It hurts our brain, it literally hurts our brain. The more that we have negative thoughts, the more negative we will become. If you have been thinking, we're saying, "I want to do a podcast." But then, immediately, you think, "I'm not techy. I hate my voice. Who would listen? What would I say?" If you are a woman, over 40, you have to listen. And with my course, the Podpreneur Blueprint, you can get a podcast up and running within a week if you'd like. If you're not techy, don't worry, I give you options on how to find someone that can help you. We are not islands. We don't do this alone. If not now, win. As on New Years, when you make that new resolution, this year I'm going to think about this. You could be saying, "This year I did and I have 52 episodes." You can do this. Learn all about podcasting. With the Podpreneur Blueprint System, go to www.coachlory.com and get your Flash Sale Today, somebody's praying for an answer and you have it. Will you say yes? Go to www.coachlory.com. That's L-A-U-R-I-E. Has your life, your dreams been interrupted? Good news. It is possible to reinvent our lives. People are doing it every day and some are brave enough to share the struggles, disappointments and challenges. If you are looking for a new beginning, a do-over or to rediscover your passion, maybe even find a new one, then grab a cup of coffee and let's talk. Interrupted, Act 2, Reinventing Your Legacy with your host, Coach Lori. Welcome, Suzette, my friend, colleague and coach. Hi, thank you for having me. It's so fun to have you here. We were partners in crime on a radio show for a while. Yes, we were. Happy with the coaches. Those pictures that we took near the space needle pop up every now and then. Tell us what you're doing now and we'll get into how you pivoted because you're just launching a brand new course. I am so passionate about the course that I am launching right now. It's really an outgrowth of everything that I have done up to this point. One of the reasons that I am so passionate about it is because from the time I was very young, I wanted to make the best out of everything. That was just my personality. To now be able to help others make the best of whatever they have been given. Looking around and seeing how people are suffering with fear and anxiety and such horrendous ways, I mean really staggering, paralyzing ways. It makes my work just seem even more fulfilling and what I really love is working with young adults. I have always loved that since I got certified in coaching. That's what I've always loved to do. Working one-on-one was really great for a long time. I loved it and I still do like it, but I really wanted to have the opportunity to influence more people. This is a way that I can do that, share coaching strategies and help them learn how to manage their own emotions and manage their own minds. Tell me a little more about making the best because that's really cool, but you go a little deeper. You're making the best of people who've had trauma. With the strategies that I teach, I have my brain health coaching certification. It's a brain health professional certification. I prefer to call it a brain health coaching certification because I coach and don't teach and I'm not going to talk to you about all the different parts of your brain and how they work together. Maybe a little bit here and there, but mostly I want people to understand the connections that they have with their own bodies, with their own brains and how when they make them work together, when they get in coherence and when they can change the synapses that are causing all of their distress, then they can change their life. So yes, I do go deeper than just not surfacing at all, it goes deeper, it helps them to be able to understand even their heart and how changing their heart rhythms can change their life. It's not their heart rate, it's the heart rhythms that they can change and we can watch it on a biofeedback monitor. It's pretty fascinating. It does go deeper. And tell us a little bit about the course. Specifically, it's six weeks long, it is made up of five lessons a week, they're short video lessons. Within that, it's all on a course portal where people can come and look at the videos, hopefully they'll just look at them one a day, so five per week. So it comes with worksheets and on those worksheets, there's a summary. So the summary, key points, some reflection things and also action steps because if you don't change something, you're not going to change. We always have action steps and with action steps, that's expected to happen throughout the course. So we are taking what we've learned, putting it into action and repeating it over and over again. So these things can become habits. That's what the course is all about. I also have interviews that make my points that just kind of solidify the point of the week like I have you interviewed. And I've got a guy who is a hostage negotiator. Yeah, I know, right? That's pretty cool. He's a hostage and crisis negotiator. He's worked with lots of people. He coaches not only the police force, but also anybody who is there and working with the hostage. He coaches them. And then sometimes he will even intervene and talk to the hostage themselves and help them kind of get off the ledge. He is a wealth of knowledge and absolutely knows how to help people manage their own emotions so that they can stay in control of their own selves in order to help navigate the conversations with these hostages. He's also a crisis negotiator. So he's talked many people off the edge of a bridge or off the ledge of a building where they're about to take their own lives, you know, they're called in. And sometimes it takes hours and hours and hours. And with that, you know, the people who are trying their best to work with