Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Lessons From Nazi Camps, Near-Death Experiences, and Other Life Traumas | Dr. Edith Eger, Donald Miller, Benjamin Hardy, Amy Morin, Colin O’Brady, and Alex Banayan | Human Behavior | YAPSnacks

Starting point is 00:00:01 Hey everyone, you're listening to Yapsnacks, a series of bite-sized content hosted by me, Hala Taha. Today's a little bit of a different topic, but it's definitely an important one. We're talking about trauma. Trauma can haunt us or trauma can motivate us. And before we get started, I want to share my most traumatic experience with you all. And I'm freestyling this, so I'll tell the story the best I can. I'll try not to get super emotional so that we can just get through it together.

Starting point is 00:00:40 So in March of 2020, my entire family got COVID and we were one of the first families impacted by COVID. And I get a call from my sister. And at the time, I'm living in Brooklyn with my boyfriend. I'm working at Disney Streaming Services. I've had this podcast for about two years. It's just a hobby. It makes no money. It's a notable podcast.

Starting point is 00:01:01 But nowhere as big as it is now. And I got a call from my sister. And she says, Hala, your mom, your dad, your brother, your aunt and uncle down the street all have COVID. I'm going home to help them. She's a doctor. I want to know if you want to come with me. I'll pick you up. You've got 30 minutes. And so I was like, of course I'm going to come. So I packed my bag. And little did I know I was going to essentially be in Washington, New Jersey, away from my boyfriend and my life and my work for three months because we went there to help my parents. We caught COVID. The shutdown happened. Everybody started working from home. And I stayed at

Starting point is 00:01:38 my parents' house because my friends and my boyfriend weren't going to see me. At that point, it wasn't like you got COVID and 10 days later, you hung out with everyone again. At that point, getting COVID was like really crazy and nobody wanted to hang out with me for months. And so I was super isolated. So my dad ended up getting super sick and everybody else got better. My dad, after three weeks or so, we tried our best, but he was getting severely sick. We ended up having to send him to the hospital. And I remember as they wheeled him in the ambulance, he said, we're never going to see him again if he goes to the hospital. And he was right. We never saw him again in person. And it was just so tough. I think the most traumatic part about all of this is that I wasn't allowed to see my father in the hospital. And my father was such a good man. He was my hero. He came from nothing. He pulled my whole family out of poverty and was just such a generous, good man. He was a good man. He was a good. He came from nothing. He came from nothing. He pulled my whole family out of poverty. He pulled my whole family out of poverty. He was just such a generous, good man who helped so many people. He saved so many lives. He was a doctor or surgeon. He put like 20 people through college. He was an amazing man. And it's like nobody deserves to die in

Starting point is 00:02:47 such a terrible way. And like that really bothered me that nobody was there to like hold his hand. At this point, everybody was so scared of COVID. Rightfully so that even like nurses really weren't giving anybody attention. It's kind of like he was like left to die by himself for like 30 days in the hospital. He was just like tormented and suffered. And every time I saw him on Zoom, he was unconscious. He looked visibly distraught. He would be making crazy faces. Didn't look like himself. And it was really hard. And I would just sit there and try to just beg the nurses to let me go on Zoom and I would try to sing to him. And I would notice that like he would like sort of like relax when I sing to him. And like that made me feel better. But nonetheless, we were never allowed to see him. And I

Starting point is 00:03:31 remember, I was on a call, Disney streaming services working from home at my mom's house, and we get a call that my dad died. And they didn't even give us, like, a chance to see him in his last moments. They didn't allow us in the hospital. But then they allowed us to see him when he died. So we get there, and they only allowed us to go one by one into his room, more traumatic. I get there, and I see my dad, and he's so swollen, and his eyes are open, and his fingers are so swollen. I just remember howling. I remember howling in the room because he just looked so messed up

Starting point is 00:04:11 and I just felt like, God, why didn't you guys just let us be there? We could have helped him if he just allowed us to be there with him. And it was just so hard for me. And while he was in the hospital, because I had nothing else to do, we weren't allowed to go see him or anything. And I had all this free time because my boyfriend didn't want to see me. My best friends wouldn't go to see me because everybody was scared of me. So I had nothing to do. And I was working from home. I had so much time that I ended up starting Yap Media. And I'm so happy that I was given the opportunity to have that moment and space to actually create this company. And I eventually broke up with my boyfriend of 10 years, another traumatic experience right off the back of this one, because he started

Starting point is 00:04:58 stonewalling me because I started this company and it literally blew up as soon as I started it. And as soon as my dad died, I took my role and responsibility in life a lot more serious. I decided I was going to be the number one female podcaster. I decided I was going to start a company that was going to enable me to accomplish that dream. And everything took off, immediately took off. Within three months, I was on the cover of podcast magazine. interviewing Matthew McConaughey, right? And within six months, I was an entrepreneur and I was able to quit my job at Disney streaming services

