Episode 175 - Stephanie Reck On Poverty, Abuse, & Homelessness, Discover How She Became A Survivor

I do really believe 100% from every part of me that everyone has the.

Capacity to be able to do the things that they want and not to.

Be held back by the mental baggage that's in our head that we want to push through.

Welcome to the do the Thing podcast. In each episode, we get down and personal with people who go after the things they want to make all their wildest dreams come true. Join us as we unveil and dissect a formula for what it takes to do the thing. Here is your host, Stacy Lauren. Hey, everyone.

Welcome to the do the Thing podcast. This is your host, Stacy Lauren. Well, I love these kinds of conversations because I get to meet people in such a cool way now because I have this amazing community that I've been a part of for the last seven months. And I met our next guest through the community. She's been participating in the challenges that we have in there. And I got to do a celebration interview with her on one of the challenges we had. I just felt really moved by her story. And we only got to touch on it since the interview was about celebrating her completing the challenge. We didn't get to dive in fully deep into her personal story. And so I really asked her to do a separate interview on that because I know that's something that you guys would be really interested in learning about. Because whenever we have really hard things that we walk through, sometimes it's hard to see the light outside of that thing that we were walking through, especially when we're in the middle of it. But when we're outside of it, it's easier to reflect and then to be able to pull the lessons that are learned, especially after coming through the pain and the agony from it. So that is what I am looking forward to talking to our next guest about. So I am so excited to welcome Stephanie back to the show. Hi, Stephanie.

Hi, Stacy. Thanks for having me back.

Yeah, thanks for coming back. I really appreciate it.

Of course.

Well, I would love to start off and just hear about. Because we went into a little bit of it, but we didn't get to go full on. So I'd love to just hear your story.

