Susie with her family
Susie Rinehart is an award-winning author, champion ultra-runner, life coach, activist and mother of two young children. On June 30, 2016, she was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive tumor on her brainstem. Her doctor told her, “Without surgery, you have less than five months to live.” After multiple complicated surgeries, she has recovered but there were big risks. That was over three years ago.
Susie’s incredible journey to find her voice and a new kind of bravery after facing death allows her to share important lessons about pain and suffering, finding and holding onto joy, and the importance of slowing down to experience the sweetness of the moment.
You can listen to my full conversation with Susie Rinehart by clicking ‘play’ below, or on the following podcast platforms:
Choosing Joy Over Fear and Brave Over Perfect
The following is just a taste of Susie’s insights.
Q: You speak of two different kinds of pain. What are they?
Susie: Clean pain is loss. It is the medical diagnosis. It is the broken bone. Dirty pain is the worrying and the added anxiety and suffering that we layer on top of that loss or that clean pain.
Q: What is the point of suffering?
Susie: When we go through moments of crisis, we think they’re tragic. And yet often, they shine a light on something that we wish we could get rid of, and then also guide us forward in a way that we didn’t think we were capable of.
Q: What is your path to joy?
Susie: Finding a little bit more in balance, having a little bit more self-compassion, a little bit more courage, and a little less criticism of how I show up.
Q: You’ve spoken of the need to stop so much doing and focus on being. Is it our doing-ness that’s harmful or our frenetic need for approval?
Susie: You don’t have to give up the doing. That is your executive functioning brain that wants to accomplish things in this life. But I feel I’ve been able to accomplish more once I’ve given up the need to always get it right before I even begin.
When I ask if there’s one last thing she’d like our listeners to hear, Susie says, “Choose connection over consumerism. And if it’s work that drives you to achieve excellence, take breaks early and often, and then come back to your work, rather than putting it off until the only thing that you have left for yourself and for others in your life is your exhausted, resentful self.”
Susie Rinehart is the author of Fierce Joy: Choosing Brave Over Perfect to Find My True Voice, an inspirational story of learning to choose joy over fear.
About Susie Rinehart
Susie is an award-winning author, champion ultra-runner, life coach, activist and mother of two young children. On June 30, 2016, she was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive tumor on her brainstem. Her doctor told her, “Without surgery, you have less than five months to live.” After multiple complicated surgeries, she has recovered but there were big risks. That was over three years ago. Susie’s incredible journey to find her voice and a new kind of bravery after facing death allows her to share important lessons about pain and suffering, finding and holding onto joy, and the importance of slowing down to experience the sweetness of the moment.
Find Susie on Social Media:
https://susierinehart.com/ (Website)
https://www.instagram.com/susierinehart/ (Instagram)
Susie’s Book:
Fierce Joy: Choosing Brave Over Perfect to Find My True Voice
Books Mentioned in the Interview:
A Few Minor Adjustments: A Memoir of Healing, by Cherie Kephart
Love Is Complicated: A True Story of Brokenness and Healing, by Marlena Fiol, to be released summer 2020
About Marlena Fiol, PhD
Marlena Fiol, PhD, is a globally recognized author, scholar and speaker. She is a spiritual seeker whose work explores the depths of who we are and what’s possible in our lives. Her significant body of publications on the topic, coupled with her own raw identity-changing experiences, makes her uniquely qualified to write about personal transformational change. She is also a certified tai chi instructor and freelance writer whose most recent work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and newsletters.
You can find Marlena in the following places:
https://marlenafiol.com
Facebook
Twitter: @marlenafiol
Podcast Transcript
Below is a complete transcript of the podcast. I used a transcription service to create this, please note that there may be errors. For a 100% accurate quote of what was said, please listen to the podcast itself via the links above.
Interviewer: I’m so pleased to introduce today’s guest, Susie Rinehart. Susie is an award-winning author. She’s a champion ultra-runner, an activist, and a mother. She’s also a coach, a life coach. On June 30th of 2016, Susie was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive tumor on her brainstem. Her doctor told her, “Without surgery, you have less than five months to live.” And after multiple complicated surgeries, she has recovered but there were big risks. That was over three years ago. What began as a letter she wrote to pass along life lessons to her two young children became a memoir, “Fierce Joy,” which was just released in May. So, the theme running through all of our episodes for this podcast season titled “Becoming Who You Truly Are” is that going through bleak times of suffering sometimes leads us to more deeply know who we are and what’s possible for us. Susie’s incredible journey to find her voice and a new kind of bravery after facing death certainly fits that theme. Susie, welcome.