Starting point is 00:05:37 and my side hustle was generating over $150,000 a month. That was six months into it. Everything just snapped, took off. And a lot of people asked me like, Hala, you went through such traumatic 2020. How did you make it the best year of your life when it started as the worst year of your life? How are you able to just get over that trauma

Starting point is 00:06:01 and create this business through all this pain and through all the things that you went through? And my answer to them is that I was lucky enough to be the host of this podcast. Every week I was listening to powerful people and every week I heard people's stories and I heard how they overcame adversity and innately, subconsciously, I didn't think about it.

Starting point is 00:06:24 Subconsciously, I knew exactly what to do. when that trauma hit me. I knew exactly what to do. I knew I had to turn my pain into purpose. And actually, that's why today I felt inspired to put out on this episode. You can hear it in my voice, maybe that I'm a little bit stuffy.

Starting point is 00:06:40 I got COVID for the third time, and I'm getting over it right now. And so it reminded me of all the trauma that I faced. And that's why today I'm going to put out this episode on trauma and how you can use it to your advantage. So let's hear first from Dr. Edith Eager. She's a Holocaust survivor on how you can use your imagination to escape traumatic situations. When I was at the latrine, a girl next to me found the mirror.

Starting point is 00:07:10 And I couldn't understand where do you find a mirror in a place like that. And in no time at all, I see the same girl with the mirror. And she told me, I'm Marie Antoinette in my woodwalk. see you take your imagination and I remember in Auschwitz you know they even took my blood like twice a week and I asked why are you taking my blood and the guy said to eat a German soldier so we can win the war and take over the world especially America I couldn't yank my arm away but I said to myself with my blood, you're never going to win the war. You know, I was a ballet dancer.

Starting point is 00:08:03 I was a gymnast. And so they could throw me in a gas chamber. They could beat me, torture me. And yet, they could never touch my spirit. Wow. Nobody can. Nobody can. What else happened in Auschwitz?

Starting point is 00:08:20 Like, what was daily life? Like, you just mentioned they took blood from you twice a week. What are those things did you wait? I think Auschwitz was hell. And right now, we are experiencing a situation that we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. And that's a very, very unfortunate place to be because you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. So I to put on your curiosity and recognize that you never really think of suicide because you want to know what's going to happen next. And that's what kept me alive, my curiosity.

Starting point is 00:09:09 And what we had was each other. So when I was asked to dance for Dr. Mangala, who came to the barrack, there was my soul. school teacher from the Jewish school who told me to do as I am told. And I remember I closed my eyes and I pretended that the music was Jakovsky and I was dancing the Romaine and Juliet at the Budapest Opera House. So you had to go beyond me, me, me. We had to commit ourselves to each other as we do now. And it was very important. So you were just saying that you used your imagination when you were in the concentration camp to kind of keep your sanity so you wouldn't get depressed, you wouldn't be suicidal, you used your imagination. Are there any

Starting point is 00:10:00 other tactics that we can use today if we're in a bad situation? No matter, you know, I don't think there's things as extreme as being in a concentration camp, but let's say you're in an abusive relationship or let's say you're in a bad work environment, how can we take any traumatic situation that we're currently in and make sure we protect our mental state? What do you suggest that we do. I tell you one one word that is not in my vocabulary. I can't. So when I'm in a classroom, I run to the blackboard, I say, I can't equals I am helpless. And then I take the eraser, I take the apostrophe, and the T I can. Why? Because I think I can. I think very importantly. because you see when cannibalism broke out in that camp where I was liberated

Starting point is 00:10:58 and people were eating other people's flesh, my liberator told me that people were eating that horse, which I did not see. But you see, I was able to look up at God, and I wanted to see the sound of music because it was there. and I looked up at God and I asked God to help me. And God told me just to look down. And I remember I am choosing one blade of grass over against the other. So when people say I can't say I'm helpless, that's not true.

Starting point is 00:11:41 You can choose one blade of grass even then I had a choice. so that's why I'm not a shrink, I'm a stretch. Okay, and today I'm guiding people to stretch their comfort zone and not to give up so quickly ever because there is hope and hopelessness. There is the light after the tunnel. There is a rainbow after the rain. It's just how you look at things.

Starting point is 00:12:14 I think it's very important. not what happens, but everything, everything in life is an opportunity. I'm going to share a very, very personal story with you, and I think it will help my listeners. So COVID-19 happened, and last March, my parents got COVID-19, and my dad ended up passing away in May from COVID. And for a whole month, I watched my dad die on camera. Sorry. I watched him die.

