't feel like I was a pretty girl. I had this fake arm. So I didn't want to talk about it. I didn't want people to see that I wore a prosthesis. I thought it was ugly. I thought I was ugly and writing this book forced me to air out all of this dirty laundry. And so when it's in black and white, you cannot take that back. It's out there for anybody who wants to buy my book to read. All of the dirty is out there. And I thought, well, so what? And so now when people ask me to speak, I'm happy to because it just, it's, this has changed me. I'm just a different person and I, it's part of me having a prosthetic. I've had a prosthetic longer than not and I'm not ashamed of.

It's me, it's who I am. And so I love it. If somebody wants me to speak, call me.

Love it. So what's the best way to get a hold of you? We're going to put a link to your book. And what's the best way for someone to reach you if they want you to speak? If they want copies of your book, where can they find you?

Well, people can join me on my podcast 4065 and they can find me on LinkedIn as well.

Very good. And what's your name on LinkedIn?

Lori Tensen. L O R I E. Tensen is T E N S E N and I will respond.

Very good. Well, it's a pleasure having you on the show and I'm excited to get you in front of more and more people. Laurie, thank you very much again. It's a pleasure been having you.

Thank you so much for the invitation. And you were right. Long time coming.

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I hope you got a lot of value out of it. Let's continue the conversation over in the community expertauthorityworld.com we can have discussions, talk about the episodes and I'd love to get your thoughts on it. Once again, expertauthorityworld. Com.