Yeah, well, this can be triggering, so I'll put that warning out there right now. You keep it in or take it out. But some of what I'm going to say can be very triggering to people, so be prepared. I grew up in a very religious household. I was raised from a young age, Mormon, lds, very different from the flds. I'll put that out there because it Comes up almost every time I talk about this. So not a fundamentalist, just the standard Mormon LDS community. And we were very, very poor. My parents had a total of six children. The first five all were within two years apart. Okay, so had a baby two years later, have another baby, two years later, have another baby. We lived in California at the time. And I still to this day, every once in a while, every few years, I go back and I look at the house that we lived in in Santa Rosa. One of these days, I'd really like to see that house and the neighborhood be cleaned up and be a pretty and safe place for people to live. It is a very low end area across the street from us. We had a very nice German family. They were lovely to us. I did have some friends on the street, very good friends. But about every other house was drug infested home or the one on the corner, for example, had prostitution ring going through it. It was pretty bad. And I had friends who lived at that house, small children. And I would go over there and play. So I didn't grow up in middle class. I didn't even grow up in like a, hey, this is kind of a nice neighborhood. It's lower class. I grew up in a really bad neighborhood. And there were times when the kids down the street would come over and bathe at our house because we had running water and electricity and theirs had been turned off because their family members that they lived with couldn't afford it. And there were a lot of children in my neighborhood who lived with grandparents and aunties and uncles because parents were incarcerated or just MIA for whatever reason. I also remember regularly my mother would do a lice check on ourselves, all of us kids in the house and our friends and neighbor kids, because growing up in an area like that, lice just goes around and around and around. It's very cyclical. And so you get rid of it and then all of a sudden, boom, everybody has it again. And if one friend has it, you're all going to have it. So that gives kind of paints a picture of where we lived in just extreme, extreme poverty. I also recall that we did a lot of church food boxes. We would have to go stand in line at the co op and get very, literally government cheese, which by the way, was very good. But it was demoralizing as kids to have to go and stand in that line. Everybody knew why you were there at school. They had small little chips. They kind of resembled a domino and they were different colors and that was another demoralizing situation. One color meant that you had paid for your hot lunch. Another color meant that you were being given hot lunch. But you got an alternate version of hot lunch because you didn't pay for it. The school was covering it, or whoever was covering it. And then of course, you had cold lunch, which you brought from home. And regularly we would have just a piece of bread in our lunchbox, or bread with mayonnaise on it, or bread with maybe we had peanut butter on at one time. So oftentimes we had the color chip that said we were being given this alternate version of hot lunch. It was hard as kids to have that Kids would make fun of you. You just start to feel like you're less than on a regular basis. In addition to all of that, I grew up in a very abusive household. There was rampant sexual abuse by our biological father. There was rampant physical abuse by both of my parents, my biological mother, my biological father, and sibling squabbles and those kind of things. But when you only understand violence, some of those sibling squabbles were. Could be very violent as well, because that's a learned behavior. When we would come home from school, we really didn't know who we were going to meet when we walked through the door. Because our biological father used to be classified as multiple personality disorder and schizophrenia. That multiple personality disorder has a new name, disassociative identity disorder. I believe someone can correct me if I'm wrong. So there were days when we would come in and he was very religious and had us do Bible study. Was really kind of a zealot on that other days we would come in and he would want to pay us a nickel to correct his grammar or his spelling, because I think he only made it through sixth or seventh grade in school. And if we came in one day and corrected his grammar and it was the more religious zealot or one of his other many personalities, then we knew almost immediately that we had made a mistake and would try to back it up. But we also were just immediately hit. Hit with his fist or with an item that was within reach. It was hard. So you just didn't want to come home. You just wanted to try to stay at your friend's house as long as possible because you weren't really sure who you were going to run into when you got home. And our mother worked in a bank, I believe, most of my younger years. And so she wasn't home much. My father worked as a welder, a custom welder, and he did absolutely phenomenal work. I remember just being in awe over the work that he did. And he would work at schools, private schools, for example, and make these elaborate handrails. I went to work with him one day. I'm not sure why, but I was there one day with him and watching him do it and watching people come over and tell him how lovely his work was, I was really proud of that. But that man could not keep a job because he had multiple personality disorder. And he would fly off the handle. He couldn't deal with any kind of leadership or direction from anyone. So he would work these construction jobs and travel around and do them, and it was like feast or famine. So when he was working, he made apparently very decent money. And I don't really have any idea of what he actually made. But then we would go for months where he didn't work, and we had no money. So we just also never knew if we were going to have food in the house. We had animals in our yard at different times. We had a cow, we had chickens. We had. At one point, I remember we had like 200 chicks. We had goats. I remember going into the livestock auction with him and picking out the animals that would be our future dinner. So we grew up very much. There were animals in our yard. Name them if you want. Probably not a good idea, because that's going to end up being dinner. And I remember him doing really horrific things with those animals. He would want to teach us how to slaughter those animals, skin the animals and prepare them all the way down through. We had our own meat grinder, and we would grind our own meat. And one time he slaughtered rabbits to prepare them for the freezer. And there was at least one rabbit that had babies inside. So he brought it in, opened it up, showed us all these dead babies, and gave us a lecture about premarital sex. So random, really horrific experiences for children happened on a regular like that in our house. Another time, he decided to not draw up the chickens by their legs before he cut their heads off. And those chickens, he thought it was hilarious. They ran around the yard with their. Based on the nerves that are still running amok in their bodies. Blood was kind of coming out of their necks, and they were essentially chasing us is what we thought as little kids. And we were just terrified. He thought it was hilarious. So in addition to all of that, our biological mother just kind of stood by and let it happen. I don't remember her ever putting her foot down or taking us out of that situation and saying, this is not okay. We shouldn't live this way. I Do recall us going to our grandparents house in Petaluma and staying there every once in a while for a weekend. And that was the most amazing thing for us kids. They had a beautiful huge garden that we got to help with. They had a huge Victorian house that to this day is still beautiful. And we just thought that they were so wealthy and as a young child living in extreme poverty and then having your grandparents in this huge Victorian home on a couple of acres right outside of downtown Petaluma was. It was hard to understand these two vastly different dynamics. Fast forward to nine years old and I believe someone at school saw some bruises on me and we had been pretty good about covering our bruises up. Also. This is like the mid-80s and you were allowed to spank your children. Corporal punishment was still widely accepted and children were still seen as property. So your parents did what they wanted to do with you. I mean, even my friend's parents spanked their kids with wooden spoons. And it was kind of like almost a running joke in households. How many handles from wooden spoons do you have? Or how many broken hair brushes do you have because you've broken wooden spoons and hair brushes over your kid's butt? And somebody at school must have said something about one of my bruises because we had the police called to our house. And I remember that during that time period it had been pretty tumultuous. I had an older brother who had been killed in a. By getting hit by a car right outside of our house just down on the corner. And things got really bad after that. My biological father didn't seem to be able to cope well with it. And mind you, at that time I'm about actually let me correct that. I was 7, my brother was 9. So he didn't seem to know how to cope with the fact that my brother was gone. And my brother had been the protector of us. Now he was only two years older than me. But if we could kind of tell that something bad was going to happen with our biological father, he would oftentimes step in and take the brunt of the beating. When we were being grounded to our beds, which happened on a regular and not given dinner, there would be times when our biological father would come in and give us a bowl filled with water and broken up pieces of bread and that would be our dinner. And my brother would often give his broken up pieces of bread saturated by water. Mind you, he would give that to the younger siblings. I had an older sister at the time and she was just kind of checked out. I Don't know how much she got of everything. Probably her fair amount, I would imagine. But I don't have a lot of memories of her kind of stepping up or stepping in and protecting the younger kids like I do my older brother. So once he had passed after the car accident, I kind of stepped up into that role, and I wanted to take care of my younger brother and younger sister. So I would take the brunt of the beatings or I would stand up to this man who I was terrified of. And at one point, my mother gets pregnant again. So now she's got another child on the way. She ends up having that child. And it was somewhere after that baby was born, my youngest sibling, that my biological father really went off the deep end. And I believe that that's when the police were called to the house. And my siblings didn't want to say anything. They were terrified as I was as well. But I think at that point I had just had enough. And I told them a chunk of what had been happening. They arrested my father, and so he was removed from the home. I don't recall him being in jail very long, and I do recall him calling and talking to us for from jail. And he told me, well, I have to get out of here because I'm just going to die. Can't stay in jail. Something to that effect, really putting it on me that I'm the only one who can get him out of jail. And I don't want to be responsible for my father dying in jail. So as a little kid, you're hearing this. You've always heard that this is just how families run. You've gone to your church, you've told them different things about what's going on in your household, and they tell you over and over again will heed the judgment of the patriarch of the household. You must not be religious enough. You must not believe in the Lord enough. You should probably read the Bible or read the Book of Mormon a little bit more. Well, you may not be doing what you're supposed to be doing. It was always my fault that this stuff was happening to me and to my siblings because we weren't religious enough. We didn't believe in the Lord enough at under a year old. Up