Leadership & Organizational Transformation: Advocating for Health within Systems You Don't Understand, Interview with Julie Arnheim

Interview with Julie Arnheim, sharing advice and insights on gratitude, resilience, brain cancer, social security disability, leadership and more.

TRANSCRIPT: 
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Hi, it’s Janice Dru-Bennett and today is Sunday, April 25th, 2021. I’m really excited today to have Julie Arnheim join me. Julie, do you want to say “hi”?

Hi. Hi.

I actually met Julie yesterday through a Lunchclub Instant Connect. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Lunchclub, I’m going to share about Lunchclub first. Julie will share about her background, and then we’ll wrap up with some ideas and advice and thoughts from Julie.
 
The Lunchclub platform that I’m sharing right now is, here's my invite code [https://lunchclub.com/?invite_code=janice1]. Once you go in you will see people that you can connect with through Lunchclub. These are activities of the people that I’m connected with on Lunchclub and who they're meeting with you can schedule matches based on your schedule to meet with people one-on-one or like Julie and I had met yesterday on Instant Connect. There are now 15-minute segments, and you can jump in and meet people for 15 minutes, versus having these 45-minute, matched meetings that happen. I’ve been meeting for 19 weeks in a row. This is Julie's profile [https://lunchclub.com/member/04af742c0048]. I don’t know how we got matched, but, some similarities, I’m originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Julia and I are both interested in diversity and inclusion and entrepreneurship e-commerce wellness. There’s a number of interests that were matched on. I can read about how Julie has written a book and is also working on a mindfulness and learning about her brain cancer.

I definitely want to talk with Julie a little bit more about that, and this is Julie's LinkedIn profile as well [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jarnheim] that’s connected with Lunchclub, so we can talk about her story and her background and where she is now. I’m going to stop sharing and let's jump right into our conversation. Julie, why don’t we start by you telling me more about your story and where you’re from and where you are now.

Sure. Thank you, Janice. Again, it was such a pleasure meeting you. The beauty of Lunchclub is getting to know people even briefly, who you never would have met. Otherwise, even though we have Pittsburgh as this minor thread, not that Pittsburgh's minor, but this small thread that would potentially connect us. You haven’t been here for most of your life. When you were here, I was in New York, likely we didn’t get quite into years that you were here. I love Lunchclub because of the randomness and yet joy that it brings to my life.
 
Yeah, I was in Pittsburgh from 1982 until probably 1991ish. I was also in New York, from working in New York, in New Jersey from 2005, 2006, until 2014 before moving to Rhode Island or 2015, and then in 2016, moved to Rhode Island.

Okay, we overlapped in both spots, but not enough to bring us together in person.

Yes. So I agree. Lunchclub is a great place to meet people. You would normally never have met before.

So about me. I always, which part of me should I share? So just to not freak out, anybody who doesn’t catch on quickly, this is not a headband. I am actually not sitting in a lovely park. You can tell by my arm fading that it is a zoom background because I’m physically in a hospital right now in an epilepsy monitoring unit, to be able to figure out what electrically is going on in my brain, since my brain surgery last February for six years prior to my surgery, I had been complaining that there were executive functioning problems that I was having. I couldn’t focus on business. I couldn’t read a book. I couldn’t remember to call people or do things on my to-do list, let alone on my calendar. I’m not an out of sight out of mind type of person. It was very distressing to me and the doctors couldn’t figure out what it was until one day last February, I woke up and I said, Oh, I don’t feel so good.

My vision was black on the side. It was gray right in front of me. And my body was kind of jittery. I say when your teeth chatter and you can’t stop it from moving, but it’s happening. My arms and legs were shaking, but I could walk and talk. I was aware of where I was and that something was wrong, but it wasn’t 9-1-1 wrong. And then it stopped in under two minutes. So I got in the shower and started to get ready for the rest of my day, because it was a very important day for me. I was to be the invocation speaker for the Pittsburgh Rotary Business Ethics Awards Luncheon. It was 2- to 300 top business leaders in the city. And I was the invocation speaker. I needed to show up for it. It was not just an invocation to me. It was an honor because my father and my uncle were involved with rotary and when I moved home from New York, my uncle brought me into rotary.
 