Susie: Thank you. It’s a joy to be here.
Interviewer: So, let’s begin with your medical journey. Please tell us about your experiences leading up to and including the diagnoses and treatments.
Susie: Right. Well, I am and was a very healthy person. I ate always very well and ran ultra-marathons competitively, often winning or standing on the podium of those races. So, it was a big shock to find out that these chronic headaches that I had that accompanied also by some nerve pain down my right arm and a little bit of numbness on my tongue, those turned out to be a massive, aggressive, and very, very rare brain tumor that was wrapped around my brainstem, as you mentioned. It was also wrapped around my vocal cords. And so when the doctors told me that I had this tumor and gave me just months to live, the way they told me was by saying, “First you’ll lose your voice, and then you’ll lose your ability to walk or even run, and then you’ll die.” So, for me, this notion of like, I’m a writer, so the metaphor of, “Why did this tumor spring up in me?” apparently, and have been something that was with me since birth, but just woke up in my 40s. So, why did it wake up? Was it trying to tell me something about how I was using my voice? And then I feel like this area around my vocal cords hadn’t been authentically used in years, and so the tumor had room to move in there. And that’s what I started to meditate upon, think about in the next phase of my journey.
Interviewer: What an amazing metaphor. So, you make a distinction in your book that I think will be of interest to our listeners. You say, “Pain is real. Suffering is what we do to ourselves with our worrying. So, pain is the physical sensation that tells me something is happening within my body and suffering is the interpretation or the story I tell myself about the pain.” Is that right?
Susie: Very well said. I’ve taken a lot of sort of value from something that Martha Beck, who is Oprah’s life coach. So, she’s good enough for Oprah, she’s good enough for me. Martha Beck says there’s something called clean pain and dirty pain. And clean pain is loss. It is the medical diagnosis. It is the broken bone. Dirty pain is the worrying and the added sort of anxiety and suffering that we layer on top of that loss or that pain. And so, what I’m interested in is my condition, as you can tell, like, I’m here, I survived. I went through 2, actually, 3 craniotomies, 36 hours of surgery back to back. I lost my voice, gained my voice back slowly, all of these things, but it’s still with me, my disease. And so, living with a chronic condition as anyone who can tell you it becomes very important to save your energy and use your energy for the things that are the most important in your life and to get rid of the things that are not serving us. And for me that’s suffering, that dirty pain, that worrying that I’m not doing something right or well enough or that will please others. All of that is what I became fascinated with, “How do we get rid of all that so we can be our strongest, most energetic selves?”
Interviewer: Yeah. First of all, congratulations, and I am just so happy that you did survive and that you’re thriving after all of what you went through. As you know, the theme of this podcast season is that suffering is sometimes a gift in our lives leading us to deeper understanding of who we are. In my new book, “Love is Complicated,” I describe the brokenness in my own life that eventually led to a different and more meaningful way to understand myself and my world. How would you say your suffering has changed how you understand yourself?
Susie: Well, exactly what you’re saying, that these moments that we see as…objectively, you know, if you hear from a friend about these moments of crisis, we think that they’re tragic, we think that they’re terrible, and yet often, they shine a light on something that we wish we could get rid of, right, and then also guide us forward in a way that we didn’t think we were capable of. And in your work, you talk often about how we are capable of far more than we think and having possible…is just possible, but we haven’t dreamt it yet or seen it yet. And, for me, in my journey I think the pain of the diagnosis, being a mother of two young children and someone who had many things just still wanted to do in her life, it just gave me incredible focus. I had always wanted to write a book. In fact, I had started to write this book 6 years ago, but I put it away because I kept writing and rewriting the first 12 pages so that I would make it perfect. Right? And what this, you know, as you call suffering, but I would just call almost the real obstacles that become opportunities in our lives, those real struggles that we have are, actually, I believe, strongly, doorways into our best selves. And my best self was actually waiting to come out, and that was me I believe as a writer and as someone who wanted to express herself in ways that were less about what others might want me to say and what I really felt the world needed and that I needed.
Interviewer: Wow. Can you suggest for me and for our listeners what we might do to more readily turn our obstacles into opportunities?