these people who are in crisis, they themselves are having difficulty emotionally. So he helps them. This is a little bit about the interviews and why I have chosen certain people. I've chosen him because of that. I chose you because you have a story to share. Many people can relate to the trauma piece of that. So when you think about who the perfect person to take this course is. Okay. Well, really anyone can benefit from the course, any man, but I would say that by target audience, which I've worked really hard and that define is young adults. So anyone who is between the ages of 18 and 28 is the target audience. I expect that it will go beyond that and maybe a little below that, people who actually enroll in the course. If you want to take it and you're my age, then go ahead. You might want to do it a little differently than some of the other people in the course. You might not feel comfortable sharing. You want to keep your picture off when we zoom. I forgot to say that part. We have live zoom. So actually in the course, there's live interaction with not only me on the zooms, but each other in groups and discord and discord is something that the young people use a lot. It's kind of like a slack program where they're interacting. There's different channels that they can interact with each other. So I'll be on there a little bit, but it will mostly be community on that. Suzanne, here's the thing that I love about your course is it really is a life skills kind of course. For me, I did not really understand that I had trauma in my life because I just thought what I grew up with was normal. And so then when I became an adult and I was trying to interact, there were things that signs or red flags. And that's when I finally got into some counseling. Often when our life isn't quite working, we may not realize that we have childhood trauma. But of course, like this can help reveal and then using our brain and our what we know can help us overcome that. Right. That is very true. Some people will realize that they had trauma, but they don't realize the impact of the trauma. That was me myself. But you know, some people do have the ones that are actually buried because they were so traumatic that they're stuffed. And you talk about that in your interview, how they were stuffed for a long time and not even in your conscious memory, but sometimes those come up. But more common is the fact that we experienced trauma that we maybe even didn't recognize this trauma or we knew that we had the trauma, but we thought we moved past it. These things all impact how we do life. That's definitely something that we cover. We talk about how to manage anxiety, so in developing healthy coping mechanisms and strategies to quiet down the mind and how to achieve emotional stability. So mastering self-regulation and getting calm and clear thinking. We learn how to boost confidence so that we can feel good about our own story and about how we show up in life and be resilient. Because whether we like it or not, we're going to experience more adversity in life. And we have to be able to get through, move through those things. And if they're really big obstacles, how do we get over them? How do we move beyond them so that we can actually thrive even in the face of that adversity? I heard someone say today they were talking about these people that have written these books that we admire and love that they didn't get there in an easy way. They went through trauma. They went through crisis. And then that's how they learned and that's how they're bringing us along is like, this is how I went through my crisis, my problems, my whatever your interruption was. If I'm a few steps ahead of you, I can help you. It's not that life is great and we just go, "Oh, life's wonderful. No problems." Yeah, there's problems. So let's walk through them in the most gracious way possible. Yes. With my training through HeartMath, HeartMath is a great organization to look them up. I learned how the heart actually is not just a blood pumping organ. It is very much an emotional house for our emotions and that it radiates the magnetic field from our heart. It radiates far beyond what our brain does. It is a huge thing. So learning how our body works together is just really, really important. But when we can actually learn the technique and it's through certain breathing techniques and some coaching strategies that you can actually calm those heart rhythms. You can clear your mind so that you can then think clearly and make good decisions. And then the brain health part is from Dr. Amans, I got that certification through Amans University and we strengthen the mental fitness and the resilience with strategies that optimize cognitive function. I know a lot of people feel like they just walk around in a brain fog all the time and they may. They may be walking around. It's not just I feel like I'm walking around in a brain fog. I was walking around in a brain fog. I'll tell you a little bit more about that in just a minute. Then figuring out how we get coherence. So we sync all of our heart rhythms to our brain's full potential and get our body in sync. And then we can flourish. It's really a big deal. Like what trauma does to us and how we can actually move through it. So something you and I have talked about many times is that PTSD doesn't have to be what controls us. We can actually move into PTGS, post-traumatic growth syndrome or PTSD, I think is actually what it's called. PTSD or sometimes like they shorten it to just PTG. It's that growth that happens after we've experienced trauma and that's what I think I admire so much about you, Lori, is that yes, you went through horrible adversity, but you've just made your life something that you love. And that's what I love to help people do is