In 2019 at this Ethics Awards Luncheon, I was asked to be the invocation speaker and I did such a great job,  they asked me back. I had to show up, my name was in the program and it had been announced a year ago. So I call my doctors and said, what I just shared with you about shaking and not feeling right. And they said, go to the emergency room. So against medical advice, I still went and did my speech. On the way home from the emergency room, I stopped on the way home from the speech. I stopped at the emergency room. That’s when I found out I had a brain tumor. Eight days later, I had brain surgery to remove the tumor. Three weeks later, the world shut down to a pandemic. I feel like the luckiest lady, because I had my friends and family around me in the hospital, had the emergency room, not taking the initiative to make sure that they helped set up all of the consults that they moved me, transferred me to a sister hospital where the best neurosurgeon was.

He was able to see me that next day, who knows I could have had surgery the end of March and not have my family around. So I’m very grateful. Gratitude actually is one of the things I didn’t quite talk to you about yesterday, but it’s one of my secret special things.

I love. I love that. I think you have exuded your optimism, even through the times of stress and looking at the positive and being able to be with family, which I completely understand. We had family who actually passed away from COVID after the pandemic. So definitely understand that this has been a really stressful time and being able to be grateful can help us stay grounded, I think.
 
Yes, absolutely. Staying grounded, whether you’re going through something as traumatic as brain cancer, or even unsure job loss or, am I going to have to go back into an office? I’ve kind of enjoyed this home thing. There are all types of ways we need to find how to be grounded and how to be grateful. Years ago, I took a workshop called Awakening Joy by James Baraz and he actually has this on, and he has a book called Awakening Joy [https://amzn.to/3gDZHK4], and he does a several weeks, several months program online called Awakening Joy kicks off every February. I’ll put it up on my Linktree [https://linktr.ee/arnheim] so that people who see this can also connect to it. Great. Thank you. So that started a lot more of my gratitude work. What I didn’t share with you is that I have a Facebook group.

I’m not, I don’t run it very much called Develop Gratitude. If you searched faith in Facebook for Develop Gratitude [https://www.facebook.com/groups/developgratitude], you would find it’s mine because it’s a black and white picture of the Louvre in Paris. I also created a Business Page for Develop Gratitude. It’s on my 2021 list of how to build up some of my writing and leading and coaching work. It’s hard for me to give a lot externally when I’m trying to work a lot internally, yet as an extrovert, it’s really important for me to give externally.
 
So I just found your Facebook page. I’ll share it real quick so people can see what it looks like.
 
This is the Develop Gratitude, private group, safe space for gratitude work. I love that doing it. It’s not, I think we've got 200 people in there, but it’s not a very active group, partly because it’s hard for me to lead consistently right now, but I’m working on it.

Having people jumping in and being active makes everybody feel a little more active and lets people see that other people struggle with gratitude at times and in a world that’s full of the stress that we've been living under. It’s understandable whether it was just this pandemic stress, but it’s definitely a time now that we need to work on more gratitude work. Did you start.

This group before or after your brain cancer?

Several years before there was an action.

You were diagnosed, but you had the brain cancer that you just weren't aware of it, right?

Correct. It was a spinoff a little bit. There was somebody who had done a 30-day gratitude project and I liked what she was doing and I had also been doing some gratitude work on my own at that point. So I, with her permission kind of set that up because I was inviting a couple of people that were at the online webinar that she was doing. If they wanted to jump in and continue with me versus stepping up the way she was, I was very respectful of where she was as a coach. But I also knew that I wanted to try to bring in some of my circle and my network to let them share what I had gleaned from her. And she is in my group. I was, I’m a hundred percent transparent in something like that. And proud of it. It’s my ethics, which is why I was asked to be the invocation speaker at an ethics awards.

Tell me more about that. I want to hear more about your background in ethics and leadership and transformation and leading into the gratitude and the health work.

Sure… It’s so meandering and sometimes I’m not sure where to jump on the court to enter the story into. Oh gosh, phone charger… technology. Okay, that should work, sorry!
 
At least we haven’t lost sound and complete video. And had “you’re muted!”

My leadership degree. So In 2006, after making a big jump from working in the spa and hospitality world at a hotel to working in the restaurant world as a coordinator for a new Italian wine restaurant, opening up in Manhattan and losing my job the week, two weeks after the restaurant opened, because they just weren't doing as well as they thought. If I kept my job another two days, they would have had to pay benefits. I thought, okay, what am I going to do at this point in my life. Grad school sounds like a really good idea!