Susie: Well, if we were in another forum, I would probably ask you raise your hand if you’re an overachiever or a recovering perfectionist. And that was me. That was… I always brought my notebook and pen to every lecture. I actually had a hard time with New Year’s resolutions and goal setting because there were too many that I wanted to set. I didn’t just run 5Ks, I ran ultra-marathons, which are anything over 26.2 miles. And I always, always wanted to do the best possible job I could do, which there’s nothing wrong with that, but what’s wrong with it is when it becomes, “Well, I’ve got to do this one more email late at night or someone will be disappointed in me,” or, “I won’t have pulled my way and others are doing…they’re gonna think poorly of me.”
Interviewer: Yeah. Perfectionism is definitely a theme that runs through your stories. You state in your book that, for you, the opposite of joy was not sadness, it was perfectionism. So, say a little more about how that perfectionism stole your joy.
Susie: Right. And even going back to your earlier question, I can tell you how it stole my joy and then how I got it back in brilliant colors now. So, stealing my joy was purely about the amount of energy that it consumed in my mind. So, I was one of those who would wake up at 3:00 in the morning thinking about something I hadn’t yet done or how I could have done something better, a conversation, a moment with my child, a moment at work. And that sort of second-guessing myself or that ruminating, overthinking everything caught in my head meant that it was difficult for me to be present in the moment and to be authentic in every exchange and all my relationships. I didn’t think of myself as someone who wasn’t brave and I didn’t think of myself as someone who was a perfectionist because I definitely have, you know, dishes piled up in the sink and a really messy house, but I am. And the reason I am is that I am constantly believing that I’m not enough as I am.
Interviewer: Yeah. Yeah.
Susie: And when we believe that and we believe we have to earn our place on this planet rather than standing tall that we deserve to be here and that we are worthy of love, we are worthy of great success, we are worthy incredible trajectories forward, and in my case, you know, worthy of being on this planet, thriving as just me, not Susie the ultra-runner or Susie the great director of a company in 14 countries, you know.
Interviewer: Yes. Yes. And you write about that need to be perfect going way, way back, winning races and earning perfect test scores was a way to please your parents. I think you said you do anything to win that smile, to win your dad’s love. And by the way, we share this. You could have been writing about me. My guess is it’s pretty darn universal. And somewhere later in the book you write that when you were young, you didn’t worry about what others thought, but as you got older you lost that. So, when, along the way, did you lose that freedom of not worrying about what others thought?
Susie: If you look at a five-year-old, maybe even all the way to nine, they are, you know, standing tall, saying what they think, telling you immediately what you’re, you know, not doing to satisfy them. They’re fully expressing themselves, telling you what they don’t want and what they want. I think, you know, we become self-conscious right around 10 years old. I think that’s when we start to hear the messages around us, like, too fat, too thin, too awkward, too loud. You know, everybody telling us to be quiet or to be, you know, not to show up as who we are. Those messages. I think you’re right about the universal quality. I think some of us roll with them better than others, but having published this book and talking to many people, it turns out that almost all of us have a pretty loud inner critic.
Interviewer: Yes.
Susie: And all I want in terms of finding more joy is getting that a little bit more in balance, you know, having a little bit more self-compassion, and having a little bit more courage and a little less criticism of how we show up.
Interviewer: Yes. It’s an important message, and thank you for being out there and proclaiming it. “Fierce Joy,” I love that title. Joy, in itself, is a big word, but you’re talking about an intense, profound kind of joy. Could you comment on how you decided on that title and what fierce joy means to you?
Susie: I’m glad you liked it because it was…there’s a story behind it always, right? And the story here is that the book’s original title was “Brave Over Perfect.” And that came to me in the moment right after the diagnosis when my husband said, “We’re all gonna die. How do you wanna live?” And after kind of thinking about that in a way that wasn’t pretty, there was a lot of anger coming to terms with the diagnosis, the words that came to me and that I wrote down in my journal were “I choose joy over fear and brave over perfect.” And that’s just how I’ve been choosing to live, brave being what I want. And this is, you know, for all of us out there, this is how we can find more joy is brave is the piece that is like my yes. And perfect doesn’t mean perfect, necessarily, it means what others want. So, can we calibrate every decision by choosing brave slightly more over what we think others wanna hear or do or say?
Interviewer: Yeah.