help them make the best of their life. As I said at the very beginning, make things that are just average so, so I mean, that's probably why I like gardening and remodeling too. It's kind of my whole personality. I like to make things come alive and be better than they were. And so if I can help a person do that, that is really what brings joy to my life. And I love that because often we think of PTSD as a kind of a cemented, "Oh, you have this, you're damaged." And it really, it's a place where we can grow and we don't have to be stuck there. But I don't think in the mainstream, there is that kind of information. So I love that you brought that up, that it doesn't have to dictate our life. It absolutely doesn't have to dictate our lives. I told you that I had been a child that made lemonade out of anything, not just lemons. That was my dad. My dad always said to me, "He always had these little things. There's four kids." And he always said things about us, like when we were little. And he kept saying them our entire lives. And one of the things that he would say about me is that I could make lemonade out of anything. And then he would go on to say, "Yep, all you do is you'd say, 'Oh no, oh well.'" And so that's who I was. But then I suffered. And I had brain fog and that caused me anxiety. And that was a journey through Lyme disease, really, is what it started as. But since then, there were so many things that I've learned. I learned about how our physical body can impact us and cause so many issues mentally, physically, and emotionally. Getting a handle on that. I've always been someone who really cared about doing things naturally. And that's one of the reasons that I love Dr. Ayman's work is that he's not just a psychiatrist who puts you on meds immediately. He wants to help you live life in a way that honors your body and helps you to learn different strategies for how to think, how to behave, how to eat, how to honor your body. That's something that I learned when I was young, but through this process of healing from Lyme disease, I had to learn it in a bigger, much, much more in depth way. So I learned about neurotoxins and how neurotoxins can just ravage your brain. They had ravaged my brain. My neurotoxins were mainly from the Lyme, but it caused so many other problems. But neurotoxins aren't just from diseases, they're also from all of our lifestyle choices. And we do have a segment that's all about lifestyle choices. So for me, getting that detox happening in my brain, not a regular detox. I know people talk about all these crazy, bad things that they do, but really mine was for detoxing my brain. And it was very necessary because not only was I diagnosed with Lyme disease, that was years ago, but I just continue to not be quite right. And Lyme does cause you to be susceptible to many other things. I have heavy metals in my body and also mold. So when I had my brain scan, it was part of getting that certification. They told me, they said, "It looks like you have mold in your brain." And that could be causing some of what's going on in your life and having that severe brain fog and anxiety and all the things that happened with that. You said, "Here, you need to go and have some other tests." So I did. I had the other tests and sure enough, they all came up positive. Using that out of my body, I mean, I'm a different person today. I can think clearly and enjoy life. And my body is so much better because I really, I know they say that you can't be healed of Lyme, but if permanent remission isn't healing, I don't know what is. I feel like I'm in permanent remission. I've been in remission for a long time and only on the uphill. So I'm so thankful. And yeah, that's a very, very much of a blessing that I thank God for. Yeah. And I see the difference because back in the day, you couldn't have just hopped on an interview without being totally prepared. And I love that you're like, "You know, I don't know if I'm ready, but I'm willing." Oh, yeah. I have too many other things going on in my life now. I totally respect Dr. Amen's work because I was done with ADHD. And so I followed him, read his books early on. And now he's done a book with Dr. Jim Fay. It makes so much sense in the early days that we didn't know so much about red dyes and about food. And so I got my son off of dairy and sugar and all those red dyes. And it helped. It helped a lot. And being in the music industry, because I'm a DJ, there was a time when Justin Bieber was so out of control and such a jerk. And he went to Dr. Amen. He absolutely did. And it turned his life around for whatever the work he did to help him. Get his brain back. I love that because it's really a very public display of how important Dr. Amen's work is and how important our brain, our love, neuroscience, and how our mind can change our brain. Don't have to be stuck with, like you say, Lyme's disease or with PTSD or any of those thoughts that we thought for me because of childhood things, I would have these thoughts about, well, nobody's going to care anyway, or they're so subtle and so far back here. But when I began to bring them to the front, it made more sense, and I was able to speak truth to myself and override all those lies. I would recommend your class to you. Yeah. Thank you. May I just kind of do a rundown of what's going to happen during the class. So there's the modules that I talked about week by week, there's six weeks and 30 lessons of the video lessons, and I just want to tell you what's included in those lessons, not just like from a physical sample, but what they'll be learning in each one of those lessons. So module number one, title of it is From Pain to Resilience. And this is where we're going to learn like what the root causes of our anxiety are, learn how to relax our