That was right when the market's crashed too. Right. So everything was…

It was 2006. So it was heading up to it. Yeah, I graduated undergrad in 93 and I graduated grad school in 2009. I have a way of graduating college into recessions. Perhaps that’s part of my gratitude work is learning that you got to look for what’s good and what’s going on at the moment. Really good. One, glad this is recorded. Thank you, Janice.

That’s one of the things where I think we have so many conversations and there's so much knowledge we have to share and being able to record and capture this information that we can share more broadly is this part of my mission with, ledge and helping the world become a better place.

I think it’s great. I’m so glad that our lives intertwined and that it doesn’t stop here. I know it in my soul that there's going to be so much more in how our lives intertwine, what that is. I don’t know, but I know that it will be absolutely. I went home for my cousin's wedding and I was looking at grad programs and I noticed my Alma mater had a leadership and organizational transfer transformation with a focus on wellness program. I thought, well, I’ve seen a lot of companies do some really neat things when they were going through transitions. I’ve seen some companies not do some, not so well executed things from a lower point of view, but I wanted to understand the macro level view versus the micro level view. I thought that degree would be fantastic. It really seemed to resonate with everything that was about me.

How do we make the spaces around us, the teams around us, the family systems around us, whatever system around us be stronger. How do we leave the world a better place? Legacy is really important to me, especially since I do not have children. The only way that I feel I can leave part of my Mark is by sharing it with others to create legacy. That leads to part of my ethics. You can’t leave legacy in a positive way with negative ethics. The interesting wellness has to do with not just my present battle with brain cancer. As a child, I struggled with mental illness and that’s been something that I’ve battled for 38 years of my 50. I’m passionate about all types of ways that we can help each other. That’s one of the reasons gratitude work is so important because gratitude work can be something that helps us when we’re in our darkest moments.

If we can just gleam onto one thing to say, I am grateful for my new friend, Janice. I am grateful for getting a good night's sleep last night. I’m grateful I have a doctor that can prescribe glasses so that I can see more. I’m grateful for the fact that the iPhone had that very smart thing saying battery 20% was reachable to me to plug it in. You can find gratitude and very simple little things. Another thing with gratitude that I love talking about, if you’ve never done this before, grab some kind of jar. Oh wow. You can’t see the jar. Okay. We’ll use this as an example. Nope. Can’t see that one either. I’ve got, I’ve got a coffee mug here. Awesome. Take a piece of paper and right. I am grateful for and fill that coffee mug every day with something that you’re grateful for, or several things, almost like little fortune cookie sized pieces of paper at the end of the week, sit down and read through all of your gratitudes of the week.

It’s a great thing to do with a partner or a family as well.

I love that. Definitely creating a family jar of gratitude and going over. It would be a definitely be a different activity that than we’re used to stuck in front of our screens versus reading from little papers. I just wanted to mention, I’ve been reading a book called Untamed by Glennon Doyle [https://amzn.to/2QTx4xO]. Have you read that one yet? I haven’t. She talks about writing to herself when she has her happy self versus her sad self … and going back and reading to remind herself of the different places you’re in, when you’re kind of going through ups and downs or whatever, challenges you’re facing and being able to talk to yourself at different points. I think the gratitude can also help you in times of sadness to remind yourself of everything that you are grateful for.

Absolutely. That’s so interesting because just what you said, one of the things I brought to do at the hospital, I picked up a couple of my old little journals and brought them to read into text in Google Docs. You can actually do talk to text under tools so you can sit and just talk your story, talk your book, talk your thoughts, whatever you don’t have to do the old fashioned handwriting, but I’ve got a lot of journals. I thought, why not bring them and sit and talk them into something and get them off my shelves. In August of 2009, I wrote after attending the Warhol Museum here in Pittsburgh, on the wall, in the Warhol Museum, it says he challenged traditional boundaries between art and life art and business and different media in the process. He turned everyday life into art and art into a way to live the everyday, collecting, commenting, reproducing, experimenting, collaborating with people, places, and things around him.

What I wrote underneath it is: how could we turn health into the way he looked at art? And I read this last night and I have this morning with you.

Interesting. It’s sometimes you write something that we don’t remember it, and it comes back at the right moment for us to process it differently.