Susie: So, that, so just to get to your answer about “Fierce Joy,” the title was almost taken by someone else who was quite famous. Her title was “Brave Not Perfect.” And so I had to scramble to come up with another title and, for me, what I found when I let go of the worrying, not the striving for excellence, but the worrying and the anxious feelings that went with trying to please everyone all the time or trying to, you know, save the world as one person, what I found when I let that drop, by choosing brave over perfect and joy over fear, what I found was a deep, deep, powerful, motivating force that was deep inside and then quiet, but was way more powerful than the fear and motivation that caused me to burn out, and I would say causes lots of us on healthy issues, not maybe as serious as mine, but can lead to some very serious health issues.
Interviewer: Yeah. Yeah. What your husband told you is not unlike what you write about your therapist telling you also by facing death. I think your therapist said, “By facing death, you’re embracing life.” And it’s also not too far off from what the Dalai Lama said, I think, to you, that the worst thing is to die without knowing yourself. Actually, can we back up a bit? I want… Can you tell us about your meeting with the Dalai Lama?
Susie: Oh, yeah. I was having a conversation with the Dalai Lama. That was a phenomenal and embarrassing moment in my life in which I went to a small liberal arts college and there was an event at the college on spirit and nature. But I had been out late partying and didn’t really pay attention to this event coming to campus until my advisor asked me to be a tour guide for one of the guests. At the time, I think I was 19, I knew nothing about Tibet, I knew nothing about Buddhism, and I was asked to give a tour to someone named Dolly.
Interviewer: Literally, D-O-L-L-Y.
Susie: Exactly. And so, of course, it’s the ’80s and my vision of Dolly is Dolly Parton. And I knew it wasn’t her. But the image I had in my head was, “Okay, I’m looking for a blonde, maybe even a big busted woman.” And instead, what happened was I was standing next to the dining hall and a swarm of monks came towards me, and then they parted, and this man’s…short man in the saffron…not saffron, but that, like, burgundy, merlot-colored robes with like a saffron scarf. He just put his hands together, came right up to me, bowed and touched his forehead to mine. And the monks beside me said, “This is the Dalai Lama. And you…I hear you are our tour guide.” And knowing nothing about the Dalai Lama, I felt incredible, intense white light around him. And so it led me on this whole other journey of how can you live with such joy and such light, when, without any preconceived notions, I felt it and vowed to live like that.
Interviewer: What a lovely presence you got to experience.
Susie: Right?
Interviewer: So, in your TEDx talk, which I had the great pleasure of watching recently, you speak of the need to stop so much doing, that we should be doing less, and yet, since your diagnosis, you’ve written books, you’ve done TEDx talks, you’ve coached. It seems to me you’re still doing a lot, but maybe without… Is the point without the frenetic need for approval? Is it the motivation for our doingness that needs to change or are you really suggesting that we should do less?
Susie: Both. You don’t have to give up that side of you. That is your executive functioning brain that wants to accomplish things in this life. I felt I’ve been able to accomplish more, as you said, once I’ve given up also the need to get it right before I begin. Right?
Interviewer: That’s powerful. Yeah.
Susie: So, I would never have done a TEDx talk and I was not finishing my book. My book was in a box in the closet because I was pretty sure that I had to know what it was gonna be before it was done. And so what I’m talking about in terms of doing less is true, especially around this season where I stop now every morning and I spend time, I light a candle and I spend 11 minutes just thinking about, what is it that I’m going to do to grow and build the relationships that I care so much about this holiday season? Instead of the lists of what am I gonna get so and so, that is perfect for them, but also kind of unconsciously or consciously, I’m thinking that therefore they see how much I really adore them, but they also, like, like me a lot because I gave them the right thing, right?
Interviewer: Yes.
Susie: So, that has led me to, for example, around the solstice, I make it a priority now to do a walk with my family in the woods and to talk about our fears and what brings us light in the dark times rather than running around and trying to do zoo lights and Denver Botanic Garden lights and go to everybody’s parties. And that’s what I’m talking about. Slow down and say sorry. I’m actually just gonna play, you know, a game of checkers with my kids on the floor and get Trader Joe’s frozen food instead of making sure I’m doing everything the way that my grandmother or my mother or my friends that, I think, have or during the holidays are doing. Right?
Interviewer: Yeah. Inadvertently, you are really giving us a message that is so, especially important during this season. So, thank you for that.