to my sister was 14. So when you hear all of that over and over and over again, and you've gone for help, and then all of a sudden help comes in, but then you're essentially guilted into helping your father get out of jail. I was really convinced that I needed to retract Some of my statement now, cps. I don't remember them being involved. They may have been involved, but we were essentially free of this man for a while. My mother must have gotten enough courage to say, okay, enough's enough, because that man did get out of jail. And he would stalk us at the house, and he would be at the house when we got home, or we'd be home after school, and he would try to get in through windows or convince my younger siblings that they should open the door because he's their father, et cetera. And I remember there was a police officer who came to our house after there was a really bad incident one night. We had to call the police. So this officer comes over, he gets that. My biological father, out of the situation again. And then I remember him coming to the house many times and sitting on our front porch and reading stories with us. I don't know this officer's name. I've asked my older sister. She doesn't remember his name either, but she said he definitely came for a while to our house and stayed there in the evenings with us and hung out with us, typically out on the front porch, sometimes in our living room. I would imagine that he was there to make sure that our biological father didn't come back. At some point, my mother sold the house. They got divorced, sold the house. I don't know the timeline for that, but I was probably 9 years old at that time. And she sold the house, and we went camping for months. And I didn't realize until I was an adult that we were homeless. I just thought we were camping because at times when our father had traveled construction, we would go with him, and we would live in this little tiny camp trailer. Wasn't very long. We're talking like 8 or 10ft. It's the tiniest little camp trailer you could imagine. And we lived in that for months at a time while he traveled construction. And my parents would rent our home out to other church members who were in need. Mind you, we were in need, but other people were definitely in. Apparently in more need than us. So they would rent our house out. And I do remember that we came back one time from construction when he had lost his job. And we lived in our camp trailer in our driveway because this other family was in greater need. So they needed to stay living in our house. And I don't know what they rented the house out for. They may not have even received any money because he just had it in his head that he. We always had to help other people. We Were never that bad off. So we're camping with my mother all of these months. And finally we moved to the Sacramento area in with some friends, and we lived in their front room. And I remember going in with a trash bag, and that's all I had of my things. That's where the trash bag starts. So when you hear about foster kids with trash bags, it's a real thing. It happened for multiple years after that in my life. We lived there for a little while. Finally got into a house that was provided by the church. They rented it for my mother. They actually helped her get a job at the church as a bookkeeper. And they paid all of our bills, all of our bills. And we would fill out this printed form every month of everything that we needed, from groceries to razors and shaving cream and shampoos and conditionals, personal hygiene items. You name it, Everything was there. And then we would get the box. I remember that we also went to the church storeroom and picked out furniture. My mom picked out, like, dining room table beds, living room furniture, et cetera. Everything was provided by the church. And she's working, and she's a single mother, and I don't believe she ever got any child support from my father. This whole time, though, she's paying 10% of her income to tithing to the church. In return, they are paying for our house and all of our bills. I'm a numbers person, and that just doesn't pencil for me. But it got pretty tumultuous in our house during that period of time. That was a couple years that I was there. Fourth, fifth, sixth grade. I was in that home. And in that time, I started to ask my mom a lot of questions, and I started to challenge her on why she allowed the abuse to go on so long. And she was still physically abusive to us. I will say that it wasn't anywhere near the extreme that we had had previously, but she was still physically abusive to us and mentally abusive to us. And she screamed at us. One of her favorite things was to smack us on the back of the head or slap us across the face because she didn't like what we said. So I'm challenging her. My brother is a little bit younger than me, two years younger than me, and he's getting exceedingly more violent. He's starting fires outside in our yard, burning our grass, trying to burn, catch our trees on fire. He's just being very defiant. He needs a lot of help coping with everything. And one day he decided that he wanted to slash the new Chairs. It was the dining set that matched. I was actually really proud of the furniture that we had in that house because it matched and it was newer. And I was very upset that he had slashed all of the chairs. He then took the chairs and started smacking them against the sliding glass door. And I tried to get him to stop. He chased me down the hallway with a knife, the knife that he'd had in his hand. And I got cornered. And the only thing I could get to to help protect myself was the vacuum cleaner. And back in the day, and this is still in the 80s, back in the day your vacuum hoses were metal. They're not plastic like they are now. Well, I hit him with this metal vacuum hose. And later that evening he tells my mom that I beat him up. And I don't know if he called her at work or if he waited till she got home, but he said that I beat him up and he had bruises. And she called the police and had me removed from her home. And I did not live with my mother again until I was 15. That lasted a couple of months and then again for a few months when I was 17. Few months, almost a year when I was 17. And that's it. The rest of the time I spent in very large facility, residential group home facilities. And I would bounce from there to a smaller home, home based group home that would take in four girls at a time. It was also an lds, a Mormon family ran group home. I could only stay there for 30 days and the other place for 30 days. So if you can imagine, I would bounce from one to the other, max out my 30 days and then go back to the other. During that time I could have weekends with my parent and my mother gave up her parental rights. She didn't want to see me. So I would go and hang out with my friend for the weekend. That was had been in my previous neighborhood. I'd known her also from school and from church. So I would go stay with them. So I went and stayed in literally in my same neighborhood where my mother and my siblings were. I wasn't allowed to go and see my mother or my siblings. I went to church, my mother would see me front in the chapel or see me in the hallways and she would look the other direction and she wouldn't talk to me and I wasn't allowed to see my siblings and go and talk to them. And that went on for months before I was placed in a long term foster home. That was a nice home. My previous home based group home was also A very nice home. People were very nice to each other. And over this time I learned that you could be nice and you could also make mistakes and people weren't going to beat the shit out of you regardless of whether you were nice or made a mistake. And that was just like my mind was blown that people could be so nice to one another and that people could follow a routine and people would tell me that I was good at my schoolwork and that I was a nice person. People smiled and laughed when they interacted with me. And so then I started to smile and laugh and I started to build my confidence up. And when I got into my longer term foster home, it was with a single mother of two children. She first had me in the home and she accepted me in her home after I'd stayed there for a weekend. And she thought I would be a good fit for her daughter, who was a couple years younger than me, and her son, who was probably in elementary first, second grade, something like that. Later she would take on a teenager, another female teenager, and she was there for a couple of months. But during that time I lived in Danville, California, in a very nice neighborhood, upper middle class. Those homes now go for well over a million dollars. I went to a very nice school. This foster mother ensured that I had nice clothes that fit me. I had only ever had used clothes growing up and, you know, high waters clothes didn't fit right, shoes were too small, they had holes in them. And I think in prior to going into the system, I can distinctly remember having about six items of clothing that were brand new that came from a store that either I picked out or someone picked out for me from a store that were for me. Everything else was either hand me downs or picked up at the Goodwill or something. So this gal, my foster mother, was nice and she was strict. She certainly had a lot of rules. And I definitely made mistakes that she didn't care for. But I learned from her that you can make mistakes and you can talk through those mistakes and people still like you. Afterward, she helped me get my first job throwing newspapers where I got to keep my money. Now, when I lived with my biological mother, I had a paper route with her and my younger brother. And we drove around in my mom's car and we threw papers and we would run up and do it all. And she was just the driver. We did that job for a long time and we never got paid, ever. That money was just to go and help support the household. So I get my first paycheck from the newspaper And I go and hand it to my foster mother, and she said, well, that's yours. You get to keep that. She helped me cash it. And I actually had money that was mine that I could do what I wanted with. And that was the first time, I think I realized that when you do a job, you get paid for the job. And the more effort you put into that job, the more you get paid. And I had a lot of really nice people on my route. Again, it was a very nice neighborhood. There was like a community pool and all of this. And I had some elderly households that I delivered to and they told me where to put the paper. And when it came time for me to do my collections, because back in the day, you did all of your collections yourself, you turned that money into the newspaper, and you kept the difference between what you received and what those households owed the newspaper. And I would get tips, really big tips, $5, $10, $20, sometimes in tips. And then some of these households asked me to start pet sitting for them and so forth. And so I developed a sense of pride that I was doing a really good job and people trusted me. I had never felt like people trusted me before. And I think that that work ethic that I developed over that time has stuck with me. I tried to go back to my mom's house at some point I must have been 14 or 15. So I left the foster home, moved back in with my mother. There was no transitional counseling, There was nothing. I don't even remember why I ended up going back to my mom's house. I pr I know that I craved her love. I never understood why she didn't love me and what I had done wrong. So I had been in this rewards based household for a long time now, while I've been in my foster homes and my group homes and treated with the utmost respect and learned a lot of good skills. And I moved in, packing with my mother. Meanwhile, she remarried somebody and they'd moved to a new area. So this is a new house to me. And I was immediately treated like I was less than I had just come into the family. I had to earn all my privileges. I just didn't feel like I fit there. And I tried really hard. And I went back to church with them and I thought again, if I just listen to the teachings of the gospel and I, I believe in the Lord and if I adhere to the request of the patriarch of the family, which was now my stepfather, and if I obey my parents, then they will love me. And that is not the case. So I ended up.