Yes, I am so amazed. How can we turn health into the way he looked at art? So he challenged traditional boundaries between art and life. We’re talking about health and life art and business or health and business in the process. He turned everyday life into art and art into the way to live every day. What I’m challenging is can we turn everyday life into health and health into a way to live every day.

That we’re talking about leadership and transformation into health and what that means? So it’s really that lens. Yeah.

Wow. Because health is not just what a health coach says. It’s not just what a doctor says. Sometimes health is intuitive. When we listen inside ourselves, our bodies are brilliant machines and they tell us what they need. Sometimes when you have a craving, I know this one sounds kind of random and sometimes I’ll crave watercress and it wasn’t until I learned the nutritional value of watercress. Did that become a brilliant thing that I was listening to my body going? It’s not just that. I like that kind of funny mustardy bittery thing that my grandmother used to always put in her salads. My body is saying is likely saying, Hey, some of those minerals that are in watercress, I need right now. So I challenge people who are watching. If you are craving something, go look up. What is in the ingredients or what are the natural vitamins and minerals and what you are craving.

If you’re craving a soda, do it as well. Look at what is in there and question, why is this what you’re craving? Because the only way to strengthen have good habits or break bad habits is becoming aware of what’s driving them.

Yeah, absolutely. Like if you were, if you can figure out what’s motivating you to do something or not do something, then, being able to adjust those motivators can change your behavior.

Yeah. Even with what they found out today, for me in this or this week during this hospital stay, is that I don’t have epilepsy. They do feel that I have is something called functional neurological disorder, which is a cluster of different things. I said to the neurologist, so how do we deal with this? And she said, well, through CBT, which is cognitive behavioral therapy. Guys, I kind of already been doing that for a long time. I’ve, and I not only have I done cognitive behavioral therapy, but I have also studied it in graduate school. I’m not a cognitive behavioral therapist, but intellectually I know what it is. I’ve also done mindfulness-based stress reduction, which leads me to another funny story on for those who do know it you'll laugh. When I sa, I know how to eat a raisin. If you don’t know about mindfulness, Google, how to eat a raisin, there's actually a way to learn mindfulness techniques around eating a raisin around the feeling, the textures, the taste, how it softens in your mouth.

I did a meditation with a dried apricot, wondering if that’s similar… Absolutely. They just took the raisin and make it a little bigger, a little more tasteful. I was struggling, so the surgery was February of 2020, about July. I was still struggling with a lot of sensory overstimulation issues, which I had before the surgery, but they were amplified. One of my sorority sisters is a spinal care physician. And she deals with spinal cord injury people and deals very closely with a traumatic brain injury person. Well, this was the cancer growing is a traumatic injury to my brain. Having the surgeon break open my skull to remove the tumor is a traumatic thing to the brain. It’s not a traumatic injury, like a sports-related thing, but it’s still tragic. Both emotionally traumatic. Anyone who’s told they have cancer can have trauma having it in the primary processing unit of the entire year.

I don’t know if you haven’t heard the term brain dead without this. Everything else doesn’t work. So it is traumatic, but I’m grateful. It was found. I’m grateful that they, even though they said this tumor likely has been there for close to 10 years. And I just turned 50. They told me that I likely have 20 to 40 more years. I thought I was going to punch out between 70 and 90 anyway. As long as I get to have 20 to 40 good years that were better than the 10, between 40 and 50.

I had a colleague who I used to ask, how are you? And he would always say, this is the best day ever. And I love that.

Well, it’s interesting that you say that. I think about the background that we decided on, because I like to say, when somebody says, how are you? I said, I get to pick the roses. I’m not pushing them up. So I know that I’ve meandered. I’m going to ask you to try to reign me back in, because I forget where I was meandering from. I tend to meander as well.

We were talking about leadership and health and your journey learning. Yes. You’re reading from your journal again on infusing health into everything, into business, into life. The last 10 years you’ve had this brain tumor that you didn’t know. I would love to hear more about how, whether you could sense it. I mean, what were some signs or signals that you might not have known at the time, but now that you are aware of what you were going through, anything that you would, advise people to keep an eye out for?