minds, how to realize that we have had joy in life at some point in time. Figure out what it is really that brings us joy, because a lot of time when we're stuck in pain, we think that nothing can bring us joy, and nothing is bringing us joy right then. But if we can think back to a little reflection, think about the good things in life, because we need dopamine hits, we're human and we need certain things in our brain to happen in order for us to really thrive. And so we go down that path of trying to figure out what it is that really can light us up and help us. And we don't really go back to that part of lighting the part where, you know, our life and lighting us up and putting us on the path to a new career or different relationships or whatever until the end. But we start with that, and then we learn a lot of stuff in between. So the next one, module two is about calming your heart to calm your mind. So mastering the techniques to regulate your emotions and cultivate really that inner piece that is gone. It's just completely gone. But we can do what we need to do to create the environment that we can actually experience the inner piece. Module number two, it's the heart mass stuff. And then in number three, we're going to start talking about mastering your mental health. So mastering your fitness. You want a fit brain, lots of little emojis in my videos, you know, one's a little brain and he's raising a barbell and things like that just to make it more fun. But we'll identify and reframe the thought patterns and build that positive mindset. That's what you were alluding to and maybe think, Oh, I should chair that. Yes, I'm going to be talking about how automatic negative thoughts, things that we have because of our past and everyone has a history. Everyone has triggers. It doesn't matter who the person is. There are things that will trigger our emotions, but they don't, those emotions don't have to rule us. When we can figure out what I was talking about in module two, calming the heart, that's a big step. But we also have to figure out how to change our thought strategies. So the automatic negative thoughts, Dr. Eamonn Paultham ants are super important to figure out which ones are most common for you. Which ones do you have to fight the most? And then I give you a strategy for fighting all of them and examples, and then I ask you to actually put it into practice daily so that it does become a habit. Because after a while, Lori, you're not out there always having to go, Oh, yes, I'm just like, I have to fight this. I have to fight this. I mean, some days, especially, I know for me, if I am actually sick, if I have the flu or something, that's when my mind gets negative. But I'm not out there fighting those negative thoughts all the time. And granted, I might be a more positive person than some people, just on God given general level. But even people who have had to work hard, they, after a while, they change the neural pathways. And when we change the neural pathways, you reach a tipping point. And it's not so hard anymore. I have little doodly videos. If you follow me on Instagram, you'll see some of those little doodly videos like about neuroplasticity. It's coaching for Holy Living. It's C-O-A-C-H-I-N-G, coaching for the written out F-O-R Holy W-H-O-L-L-Y and living. L-I-V-I-N-G, coaching for Holy Living. Number three and four are all about impact of negative thoughts and how it hurts us. It hurts our brain. It literally hurts our brain. The more that we have negative thoughts, the more negative we will become because the more that we cement those synaptic connections, they're just the ones that are going to happen easiest. It's going to take work. It's like a truck that is in a field of mud and just keeps going over that field, you know, trying to get through it, but he's stuck. He just can't move very far until he changes something and when you change directions, you can pull yourself out. That's what the strategy does. And then in modified, we talk a lot about lifestyle because you have to change more than just one thing, your emotions, your mental health, and maybe some things in your lifestyle. And so we go over lots of different things about lifestyle that can cause us to have a more difficult time with our mental health and then how we can slowly change those because it's not easy. And I'm not expecting people that absolutely do what I did where I just detox my entire life really quickly. A slow, steady change is what really will help you. And then in module six, it's basically coaching. It's like, what do you want out of life and how are we going to get to there? How are you going to go there? Well, I love this program, but before we go, I have a couple more questions. Number one, and I don't know if it was really an interruption, but you were a stay-home mom, you were a pastor's wife. You had all the things you wanted and all of a sudden your kids got to an age and they're going to graduate and you were like, now what? So can you talk about that? Yes, absolutely. So I did. I needed something different and a lot of people had told me that I should go and get my psychology degree or go into the medical field and I really didn't want to do that. I don't enjoy listening to people go on and on and on and stay stuck in their stories. So I wanted to be able to have tools that would help them. That's when I called you and it was quite an interruption in my life, a growth interruption. I think I've had several. I think the Lyme disease was probably a big interruption in my life because I got so sick that I mean literally I couldn't keep anything down, like even water would come up. It's not that I was, well I don't want to get graphic here, but it was more like a baby who has terrible reflex. It was horrible for a long