They.

They moved to another state. I ended up seeing in California, ultimately ended up moving in with the family friend in the Sacramento area that we'd moved in with when I was 9. Lived with her for a little while, and she ended up needing me to move. Not for any fault of mine, which was lovely that she was able to tell me that. But her daughter became pregnant at 16 and she was going to need the space. So I ended up moving in with my stepsister, who was an adult. She was married and had a child in Monterey, and I lived there. And they were lovely individuals. And my older sister, biological sister, ended up moving in with us for a while as well. And then I got raped by my boyfriend's friend. And so I was there for a year, did great in school. Everything was wonderful. Then I got raped and no one believed me. It was really hard for me. My sister didn't believe me, my stepsister didn't believe me. They wanted to know what I had done to encourage the behavior. That boy told all of our joint friends that I had had sex with him willingly. So all of my friends turned on me because how could I cheat on my boyfriend like that? I was a virgin. I had not had sex with anybody of my own accord. And so I just kind of crawled back into this hole inside myself and thought, well, my only option is to leave. If I don't have any support here, I'll leave. So I moved to Oregon, where my mother and my stepfather had moved with my younger siblings. And that cycle started over again where I was less than. I wasn't good enough. And I decided, I'm out of here. I'm not doing this anymore. I'm worth more than this. But my only escape was to get married because I was raised Mormon. And you don't date to date, you date to marry. If you're going to go to college, you're just going for an Mrs. Degree, a Mrs. Degree. You're looking for a husband. So I met somebody through a friend at a church dance, and she was dating his brother. And I decided, well, I'm here. I'm taking her over to their house to hang out. I'll talk to the older brother, who was two years older. We knew each other for three months. He went in the Marines. When he came back from boot camp, we got married, we had two children. And I thought, this is a good Mormon boy. Air quotes. Good Mormon boy. And I will. I'm going to be okay. And he turns out he's an addict, and we Were married for three years, we had two children, and he was abusive to me two times. And I said, that's it. I am not going to ever allow anyone to put their hands on me again. And I'm going to figure this out with my children. And that was, gosh, in the late 90s. And I put myself through a chunk of school, and then I decided I just have to make money and I need to be able to take care of my kids. And so I learned pretty much everything I know in my, that I do in my profession now. Hands on, on the job, Took care of my kids, raised my children, got married again at age 36. That lasted three years, and we got divorced, found out he had been cheating on me for a chunk of our relationship, and have been single ever since. But in all of that, I have raised two amazing children, I have an amazing career, I'm very good at what I do. And at the end of the day, what really gets me excited is helping other people find their greatness and giving people the opportunity to see that life can be anything that they want it to be. I want them to have different experiences. This could be my staff, this could be my friends, this could be other professional colleagues. I just want them to be able to see that it doesn't matter where you came from. You can be whoever you want to be if you work hard at it and if you have enough grace for yourself so that you can forgive yourself for making mistakes along the way and realize that every adversity that we run into is an opportunity to learn and to make a decision about which path you're going to take. So I decided that I was going to take a few years after my kids had left in my last divorce, and I was just going to be selfish and I was going to take care of me. And I adopted a mantra that was, if I don't want to, I'm not going to do it. So if I don't want to, I'm not going to. And that mantra has really been helpful for me over the last few years because I have been able to learn to say no. I had never said no when I was growing up. Oh gave way too much of me. I never expected anything in return, but I found over the years that I should have received something in return from some people because my cup was empty. I was always giving to other people, but I wasn't ever seeking out anything that would then fill my cup up. So I learned that I had to shed a lot of relationships that I thought were these were my friends. And I. I really craved attention from people most of my life and that all relationships are not good relationships. And if I was only giving, giving, giving, giving in a relationship and I wasn't getting anything back then, that wasn't healthy. I didn't have to be that selfless. When I started to do that and shed some of these unproductive relationships, I started to find more happiness. And when I started to do things that I really enjoyed versus worrying about what other, what would make other people happy. And I got back into some of my old activities and habits, I found that I was a whole lot happier. And there's certainly people in my life who to this day say, you've changed so much. I don't really like who you've become. And I have been able to say, and that's okay because I'm not here to make everybody else happy, I'm here to make myself happy. And when I make myself happy, it also means that I have more energy to go out and do volunteer efforts that also make me happy. That in turn will make other people happy. But I'm really not doing it for other people. I'm really doing it for me, which can sound very selfish, but I feel like in my life that's the healthiest I've probably ever been. And the most recent volunteer effort that I'm doing is I've spent the last nine or 10 months going through the motions. Certifications, coursework, background checks. So many background checks. And last week I was just provided my license to be a licensed foster home. And I will be taking in emergent placement and respite care. So it'll be children of all ages with a primary focus of teenagers, because I was a teen when I went into the system. But they'll come into my home probably in the middle of the night, probably with. If they bring belongings, it'll be in a garbage bag and they'll stay with me up to 45 days. In that time, the goal would be for the system to find them a long term foster home to reunite them with family for a kinship placement. Or maybe their parents had an acute situation where they're not able to care for their children, but were able to get them back in with their families. So my situation for them is how do I provide them a structured, loving home that gives them the opportunity to see that life can be different. They don't have to like my life and they don't have to do what I did growing up. I just want to give children the opportunity to see that regardless of where they're coming from now, they can have something different in their life. They can be whoever they want to be. And I also want them to know that I'll always be a resource for them. So that's the next adventure on my plate.