Well, sadly, yes, there were many things. I’m a very big advocate for my own health. I really recommend that anybody, if you are not comfortable being an advocate for yourself, talk with somebody, look into hiring somebody. There are often social workers that are even, there's even a new whole, business of people that are patient advocate or patient caregiver advocates. If anybody has questions and wants to reach out through whatever you post about me, you can find me and I’m not working right now. I, my work is healing myself, but I would suffocate myself if I didn’t reach out, which is one of the things I love Lunchclub for. People are welcome to ask me if they need help finding an advocate, I would be honored to try to help somebody who was seeking it. If they can’t find it on their own. If you are in a hospital system, every hospital system has a paid and rights or patient advocacy office, whether you are an inpatient person or definitely if you’re an inpatient person, if you are seeing somebody in a hospital system, outpatient, there's still a patient rights that you can call and say, I’m struggling with something.

Can you help me or ask to see the social worker that’s affiliated with that doctor's office or healthcare system. And they can help you. There are lots of wonderful things out there that are ways that you can get help, that you didn’t think you could circling back to what were some of my symptoms? Because I had depression since I was 12, because I had migraines since I was 12, 16, and narcolepsy at 22, all of my symptoms from my brain tumor hung under those categories, moodiness, irritability, headaches, sleepiness, fatigue, loss of concentration, things that I consider executive functions, task management, time management, thought management, were all flying by the wayside. It was getting harder and harder for me being that I had a lifetime of living with myself. I knew something was different and I love my doctors. My doctors are fantastic physicians that said they couldn’t find something different.

It wasn’t until morning of February 12th. When I woke up and had that visual disruption and physical disruption that I truly believe my brain said, okay, I’ve given your mind enough that I can give it and to make your voice heard by everyone. Now I’m going to make you make me be seen. Cause again, it’s a brain tumor, not a mind tumor. It wasn’t until I, again, reacted to what my body was telling me. I let the doctors know, and the doctor said go to the emergency room. I said, after my speech, I’ll go to the emergency room. I did smartly say I shouldn’t drive myself. Luckily we live in a world of Uber and Lyft. In my case, I live with a mother who would drive me town. So, but the moral of the story is I was wise to listen to my body, listen to what I knew was ethical, not getting behind the wheel of a car, both for myself and my safety and for the safety of all those on the road.

Yeah, I did my speech. I went to the emergency room. They found the tumor. Last January, I had a little shakiness, again, went to the emergency room. They thought that it might have been a seizure on Friday. I guess this was a Monday. I went to the emergency room on the Friday. I got an EEG done. It showed some postictal activity. Postictal means that a seizure has occurred in the brain. I told my neural oncologist, you get a free pass. If it says that and you by your, what’s the right word, the ethics and rules of being a doctor and having to say, this person is safe driving, or this person is not safe driving. I’m not going to fight you because if I don’t feel safe driving, I’m not going to drive, but I’m not going to make you put your medical license at risk, trying to fight me for it.

That’s another story that I really want to put out there. We are lucky. We live in the world we live in, even if Uber and Lyft are not possible for you. If you’re having a medical crisis that really makes the doctors question, should this person be driving? The American Cancer Association has a transportation program, a lot of different organizations that know a lot of their constituents or people who have those illnesses have driving shoes. They have ways of helping. I know in Pittsburgh, we have something called Age Well Rides, which is something that’s mimicked in a lot of different cities. We weren't the first, they can be people that volunteer to drive people, different places for medical appointments or grocery shopping, things like that. So it’s another way of giving back. If you’re looking for something to feel gratitude about, to feel like you’re giving back as this world changes and becomes a little safer to open your car to a stranger and do a good deed, look and see if there's an Age Well Rides program in your city, because there might be ways that you could give back that you didn’t think about.

That’s another way I love to be a leader is to help people find what might feed their soul in ways to give back. That’s a pretty neat thing for me to be able to leave.

Yeah, I love how you’re sharing resources and ideas and what people can do to fill that void, perhaps that’s inside themselves. This brings to mind the book that I just finished, again, the untamed by Glennon Doyle, it was sent to me by a dance therapist, a life coach, Morgan Northway, also, have had some really great conversations with Morgan and in this book, Glenn and talks about knowing and being still, and just finding that inner voice that is, that tells you what is right and what’s not. Also she talks about illness and how our illness may not be our illness. It might be the world's illness and we’re responding to what’s happening in the world in a way that is natural. That, there's so many terrible things happening that sometimes our bodies will react in a negative way to our external environment. If there are toxins in the air that can poison you.