Susie: Thank you.
Interviewer: Susie, like you, I am a language lover. And I picked up on something you said and I’ve thought about it a lot since I read it. In your book, somewhere you said, “To receive is an active verb.” How did you learn about the, I would say, virtuous action of receiving?
Susie: Beautiful to remember that part. That’s another part, I would say, about the shift that has led me to more joy, and that has been really coming to terms of my ability to ask for help. And you know, people say that all the time, and I thought I was pretty good at asking for help. I was a great delegator at work, but not really, not at some… If it meant that I had to expose myself or be vulnerable for others, and I never thought that my problems were really bad enough that I needed help. So, once I understood that this diagnosis was too big, that I could not handle it on my own, it made it easier for me to ask for help. And in so doing, what we noticed, my husband and me, was we were being faked all the time by our friends who would literally come into our homes and do our laundry. They were thanking us because I think so many of us are only doing the first half of the gift exchange, that we’re giving, we give to our families, we’re giving, we’re giving to our communities, we’re giving to our work. And maybe, we always think we can give more, which is true, but there is another half to that equation, which is about receiving. And if we don’t learn to receive the gifts, if we don’t learn to just stop and let someone also give us a gift and we just say, “Thank you,” rather than, “Oh, I didn’t get you anything,” or “I should have done this,” or… If we learn to truly receive, I think we also learn that we are loved and that we are valuable and that we don’t have to hustle for that love or hustle for that approval or value.
Interviewer: Yeah. And as you said, receiving is sometimes actually less selfish or selfishly motivated than giving, or it can be.
Susie: Right.
Interviewer: And when you invite someone to help you, you actually strengthen their sense of connectedness as well as your own. Isn’t that right?
Susie: That’s right.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Susie: That’s right. And it’s hard to figure out how to do that, right? But the more specific you can get, the better. Like, recently I asked someone, “Would she be willing to come and help me with my daughter’s birthday party because my husband is actually not great at that stuff?” So, we kept the birthday party very simple. We’re doing just a simple thing. But I realized I did want help, and that I sort of got specific about the kind of help and I knew I would be resentful if my husband was there, but wasn’t helping me in the ways that were gonna help me. Do you know what I mean?
Interviewer: Yes.
Susie: It was getting really clear and specific about, “Hey, you, my friend, even though this is not your child, would you be willing to come and help me?” And her answer was, “Oh, I would love that. I would love the time with you. I would love the time with your daughter. I would love… And I can come early, but then I have to go. Is that okay?” I’m like, “Yes.”
Interviewer: She probably felt honored. So, speaking of asking for help, let’s talk about prayer. When you were so ill, you prayed, and I’m almost tearing up as I quote you, “Please let me be here to help my children grow.” And your yoga teacher said that that sounded like begging. And then a year later before some of your follow-up appointments, it was, again, hard for you not to beg. And I think it’s hard for many of us in our prayers not to beg. How do you think about prayer today?
Susie: Oh, I could remember the lines written by the poet Mary Oliver about prayer. And she basically says, you know, “It doesn’t have to be, oh my gosh, I’m remembering them. It doesn’t have to be the blue iris. It could be weeds in a vacant lot or a few small stones. Just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate. It isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks.” So, that’s one way, right? Just let’s not worry that we’re doing it right. So, I wanna say first. But then my yoga teacher did tap into something about the begging, right? Like, I’m kind of saying, “Hey, I know you’re busy. You got a lot of people who are in a lot worse situations than me, but please let me be here with my children.” And my yoga teacher just said something, she said, “You know, you are a woman, you are a mother, you are a living human being. You actually have a lot of power. So, maybe step into that power and say your prayer again from a place where you actually believe for just a moment your value and your worth.” And so then my prayer shifted to be like, “Hey, I accept this challenge that you’ve given me and I’m even grateful for it because of the love that it has opened me up to. At the same time, I need you in my corner. I need you with me as I face this challenge so that I can be here with my family and I can give back to the world.”
Interviewer: Yeah. Asking from a place of your own power.
Susie: Yeah.
Interviewer: Yeah. That’s lovely. Susie, most of us, I believe, tend to think about times of crisis as a lot scarier than routine life as it unfolds, but you write that after the surgeries, when you were back more or less into the routine of regular life, fear kept showing up. Was it in some ways easier to manage fear during the crisis than when you were back into a regular routine?