Yeah. And thank you for sharing your full story, because I think there's just so much in there that is so inspiring for people to be able to hear. And when I hear you talk about what you're doing now by you just being able to have this foster home and just you being able to also describe the experience you had with the single mom that had taken you in when you were a teenager, and that's how you got to see a different life. You hadn't seen anyone act that way before. You almost got to see a whole nother way of living through that.

Right?

Yeah. And some.

So many people don't get an opportunity to see. They might see something on tv, but it doesn't connect with them. Maybe because they have generational poverty or they're in a marginalized community, and they just feel like there's no opportunity for them to do better because others in their lives haven't done better. And maybe they haven't been provided the opportunity to have a hand up in life. And I think that if more of us found ways to do that versus criticize people, we might be able to work together and really enhance the lives of many people for generations to come. Yeah.

And I love the mantra that you took on with the if I don't want to, I'm not going to, or if I'm. If I don't want to, I'm not gonna. I'm wondering, too, when you were kind of walking through that fire, through your childhood, it seems like you found your voice then where you were realizing, this is not good for me. I'm not gonna stay here. I'm not gonna keep doing this. Was there anything that you think that you were able to recognize now, looking back, that got you to that place?

I don't know if there was anything in particular that. That really stands out other than I had seen glimpses of other ways to live and other households. I had very loving grandparents, very stern grandparents, but very loving grandparents. And I had cousins who seemed to really enjoy their families. And I had kids at church who lived in nicer neighborhoods or kids at school who wore nicer clothes. So I had these little glimpses that there were things out there that were just not available to me at that time. And I always wanted something more. And People say that. My friends will say that I'm kind of a gypsy. I'm kind of never settled with roots down anywhere. I'm somebody who can find joy in most situations, and I kind of thrive on picking up and moving to a new area and starting over. I love to buy the ugliest house on the street. The ugliest. Give me the house that somebody abandoned that they had started. All these projects are half done. Give me that house. I'm going to fix it. I just did this over the last year. I'm on my fourth house now since 2010 that I've done this with. And even when I was renting, I would leave the house or the apartment better than I found it. So I'm not trying to really compare houses and children together, but if I can go through my life with kind of the shit storm I had when I was younger and still find a way to leave things and people in a better position than when I found them, then I think everybody can do that to some extent.

Well, yeah, when I hear you talking about the houses, I mean, it's pretty much what you've done through your life, right? You feel like you're getting to a place where, okay, I think I'm. I'm good now. And then something else happens, and then you have to almost clear out and then start over again. And so the house is sort of like a representation of you being able to do that with your own life, too.

Yeah. Yeah, I think so. And there's that old saying, home is where you hang your hat. And I really can find a sense of calm and peace anywhere that I decide I'm going to kind of set up house. And I don't know that I can say that for all of my friends. I have friends who've owned their houses for 10 and 20 years, and they're just not at peace in their homes and they're not at peace in their relationships. And I'm not going to say I'm at peace in every relationship I have. I have adult children, and we have tumultuous times in our relationships. I have friends that. Man, there are times I get really annoyed with my friends. I'm sure they get very annoyed with me, and we need a hot minute of a break. But for the most part, I don't think that I had given myself the opportunity when I was younger to really enjoy things because I was in survival mode for so long. But when I do look back now, I see that somehow I always figured it out. And when I realized probably in my early 40s, I realized it'll work out. It might not work out the way I had originally envisioned, but it's going to work out. So if I just try, that's better than not trying to. So your mantra is, you know, do the thing, right? So I realized a long time ago that I just need to do the thing. And it's okay if I fail, but at least I tried.

What do you suggest for people that are in survival mode and they're still fighting the fire of whatever that fire is that they're walking through? What would you suggest? I know it's hard because I'm giving such a global question to it, but just what would you suggest in terms of first steps?

When I talk to people who are kind of in the midst of the fire and they're just trying to breathe or find a way out, I suggest to them that they really sit back and think about what makes them happy, what brings them the greatest amount of joy in their life. Put that down on a list, and then on the other side, put the things that really give them anxiety, the things they don't want to do. Maybe they just do them because they think they're supposed to do them, whatever. But make your kind of your list, and then we can talk about building that life around the things that bring you the greatest amount of joy. And how do we increase those things, and then how do we decrease the things that they don't want to do or that bring them anxiety or that really aren't serving them any purpose? And I do this with my staff often because people have been told, you have to get the highest degree you could possibly get. You have to make the most money you can possibly make. That's the only way you're going to be happy. You have to have the best car out there or you're not going to be happy. You have to have all of these things that society tells us we have to have. And I just feel like it's so overwhelming for people. And if you. If that's the expectation that you've put on yourself, wow, it's just such a hard. It's an overwhelming burden that we've put on ourselves. And if we can start to peel that stuff away, that doesn't mean anything to us or brings us anxiety or strife and really focus on the things that bring us joy. I have found that my staff will say, you know what? I don't want that promotion, but I want time in my day to do this other thing. So I'm actually Really happy with most of my roles and responsibilities. These things I don't love. I don't want to do them, even though I'm good at them. But these other things I'm really good at and I don't have an opportunity to do it in my job today, I would like to do that. I would like to find a way to incorporate that. And I give them the permission to have these conversations with me. If it's actually one of the first things I do in the first 90 days when I take on a job is I do a seat skills matrix and a people skills matrix. And the C skills matrix is just like, what are the skills that we need to effectively fulfill this role at this company? The people skills matrix tells me so much about the staff and the people that I'll be working with. And I can better align personalities and personal interests. And I can help people start to balance their professional and their personal lives. Because I oftentimes am going into companies where I'm kind of cleaning up a mess or I'm trying to save a company from really going under and having to lay off all their staff, or I'm in a startup where it's brand new and we're trying to develop the culture. So if I can start to find out what really helps people be excited about their job, about coming to work each day, they will stop getting so frustrated with others that they work with. It's kind of amazing when you start to actually care about other people and what's going on in their personal life to some extent, without getting too intrusive, obviously. But if you can start to care about people and not just the bottom line, those people are happier to come to work. They're more collaborative, they're more efficient with their jobs. They find really great suggestions for improvement in the company and in the culture in your products or services, you name it. That then starts to build passion. People become passionate about what they're doing and the services that they're providing to customers. They're the customers start to call and or email in to me and say how excited they are to work with us. They've seen a change with the people that they're interacting with. I have another exercise that I have staff go through, which is reach out to X number of people in your professional life and X number of people in your personal life and ask them what your greatest strengths are and what your unique abilities are. I say, you don't have to share those with me. I just want you to go through this exercise and then we're going to talk about the results in kind of generalities. And what I found is more often than not, people do want to share the information that came in from their professional colleagues and their personal connections. They also find that there's a pretty substantial theme to the responses that they get. We are oftentimes very, very hard on ourselves and we don't realize it, that we are the ones who give ourselves the most negative self talk because we heard it from somewhere at one point and we just keep repeating it in our head. It's our internal dialogue. And this exercise helps to get people out of that internal dialogue. And I hear things like, this is the biggest ego boost I've had, which is great. People need an ego boost, but it's a humbling experience for people. They are confident, shoots through the roof, and they oftentimes, I think we forget to thank people and tell them how great they are at things. And this is an opportunity for them to hear what other people think of them and what other people think they do really, really well, that they do better than other people. And I've had employees who get on a call to talk to me about this and they just break down crying and they say, I had no idea that people even knew that I knew how to do this or I didn't know that I was so good at this. I just do it all the time. I didn't know that this had such a profound impact on so many people in my lives. And I think we, we just get into this mundane, do the job every day and check a box every day, and we don't stop to think about how we're impacting other people's lives. And we don't stop to thank other people for the positive impact that they've had on our lives. And this gives people an opportunity to look at this. And I'll tell you, this was an exercise that I went through, gosh, almost 20 years ago now with a previous boss. And my former employees will start to see these come up on LinkedIn or in social media and they'll be like, oh, she's running that exercise again. And then they go run the exercise with their staff at the company that they're at now. And it's just, it has really helped a lot of people. And every time I go through this exercise, exercise, I learn so much about my staff and I learn more about myself as well. But if you've never been asked, you know, what you really like to do and what really brings you passionate life, don't you Think that you just feel like nobody cares about your life and what you enjoy doing, and all you do is just do your job every day and then go home and it's kind of depressing.