That’s where I feel, sometimes we avoid talking about mental illness, or other issues that people might be facing. It’s because we think it’s us versus it. There's a much bigger picture and a connected society.

Ecosystem that we’re living in that has broken parts that together. I think we can heal holistically as well. Yes. There are so many things that have happened over the last two years, certainly in America and in the world that we are trapped within each other's circles of energy. Just like when you walk into a room and you’re with people who are super up and happy, chances are, you’re going to be up and happy too. If you’re listening to the news droning on about all of the negative stuff, and you’re only on MSNBC or Fox or whatever it is. You’re only listening to that all day long in the background, that negative energy, the tone of their voices, even if you’re not listening to the words, just the tones can draw your mood down. Even if it’s not the stories, it’s just the tones. I love that you brought up dance therapy because dance therapy, music therapy, there's even something called laughter yoga.

I definitely would love to try that. I’m, I’ve heard of hot yoga. The one thing in laughter, yoga that I learned, I’m not a certified laughter yoga practitioner, but you pick up your piece of floss. Just like you’re flossing your teeth, you pick up your piece of floss and you bring one hand over here and you mental floss. Now you can’t do this without laughing with the physical piece of dental floss or your face, or you’re just thinking about floss it out. You’re getting that plaque out of your head. You’re getting the neck negativities out of your head. You can’t do this and not lie. I am sure there are lots of YouTube videos on laughter yoga. If you need a pick me up, go for it now to talk. Can I have some pretty funny videos too? Right? Which leads me to one little thing, but I just want to show, cause it makes me laugh.

I’m trying to find out to put it in front of your face. Yeah. Yeah, so this is a product by Napeazy [https://storeworld.napeazy.com]. It’s a pillow that you can carry with you and nap anywhere. It has like, this is so weird. Anyway, it comes up like a telescopic umbrella or, and you can then use it to take a nap anywhere it’s called nappies and that’s on my thanks. There's a 15% off link so that if people are looking for something, they can get it and you don’t just have to have a Panda. They've got solid brain solid black and a couple of other animals. Yeah. Why don’t I pull up in your Linktree right now? Give me one second. This was your LinkedIn again. I’ll post all these links on YouTube. When I share your lift print as well here, so you’ve got a video on a very happy brain.

I think if I scroll down, I’ll see the not busy or is this on here? I thought it was up towards the top. Grab some zzz, grab some anytime, anywhere. That’s your Napeazy. Okay. Yeah. Let's talk about the Very Happy Brain, because it really goes to a lot of this gratitude work, the person that does this and that’s not him. Yeah. This is a commercial. Yeah. I actually have the Neurogym on my website. I’ve gone through some of his innercises. So that might maybe why. Yeah. So Dr. Sood is a doctor at the Mayo Clinic and he does this wonderful five minute a conversation piece about what makes the struggles about an unhappy brain and how to get a very happy brain. I recommend watching this [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZZ0zpUQhBQ], I recommend sharing this, obviously it’s the number one thing that I share on that whole list of stuff.

It was the first our bond conference that I went to the Dr. Sood was a keynote speaker app. And he wrote the book. They may clinic's guide to happiness or a Mayo clinic. Scott free living, I think both of them. He does a lot of work on resiliency. Resiliency is bouncing back. Okay. You can bounce back from a job loss. You can bounce back from a divorce. You can bounce back from an illness. You can bounce back from a road range, there's resiliencies and all kinds of different ways. I think right now, resiliency is so critical as somebody who graduated college and grad school into recessions. I can tell you need resiliency to make it through the rough times. Yet you need different levels of resiliency each time. Oh, shoot running low on battery again, or no somebody called in and it’s somebody who’s supposed to come here in an hour.

If she calls back, I will text her what we’ll probably wrap up in a few minutes, Okay. Resiliency it’s so critical and it’s critical for us as adults to teach our children ways to be more resilient because it will make them stronger adults as a non-parent. As an awesome aunt, if there's any way that I can teach my nephew a level of resiliency, that’s it, that’s part of my journey is to help them. As a big sister with big brothers, big sisters, I’m thrilled to be able to do that for my little there who actually is now in college. So she's not been little anymore. I still think of her as being little though. I think of her as being a young woman that I got to help influence part of her life and their will for there is a forever bond. It’s also why I opt to mentor freshmen at my Alma mater.