Susie: In hindsight, I would say definitely. And at the same time, you know, I very, very much thought I was gonna die. And so I had to face, you know, Fear with a capital F, which allowed me actually to turn fear in the book and in my life into a character that I would actually talk back to. And I think that that is step one to managing our fears, whether it is in a moment of big crisis or in everyday life, which is to separate ourselves from those thoughts and to not accept that they are truth, but rather to accept them as just thoughts. So, I talked to fear and I would say, “Okay. You’re telling me right now that I’m not good enough to write the next book, for example. But, fear, I hear you, and thank you very much for helping me protect me and yet, I’m gonna listen to that joy voice, which is a little bit quieter than yours and takes a little more patience to listen to.” And the joy voice says, “But I want to write the next book. And so, I’m going to do that as messy, as awkwardly as I know how.” And in everyday life, parenting and being someone’s child and being…like, parenting our parents and being someone who’s an entrepreneur like yourself and a writer, it’s really difficult work. There are a million things you cannot control. So, I believe that fear is just the loudest voice in our head, the one telling you, “You really should do this and you really should do that,” as if you really can have some control over what’s happening. But what I found was that there was a lot more power when I let go of that illusion of control and managed to just kind of take one thing at a time and listen to the other voices, not just fear as to how to move forward.
Interviewer: It’s so great. We tend to equate control with power.
Susie: Right.
Interviewer: And it’s actually the opposite that you’re talking about.
Susie: Right.
Interviewer: Yeah. I interviewed an author named Cherie Kephart for this podcast season, that’s C-H-E-R-I-E, Kephart, K-E-P-H-A-R-T. And I’d love for you to read her book. It’s “A Few Minor Adjustments.”
Susie: Oh, that’s awesome.
Interviewer: I also talked with her about your book. I can’t help myself because the details of your stories are so different, but your messages are so very, very similar. I just really want you to read each other’s work. She talks about when she talks to fear, she said, “Fear gets to go in the trunk.” She said, “I don’t try to throw out fear because it always will be there, but it gets to ride along in the trunk. It does not get to drive me.”
Susie: Awesome.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Susie: I think I first got that from… Oh my gosh, why am I forgetting right now? Who wrote “Eat, Pray, Love”? Elizabeth Gilbert.
Interviewer: Gilbert, yeah.
Susie: She wrote a great book called “Big Magic” and it’s about creativity. And she’s the first one that taught me about talking back to fear and letting it ride in the car and not wanting to drive. I think the problem is, is that we don’t really believe that if you let go of control that things are gonna be okay. And maybe people like Cherie and I who have seen that we are held and that it is gonna be okay, that’s why I ended up writing this book, was that I really felt like we are wasting time.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Susie: We’re gonna control of everything. And, the fact, we, women, when we want, we are so powerful and yet we are wasting time with worry and doubt and anxious feelings.
Interviewer: Yeah. You wrote somewhere in your book, “The universe has your back. You need to work hard, get help from others, make mistakes, but then lie back and float.” I love that. So, toward the end of your book, I think it was page 200 and 204, somewhere in there, you said, you write, “It takes me one more lesson in letting go of things to truly feel free.” And that’s when you tell us about losing your red bracelet, the woven bracelet. And my question is this. Are we ever truly there, feeling truly free or is it an ongoing journey?
Susie: It is an ongoing journey, absolutely. And like Cherie says about, you know, “A Few Minor Adjustments,” there isn’t like food that I can eat or a certain pill that I can take to have that complete freedom. But what I do find is I am much happier now than I used to be and I have a lot more capacity for laughter and joy, and I was already a pretty big, brave, and joyful person, but I am genuinely surprised by the freedom that I do feel now from every day, having a little more trust, trust in the universe, trust in myself, trust that if we keep going down this road of fear-based everything, we are actually going down a path, and it’s not healthy for us or for our children or for our world. And the trust that I have is that there is actually a lot more abundance than the news would have you think, a lot more joy than the news would have you think.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Susie: And so, there is a plenty, plenty more freedom there for you if we can just practice calibrating, choosing joy over fear each moment.
Interviewer: Yeah. And your use of the word trust is, I think, also really important. Trust comes, again, from a place of more power versus, “I hope things will turn out okay,” which comes much more out of a fear-based position of, “Can I really hope for this?” So the difference between trust and hope is pretty significant, it seems to me.