Yeah. It's amazing how you're now able to see people. You're able to make them feel seen where so many people lack that ability to be able to do that. And then you're helping others see them, too. It's not just you. You're spreading that out. So then other people are able to be a part of it as well.

Yeah.

I also think it's so I've been talking about this a lot on the podcast with the I'm calling it Life Assets. I'm not sure if I'll change it at some point. I was calling it Lateral Skills for a while, and then it got switched to Life Assets. But how pretty much everything in our life that we go through kind of serves as a guide for anything else that we're going through in the future. It kind of just is reminding me and what I was saying earlier, trying to articulate it better. But with you building these houses right where they're. You're picking the bad hat or the junk house, and then you're making it nice, and then now you're doing that with companies where you're able to take it from the bottom and then back up. And it's this amazing skill that you have to see the beauty in something even when no one else does. This is your gift now, after everything that you've gone through.

Yeah, I mean, I guess you grow up in extreme poverty and you don't realize at the time that you're homeless, but later in life you're like, oh, there were multiple times when I was homeless. I never want that to happen again. So initially, when my kids were little, I was in survival mode for years and years, and I was like, I just. I don't ever want to be that poor, and I don't ever want to be homeless. Those were my two things. I would tell myself over and over and over again, and I wasn't ever going to let them be in an abusive situation. I didn't want to be in one, and my kids weren't going to be in one. And it took a really long time for me to figure out, oh, I've already surpassed those things. Those aren't concerns that I need to worry about anymore. Now it's time for me to look to the next adventure or challenge myself more. I was just so caught up in my own head in survival mode that I. I didn't provide myself the opportunity to really enjoy life as much as I could have. I guess I don't know if it was my last divorce where I was like, kind of threw my hands up in the air and said, I'm just not letting people treat me badly anymore, or if I had already gotten there prior to that situation. But I feel like in my own life, if I can just find beauty and joy in the things that I do and continue to expand on those things, it'll cause a ripple effect. It'll kind of be contagious. Right. It's the adverse of when you have a bad egg at your company or in your friend group and they're kind of cancer, and that negativity grows. I would rather grow positivity and joy and opportunities for people for the rest of my life. And the bad eggs, they're gonna be there. You can't get rid of the bad eggs. But I don't wanna put my effort into the bad eggs anymore.

I was also wondering, what about for the people that have already walked through the fire and now they're looking back and they're still stuck in the story and they're having trouble kind of moving on from that? What would you suggest on that?

Oh, I don't know if I have suggestion for that.

Also, how did you get out of that story? Because you could have had a story your whole life, right? But you keep reframing the story and then being able to redefine it.

It took me a lot of years of therapy, and I had some counselors that were just kind of sitting there checking a box. I didn't feel like they were listening to what was going on in my life. And they weren't giving me viable suggestions for how to better my situation. But I had a couple therapists over the years that were really good, that practiced active listening skills that really got deep with me about what made me happy and what things caused me anxiety and strife and gave me permission to meaning. They verbally said to me, you have permission to not keep those people in your life. I, for years and years and years kept trying to please my mother. Gave her lots of money, paid her mortgage, paid her car payment, all of these things. I helped her at her house, I helped remodel her houses. I tried to go back to the Mormon Church. At one point, as an adult, I did so many things for so many years trying to get her to love me. And I had a therapist who said, you don't need her. You don't need her in your life. You're happier when you're not around her. And you do better things in your life for yourself and your children and for other people when you're not around her. And when you get around her, she sucks you back into her delusion of what life should be and you're treated as less than and you start to believe that you're less than. Why would you want to keep doing that? And my response was something to the effect of, well, she's family. I'm supposed to always accept family and be there for family and help them. And they said, why? Because someone said that was true. It doesn't mean it's true just because someone said it. And I had to do a lot of unlearning of those principles and it was a huge weight off. And I cut her out of my life in 2010. So we've got 13 years here that I've been doing other things with my life and I've become increasingly happier over the years.

Yeah. So maybe that idea of getting out of the story is first look at the environment around you and see kind of what's still feeding the story.