We have a program that we help as alumni mentor. We get matched up and mentor some of the freshmen and I follow them through their years at school, but I also stay in touch with them at least through LinkedIn. Yeah.

As you’re kind of going through college and changing. Having someone who’s been there and gone through it can really help, I think.

Yeah. I am part of a Chatham university is a very small college. It’s actually bigger than it was when I went there because it’s now a university, not a women's college. I say that in both the fact that the undergrad now accepts men. When I went there weren’t grad programs. It is a university, not just a college and it’s nice. Life is not always about what, it’s about who, which is one of the things that I love about lunch club too, because you get to meet new people. I hope this has been what you envisioned Janice.

Yes. I think absolutely the who, and then as we talked about earlier, it is somewhat about the knowledge that we’re imparting as well. Being able to turn that knowledge into action. There's two other things I wanted touch upon quickly with you. One is that you had mentioned, social security disability, and I’d love to hear if you have any insights on, if you’re denied or what it would take to be able to get that social security disability. Cause I know many people perhaps need it and w what are steps and what are resources you’ve used? And the other resource you shared with me was the alternative board. We were talking about how I’m passionate about board diversity and diverse leadership. And you mentioned that resource. So, I’m, I can pull up The Alternative Board resource you mentioned. If you can also talk about social security, those are the last two knowledge pieces that I would love for you to be able to share with the world.

We can let you have your visit with your friend.

The Alternative Board, I don’t know a ton about it, but I knew that it existed that it is a way to pull it. You may have a small business, and I’m not speaking about a network marketing business. I’m talking about a true traditional small business, whether it’s manufacturing or service or sales based, and you need a board of directors, you need somebody that helps you as the top leader, get through some of the stumbling blocks that you might be facing with your business, whether it’s growth, whether it’s, yeah, whether it’s strategic growth, strategic, planning, whether it’s human resources based, whether it’s resourcing new opportunities or whatever. You wish that you had a board of directors to help guide you. Well, the TAB, The Alternative Board is a way that brings several different, small businesses, small business owners together in a way that they can be a board to each other.

I think that’s the best way of describing it. I learned about it because my ex-boyfriend has seven different small businesses, and he used TAB to help him. I thought it was a pretty interesting organization. You and I were talking yesterday, something clicked, Oh, for diversity, TAB would be a really great place to bring that up. Absolutely.

Really valuable insights that you, as you talk to more people about growing a business, or, what you’re passionate about, people may have different resources to share with you. That’s where it takes time and knowledge together and building these relationships with other people.

The other thing that I really like to say is that a lot of people are open to coaching or mentoring other people if that asks. If you see somebody, especially if you’re in a company, let's just say you were at Proctor and gamble, and you see somebody in a role that’s higher than you and you admire what they've done in their career, approach them and say, have you ever taken on somebody as a mentee? I really am interested in who you are and what you’ve done. I’d like to know if we could work together. Would you, would you mentor me a little being brave in asking for a mentorship relationship with somebody is a gift, both for you being brave and receiving something, but it’s also a gift saying to the person you’re asking, do you have time to mentor me? You’re saying, I see you.

I respect you so much that I want to learn from your journey and your knowledge base.

Yeah. I, and if you don’t ask for it, then you won't get it. So.

It’s putting yourself out there. That last point about social security, disability insurance. Yes. I knew enough that the day I was it February 12th, the day I found out the tumor, I immediately asked the emergency room department, please have a social worker. Come see me because I wanted to start figuring out what I needed to do Justin Case. Because with social security disability, you can go back one year up to one year of potential. Back-pay from date of application. The sooner you think you might need it, put that application in. Even if it’s doing some of it, struggling yourself, get the application in. You do not always need a lawyer. Certainly for first application, you don’t need a lawyer. You’re going to get 99% of people get denied. First application, get the application in. In my case, they said it was denied first round. I did, what’s called a reconsideration appeal.

It was denied again on several factors. The main reason it was denied was you said you had brain cancer and the cancer has been removed. With your education level, you should be able to find employment. It may not be at the level of your education, not so much of a pre-Madonna that I have to have a job that’s worthy of my MBA. And my master's in leadership. Clearly on some level, I’m sitting in a hospital bed and utilizing my leadership skills, which I’m grateful for you, Janice, but I’m not going to pay for it. I couldn’t do this every day for money. My you’ve seen how disconnected. My thought process has been through this conversation. I couldn’t lead business well, and I couldn’t show up. Well, there are too many reasons that my productivity level would beneath standard to the point of somebody letting me go.