Susie: Right. That was the great conversation I had with my therapist who said, “Beware of hope because hope can lead you down the road where you say, ‘Well, I hope that my scans are clear,’ right?” Which we all want. We all want our health scans to be clear. We want to get the all clear from the doctors. But if you don’t get that, then you end up start feeling miserable. Whereas trust is, “Okay, I trust that whatever happens, I’m gonna have the resilience and the best team possible, and there’s gonna be new things coming up each day that are gonna allow me to heal and grow and thrive in this life.”
Interviewer: So, tell us about the next book.
Susie: That’s great. Well, fear says, “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know.” Joy says, “Oh, I have at least two or three in me.” And one that I’m working on right now is how to take this wisdom that I’ve learned from a moment of deep crisis and how to impart that to young women. Young women and men, I would say, but especially young women who are feeling a little bit like there’s a lot of expectations on them and a lot of pressure and there’s a lot of anxiety or anxious feelings and depressive thoughts. And really, how can we teach them not so much that they have to be everything, that they have to save the world, that they have to go to X college or do this and be a leader all the time? But rather, how can they show up whole and real, and live a life that’s very fulfill…with fulfillment as the goal rather than outer success? So, I’m playing with that and having some young people really guide me and what their concerns are and how we can address them.
Interviewer: Yeah. What are some of the factors that caused you to say that this is maybe more true for women than men in our society today?
Susie: It’s a great question because the research is showing that it is more true for women than men. I mean, women are diagnosed with depression twice as much as men. Young women going into college announce that they have really depressive thoughts or anxious thoughts more than twice as much as men. In young women, like, 12 to 18, even that age group, not just in the U.S., but in Australia, in Canada, in London, I’m sorry, England, they’re finding that girls, again, two to one, are more depressed, have less self-value and self-confidence. And I can’t tell whether it’s, one, that women traditionally have always been a little bit more aware of the expectations of them in society and… Oh, wait. I’ve got to be careful when I say that. I mean more, like, aware of like sensitive to the overall cultural climate. But then I would say that we’ve also, in the last, you know, century, what we’ve done is tell women that they can be anything they want. But the way that they’ve internalized it and certainly the way I internalize it was that we have to be everything. We have to be beautiful. We have to be very successful. We owe it to the women who came before us, who opened the doors to now stand on their shoulders and be everything. And I think that message was taken a little too seriously somehow, we take it a little too literally. And instead of focusing on one thing that we do well or the one way that we want to contribute, we take it as that we have to not just contribute, but we have to master and we have to save, fix, be everything to all people all the time.
Interviewer: Do you have a title for the book?
Susie: No. Do you have any ideas?
Interviewer: No, I don’t, but I’m looking forward to it very much. Susie, if there were one last thing that you’d like our listeners to hear, what would it be?
Susie: I think it’s something I’ve been thinking about recently. When, this time of year, you know, choose connection over consumerism. And if it’s work that drives you to achieve excellence, take breaks early and often, so that you enjoy the days that are where the sun is shining or the snow is falling beautifully and you take a break, and then come back to your work, rather than putting it off and putting it off, and the only thing that you have left for yourself and for others in your life is your exhausted, resentful self. So, take breaks early and often to go outside, to be in nature, and even to create something with your hands, that is something you love, love to do. To find more joy in this season, and we talk about joy, but we somehow don’t think that it’s really available to us. And I promise you it is.
Interviewer: Yeah. And that message is so important and one that we can take to heart any time of year. This interview will actually be aired sometime in the coming year, early part of 2020. But any time of year, choosing connection over consumerism, what a great message. In fact, there have been so many. This has been wonderful. And our time is up. Susie, it’s been a true pleasure. Thanks for taking the time to speak with us.
Susie: Oh, and thank you so much for doing this podcast or putting your brave out there. We’re all benefiting. Thank you.
Interviewer: I’ve been speaking with Susie Rinehart, author of “Fierce Joy: Choosing Brave Over Perfect to Find My True Voice.” Susie is also a life coach who works with individuals and organizations to proactively pursue risk, abandon perfectionism and anxiety, and go after something big with more ease and more power. Details about how to contact her and to purchase her book can be found on the show notes. And thank you, our listeners, for joining us today. We are together on this journey.
Susie Rinehart’s courageous response to her trauma provides an uplifting path to positive possibilities for all of us who hear her message.