Yeah. And surround yourself with high quality friends where there's give and take in the relationship. It doesn't have to be 50% from one or the other. I think at times I still, I'll give more or less to a friend than I receive and at times that'll be the adverse and it's okay. But it's a give and a take. And there's a high level of respect with the friends that I have kept in my life. And I don't need more people in my life. I need really high quality people that I know that I can depend on and that know they can always depend on me. So one of my daughter's favorite things is you need to go make friends. You've lived in your house for a year. You don't get out, go join the gym, go make friends. And I said, look, I have my friends. I have very good friends that I've had for 20 plus years. And we don't live in the same states anymore. But we make a point to connect and interact with each other. We make a point to travel, to see one another. I just spent last weekend in Vegas with one of my very good friends at her daughter's soccer team. She had a national soccer tournament and I flew out. We hung out together for the weekend. I go skiing with him about once a year for a few days at a time. And Since I left the Pacific Northwest, I haven't spent as much time with her in person. But we both make an effort to stay in one another's lives. And I think that that has really helped me. Probably more than a lot of other little things that I've done in my life to change my trajectory is saying these are the type of friends that mean a lot to me. And the other people in my life were just noise.

Okay, that feeds into my next question. You mentioned earlier that keeping the peace and how some people around you you've seen still don't have peace in their homes. What's your recommendation for being able to have that peace even when things might be spinning around?

That can be a tricky one because each situation is different. I'll use my daughter as an example. My daughter needs time. When things are chaotic, when there's been a misunderstanding or a disagreement, she needs time. I have other people in my life who need immediate response. They need immediate validation or they need to immediately come back and apologize. Whatever the situation they're in, immediate gratification, not in a negative way, but they want to get to the bottom of it right now and fix it and make up and move on. There's other people who just need time and space. And I think if you can figure out how you can communicate more effectively with the people in your life and find out if it is a truly a, you know, a two way street with those people in your life and they really want to make this work, great work toward that. But if you're in a situation where you also really feel like this is not working for both of us, and if you can have enough grace to understand that it's not a workable solution or a workable situation and you can let that relationship go, sometimes it's gonna hurt really, really bad. But at the end of the day, if that's what's right, it's what's right. So not everything is gonna feel good when you're doing this and you're kind of getting to this point where you're, you're settling and calming things in your life. But if you can also just sit down and reflect on a regular basis. What makes you happy? What do you want your life to look like? Are your goals in alignment with the other people in your life? This could be a significant other, it could be friends, it could be your children. What are your goals? Are they in alignment? Is there a way to get them in alignment? Do we have people who are honestly working toward a mutually beneficial relationship? This works in your personal life, and it works in your professional life. And if the two parties aren't going to work toward a mutually beneficial relationship, then it's best to separate that relationship, dissolve that relationship, and then keep your goals in front of you. I have a whiteboard in front of my desk. It says things to do and be. And I have a retirement goal on it. I have an investment goal and a date that I want to hit that investment goal. I have my kind of mantra for 2023. I'll read it off to you. It is connection. I want to increase the value of my connections, and I want to be successful in identifying ways that I can support other people. That brings me joy. And then I want to increase my happiness. I want to find joy or I'm not going to do the thing. I have that written on my board. Find happiness or don't do the thing. And then my last one is, I want to be intentional. I want to limit my focus to my core goals, and I want to be intentional with the things that I do this year. And I'm checking the things off as I go. It's March. Currently looking for a new job because I was involved in the tech layoffs at the top of the year. And I'm going through this process myself and realigning where I want to go with my career and my personal life. And do I stay in the city that I currently live in, or do I go to another location? All of that I have to. I'm one person, but I have two adult children, one that lives with me and one that lives two miles away. And one of them is likely to move. She's telling me that she and the husband are going to move closer to downtown Denver and closer to where they work by May. I only moved to this state, into this city, to be near my daughter and her husband, so I could spend as much time with them as possible before they have children and the dynamic changes. So my goal is still to spend as much time with my daughter as possible. And they felt really bad, really guilty about the idea of moving away because they know that I just moved here a year ago, year and a half ago. And I said, you should never feel guilty because you're doing something in your life that's going to bring you more joy and that is right for you and your family. And she just didn't know how to respond to that. She goes, yeah, but you've just moved here. You moved here to be with us. And I said, and I'll likely just move closer to you wherever you go. But you need to think about what is right for you and your husband right now. And right now, then you spend about four hours a day in the car commuting, and that's horrible. And. But that's where they got their jobs. And they want to spend more time together as a family and they want to spend more time with their animals and they want to spend more time with me and with my son. But they feel really guilty about the idea that they're going to move 45 minutes away from us to help them get in line with where they need to be to increase the level of joy in their life. So when I said earlier, you have to make sure that you've got the different people in the relationship are all kind of goal aligned.

Right.

They're working toward a mutually beneficial solution. And I think she got a little caught up on worrying too much about how this change that was going to positively impact their lives was going to potentially negatively impact my life versus just having a conversation with me about it. She learned from that. I hope she learned.

It's like you gifted her this thing of freeing her from that worry, too. So you're showing her that you're your own person and she's able to make these decisions without worrying about you, which I think is great.

Right. I don't want her to spend her adult life worrying about the decisions she's going to make and how that's going to impact me, because I did that for way too long with everybody in my life. I worried more about how my actions were going to impact others than how my actions were going to positively impact myself and. And my family. So I want to try to change that dialogue because I guarantee you she heard it from me the entire time she was growing up. Right. And it was a learned behavior. So we're not perfect. I made a ton of mistakes as a parent, ton of mistakes as an employee and as a friend and so forth. But as I recognize those situations, I now have an opportunity to be better and do better and then spread that knowledge with other people. Yeah.

No. Okay. So on that note, are you ready for the big. The big reveal?

Yeah.

Okay. So what would be your number one piece of advice for the listeners on doing the thing?

Try to work through your fear. And I'm going to say try. It's hard. One step at a time. We're afraid of failure as a society as a whole. We're afraid of failure being our own internal failure, failing at work, not doing the best we can for somebody Else letting someone down. Try to move through the fear and do it. Put your list together. Start at the top, start in the middle. I don't care. Start with the easiest thing or start with the hardest thing. Whatever is going to work for you, but just start to do them. So in Stacy, your thing is just do the thing, whatever it is. If you don't know how to invest, put $50 in an account. Buy any stock. Pick one at random. Now you're an investor. If you want to buy a home and you don't think you have the money for it, put $50 in the savings account and keep putting money in a savings account and talk to people. Learn about the thing that you want to do. Educate yourself. Just don't be afraid if you can help it. I'm still afraid all the time. There's a lot of fear in my life, but I push through it. And then I congratulate myself for the hard work that I put in. Even if I failed, it's okay. I still did something. I made it out of. Shouldn't say I failed. Even if I don't get the result that I had originally hoped for. I learned along the way. I learned maybe what not to do or how to do something different. And if I continue to do that, I increase my knowledge, I increase my self worth, what I tell myself I'm worth. And I don't become complacent. I don't want to become complacent and I don't want to become irrelevant, which is a fear of mine that I'm working on is being becoming irrelevant.