And I understand that. That’s why I want the help of having social security disability, because I couldn’t run my own business. Well, right now, maybe I’ll be able to get a book written, but that’s not a life-sustaining opportunity. Yes, there are times that a lawyer is helpful. Interview lawyers and law firms. You just like dating, you gotta find the right match. I say that also with oncologists, with neurosurgeons or any medical professional, you’ve got to find the right match. I fired my first oncologist after the first 15 minutes, I knew she wasn’t the right person for me. An oncologist is your quarterback. If you don’t think you’ve got the right person, who’s going to send, who’s going to write the right plays for you. It’s okay to say, I need a second opinion. Second opinions are okay in life, even third opinions.

That goes back to trusting yourself and what you’re…?

Yes. I somehow I think you went mute.

Yep. I accidentally clicked the mute button, but yes, I was. I was saying, I hear two themes, one recurring that what is knowing yourself and making that, and then the second one is resilience and continuing to bounce back. And, and, even if you’re denied twice, you continue to appeal and you find the right quarterback to help you with that process.

Yep. That’s where, asking for social workers to help. Many social workers know how to not all social workers deal with social security disability. If you keep asking, who do who, don’t be afraid to say within your network, who do one of the person I ended up with as my social security disability, lawyer is someone who my mother found through a friend whose husband is a medical malpractice attorney. Oh, that leads me to one other thing I did say to my mom within a month of my surgery. And, and I was told, this is a tumor that will grow back. It’s just a question of when and how do we treat it between now and then? And I’m part of the reason I let go of the oncologist was because she was saying, going towards chemotherapy and radiation therapy. I’m like, but you just told me they took the whole tumor.

What is there to radiate? If the whole tumor is gone, what is there to kill? If the whole tumor is gone and why would I put chemotherapy in my body? That’s going to kill cells throughout my body when it’s just for this tumor in my brain. That tumor is gone, it didn’t make sense to me. If something doesn’t make sense to you ask for clarification, and I say this here, just the way I said to my nephew, my 11 year old nephew asked me am truly what does puberty mean? And I asked him where heard the term, cause I wasn’t sure if it was something from school or something from the doctor. He said, my pediatrician said that I was entering puberty. I said, okay, what did you ask them? What they meant? And he said, no. I said, anytime, an adult tells you something or asks you a question and you don’t understand it.

It’s okay to rephrase the question and say, I’m sorry, what you mean by puberty? Could you tell me more so that I can understand how to answer or I can understand what you mean? That’s true in any relationship in any conversation.

That is kind of the takeaway piece of advice that I think would be valuable for anyone is any time you don’t understand where you think you understand, but perhaps it’s not quite what the person, other person is intending for you to understand. It’s always good to ask for clarity, to get clarity, to repeat back and really gain that understanding. Right. Did I get that right? Julie? Absolutely.

Did I get that right? Is there anything else that you would want people to kind of go away with as we wrap up our conversation here?

One quick piece, just on extreme medical issues. Dr. Google does not know everything and as well, educated as I am. I still go to Dr. Google sometimes. Some of what I will do is I will jot down something that I see, like, let's say this functional neurological disorder that the doctor told me yesterday is my new diagnosis. I went in on the web. I looked at some things. I found an organization that supports functional neurological disorder. I wrote down a couple of questions that I had to ask the doctor about. It helped me read through and learn on something and know what to ask the doctor. No matter what type of situation you’re going in to see a doctor for, sometimes we get forgetful. When we get fearful, those F's tend to go together and fear is false evidence appearing real if it’s an acronym.

If you have something written down to ask questions, then you know that you'll be able to ask the doctor the question. That’s one of the tips to write things down, write things, ask questions, write down the answers as well, or bring somebody with you to write down the answers. If you’re going for some kind of very intense medical appointment or a follow up, sometimes it’s good to have another set of ears there and a patient advocate, whether they are friends, family, or from the hospital system.

Yes, absolutely. Well, I’m so grateful for our time, Julie, and thank you for sharing your advice and I’ll share these links with you as soon as they are up as well and hope that you enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you.