time and I was seeing regular doctors and nothing was changing. And so that was the huge interruption, but I feel like everybody has interruptions here and there and one of them was absolutely my kids graduating or seeing that they were going to graduate from leave my house. That was a dream come true for me to be able to stay at home with my children. Then when I knew they were going to be gone, I knew I had to have more purpose in my life. And so I found that in coaching and I became a coach and I did that for a long time and I did seminars because of the radio show that we did for a year, Coffee with the Coaches. I was then asked to work for a company and I did seminars for a couple of years. I became Gottman certified, which if you're in the realm of psychology or relationship coaching or counseling, then you know that name, John Gottman. They're local here in Washington, aren't they? They are. Yes. As the University of Washington. Yes. I did that for a while. Then sometime while I was doing those seminars, we did our radio show in like 2011, I believe. So it was several years later, maybe between 2014 and 16. I just really was not well and it just kept getting worse and nothing was happening to change it. I sought help and getting my body better helped, but my mind was already being attacked by the Lyme disease. And so I wasn't thinking clearly. I was filling out all the forms that my son would come home with, you know, for school because he still was in, I think it was maybe early high school or late middle school. It was terrible. It was embarrassing and I started missing appointments all the time. And that is so not me. It was horrible, but it's because my brain was being attacked by the Lyme disease. So that was a huge interruption for me. And the result of that interruption was really moving into the brain health thing. And that has changed my life, literally learning and changing my own life and then being able to use that in the profession that I was already in coaching. I was able to help my clients that way too and then develop this course. I love that. And you know, it just goes to show you're called coaching for Holy Living and we can work on one thing and do a little better, but it really is. We have to work on the brain, the heart, the story. It has to be the whole picture. There is hope. There is healing. There is help. Before we go so that this has been so great, what is it? You really, really want us to know. You're in charge. You are in the driver's seat of your life and you are steering it where you, I'm going to say, want it to go, but you are driving it and maybe it's not where you want to go. Maybe you want to turn that around and you can do that and that is what I want people to know is it is possible. Transformation is possible. You do have to do the work to make it happen. You've got to be consistent and do it, but it's possible and it's honestly not that hard. It's easier than living a life where you don't even like waking up in the morning and that is just no fun at all. So really enjoying optimal moods, being able to focus and concentrate well, having a strong immune system, feeling better and having more energy and supporting our bodies and our minds and our brains, having healthy, happy relationships, those things are so much easier than having a life that we dread or we hate or we don't want to live. There is hope. If they're in the depths and the pit, there's hope. Thank you so much. I love it what you said about Lyme's disease that they say there's no cure, but you're in remission. I mean, that's hope because I know for me, knowing that you had it made me really sad because what I'd always heard is once you have it, it's not a death sentence, but it's a life sentence. It destroys your life. It destroys most people's lives. Yeah. And you work so hard to overcome it not only physically, but then you say mentally because it was attacking your brain and it just goes to show how neuroplasticity and how our brain people who say, well, that's just the way I am, no, no, no, no, how do you want to be? Exactly. Exactly. Yes. And the will is far stronger than what's happening in your brain because I had that strong will. I refused to let Lyme take me down and that's what you have to have. You have to have that refusal mindset. I will not be taken down by this, whatever this is, whether it's a physical disease, a mental diagnosis, because there are a lot of people who get diagnosis ADHD is mild compared to some of the diagnosis that people get and they still end up living a wonderful, beautiful, fulfilling life. So there is hope. How can we find you at coachingforholyliving.com, I have a new website I'm very proud of and pretty soon you're going to be able to find me at SuzetteParker.com. But for right now, you've got to have that whole long word. It's coaching, C-O-A-C-H-I-N-G-F-O-R-W-H-O-L-L-Y Living, L-I-V-I-N-G, coachingforholyliving.com. And if you want to see the course, it's called Unafraid. On the website, there's a tab called Courses, so just click on that and you'll learn everything you need to know. Don't be afraid to explore, you can click on the other tabs and learn even more than what's on the website. You don't have to sign up if you do. You can just go ahead and move forward and find out all about it. And right now, it's 60% off. Oh, that's a good deal. That's a very good deal. Yes. Suzette, thank you so much. You are so welcome. Thank you for inviting me. It was wonderful to be here. If you love this podcast, here's a big ask. Will you share with your friends and family, subscribe, give us a review, and a five-star rating, so that others looking to reinvent their lives will be able to get the help they're looking for. Thank you in advance. 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