How would you say you push through the fear?

Do you ever read that book by Shel Silverstein? There's a poem in there. If you ever looked at the book. The graphic was this little girl sitting at a table and there's a whale on the table and she's supposed to eat the whale. Does she start at the top or does she start at the tail? How do you eat a whale? One bite at a time. And when I'm working through the fear, I take one thing. That's why I said I don't care if it's the top of the list. The biggest thing, the smallest thing. Take one thing at a time and try it. And if it doesn't work, try something else on your list. That's how I work through anything. I'm a list builder. I keep very meticulous, copious notes on things and I check the boxes. I get through something, I check it, and then how do I feel about that thing, did it work? Did it not work? Is it advancing? Is it not advancing? And for me it's kind of the power of numbers. I have a better chance at landing the right job for me if I have gone through my multi step process that I have of evaluating the companies. Is it the right company for me? Does the role tap into my greatest strengths? Does the compensation align with the amount of effort I'm going to need to put into this role? Does that align with my retirement goals and my investment goals? And more importantly, does it align with my personal goals? Now my investment and my retirement goals are part of my personal goals and I do have to achieve those to some level so that I have security in my life and I can do all the fun things that I want to do like travel and take my kids on trips and my grand future grandchildren on trips. And it also helps me ensure that I have the stability so that I can offer the support to these future foster children over the years. And I don't want to be reliant on or worried about what the state is maybe going to reimburse me at some point. I don't want to worry about that. So there are things, there's a financial goal that I have for a new role and I need to hit. There's a range of tiers that I have in there and I know what I can do at the different tiers and I know what I can't that's below the bottom rung. I can't accept that because it doesn't allow me to fulfill the goals in my personal life like the fostering. So I can't go work for a company, for example, that wants me to go into an office 7 to 6 and work weekends and work nights and beyond 24, 7. I just, I'm not going to do that anymore. I need a role where I can provide all of the value and in return I get a flexible schedule. Because if I need to take a child to a counseling appointment or if I have to take a child an hour, two hours away so that they can have visitation with their parent, I need to be able to do that. If I have an emergency situation, I need my future employer to understand that I will always get done what I need to get done at work. But I work so that I can live. I no longer live to work, but I've had to train myself over the last number of years to learn healthy boundaries and to just try things one at a time to get to where I am today.

Yeah, and I wanted one More question. I asked this earlier, but I asked it in more of a generalized way. I wanted to be more direct about it. How do you act from such an empowered state? There's no stories. Well, at least from what I'm hearing you talking, there's no stories playing through. You're able to really come from this empowered place when you're attacking things.

I think part of it is that I started to recognize the things in my life that I do very well, and I gave myself permission to accept that I do those things very well and that there are other things in my life that are just not my dad. They don't. Are not exciting to me. I'll build a sales team. I'll build everything that goes around that sales organization, processes, procedures. I'll coach, I'll hire, I'll train, I'll work on the growth strategies for the company. I'm really good at those things. And it took me a long time to feel confident enough to say that, because as women, we're not supposed to be that good at things. We're not supposed to scream from the rooftops that we're good at our job. That's what men are supposed to do, right? We're just supposed to follow in line. And I stopped worrying as much about what people thought about me. And I also realized that if I didn't stand up for myself, I was not going to get the pay that my male counterparts got. I wasn't going to be asked to consider positions that my male counterparts would have typically taken. And I was just going to continue to feel like I was beating my head against a wall in my professional and my personal life. So once I started to give myself the power to say, no, that's not acceptable, and the power to remind myself. And it is a power because it's very empowering. I should say, when you can sit down and you can say, I'm really good at that, and stop worrying about all the noise out there where they say, well, what about this? What about this? And you're not so great about this. Yeah, but I'm not worried about those things right now. I'm worried about this thing that I'm very good at right now. And that's what's important to me today. I have a ton of stuff around my house I need to finish up in this remodel, a ton of it. And I start to get kind of get down on myself about it. I'm like, how I didn't go and finish the trim work in the bathroom and, oh, I didn't touch up the paint where I put the new lighting fixtures in. I'll stop myself and I'll say I have put all the new lighting fixtures in this house and they are lovely. So I'm not going to worry so much about the touch up paint around the lighting fixtures right now. I'm going to just bask in the fact that all of the lighting fixtures have been done. No, I'm not going to worry about filling the holes on that trim because guess what? That trim had never been put up by the previous owners of this house. And I've built out that entire custom closet and I've put all the trim up and it looks beautiful. So that's what I'm going to worry about today are the things that I was able to accomplish and get done and stop beating myself up because I didn't do the two or three other little things. But at the end of the day don't matter.

Do you have any place where people can follow along with you and keep in touch with.

Yeah, they can see me on LinkedIn or social media. LinkedIn is probably the best. And so I'm at LinkedIn.com forward/in forward/stephaniereck.

Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story. I really, I'm touched by just everything that you shared and I'm looking forward to listening back and finding all the commonalities of everything that you've been doing in your life.

Yeah, well thank you for having me on. It was was fun. I hope people weren't too triggered by it.

I, I feel like I want to run a marathon right now. I feel I'll be inspired by it, but that's just from my perception. But I just feel so encouraged and it just gives so much hope, I think to people that are walking through something hard on. When you have the right mindset and attitude about it, you're able to end the right support system to be able to move through. And thanks for being a part of the community and hope to see you in the next challenge.

Thanks for listening to the do the Thing podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show, but even more, we hope you'll be inspired to do the Thing. Do you have a burning question on Doing the Thing that you'd like answered? How about an inspiring do the Thing story of your own that you'd like to share? We'd love to hear all about it. Just leave us a voice message at do the Thing callcast co or email us at hello atdothethingpodcast.com.