Starting point is 00:12:44 It's okay. I just watched him die every day and we weren't allowed to see him. And it was terrible. And I remember my uncle, who's his best friend, he would refuse to even watch him on Zoom. And he told me, you know, you'll never get those images out of your head. If you keep watching him like this, this is how you're going to remember him now. And it's true. When I think about him, I keep seeing him in the hospital.

Starting point is 00:13:09 So it's like, what do we do with traumatic images? Like, how do we get that out of our head? Sorry. But I think this is helpful for everyone. I'm sure you saw so much worse stuff. So what I'm even crying about is nothing compared to what you saw. So it's like, how do we get these traumatic images out of our head? What do we do?

Starting point is 00:13:29 You know, when a woman came to me and told me she was sexually abused, and I don't know how I can tell you, Ede, because you were in Auschwitz. And my answer to her was, you were more in prison than I was, because I knew the enemy. And so when you have a feeling about your dad, what comes out of your body will not make you ill. Crying is very good, very healthy, to go through the valley of the shadow of death,

Starting point is 00:14:03 go through it. And how old were you when your father died? It was just last year, so I was 30. So you can think that, You didn't lose your father. You had him sent to you for that many years. And so sit down and invite the feeling. Stop denying, stop running from the feeling.

Starting point is 00:14:33 It's okay to grieve. You know, I'm working with psychiatrists now, and we're working on death, and they do not medicate grief. It's not clinical depression. You get to really acknowledge that half of you is your dad and you're carrying good blood and you can't heal what you don't feel. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors. At YAP, we have a super unique company culture.

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Starting point is 00:16:16 Terms and conditions apply. Hiring, indeed, is all you need. Next up, let's listen to Storybrand CEO and founder Donald Miller. He talks about Victor Frankel, a Jewish psychiatrist, and how you can still find meaning in your life even under the most unbearable circumstances. Well, Victor Frankel was a psychologist in Vienna in the 1920s and 30s, and he basically said, man's dominant desire. is a desire for a deep sense of meaning, which feels like purpose in their life. And he developed something called Logotherapy, a therapy of meaning in which he prescribed a

Starting point is 00:17:02 certain way of living to people, which gave them a deep sense of meaning and helped them overcome depression, anxiety, and a bunch of other stuff. And he applied it inside the Viennese hospital system specifically for suicidal high school patients. They had a serious suicide problem around the time grades were released. When he applied Logotherapy, when he basically taught them to live as heroes on a mission, suicide rate dropped to zero. And he was writing a book on his theories when World War II broke out. And the Nazis began to collect Jews and put them in concentration camps. Being a Jewish man, Victor Frankel, was taken with his wife who was pregnant. His wife, Tilly, was pregnant with their first child. She was murdered.

Starting point is 00:17:51 His parents were murdered. The manuscript in which the thesis was confiscated and taken from him, and he spent years, I believe, in four different concentration camps and survived. And after he survived, instead of being despondent, certainly he was in incredible pain, but he rose out of that victim mentality and began delivering lectures around the world on how life, in fact, does have meaning and is in fact beautiful. And of course, who's going to argue with him? Right? I mean, I'm sorry, your sugar cravings don't measure up to what this guy has been through. Yeah. If he's not a victim, then nobody has the excuse. That's right. And so he was incredibly influential on this book and influential on me, you know, personally. I'd say he saved my life and maybe saved the quality

Starting point is 00:18:35 of my life. But just a wonderful, wonderful person who has proven that life, in fact, has been. What's really interesting about Victor Frankel is he didn't actually tell him. us what the meaning of life was, he told us how to feel it. And he doesn't answer the question, what is the meaning of life? Or why does life have meaning? He just says, here's how you experience it. And so what it does is it makes the stuff I talk about in the book, and that's what the book is. It's a prescription for Logo Therapy. And it makes the work theologically agnostic, philosophically agnostic. You know, I was meeting with a friend having coffee and acquaintance, I should say, back in Portland

Starting point is 00:19:16 many, many years ago. And they were, they was very obvious they were a nihist. And they said to me at one point, well, you know, life is meaningless. And I said something a bit offensive to them. I wrote about it in the book, but I said, what if life is not meaningless? What if just your life is meaningless? And of course, they didn't think that was very funny. But what I meant by that was, what if the stuff that you were doing inside of your story

Starting point is 00:19:37 is giving you a bad experience? And what if it's not life itself? In other words, what if you're writing a book and what you're actually saying is this book is not interesting? And the good news is if we can get ourselves to believe it and understand it, is that the book can change. If you know how to live a certain way, the book can get really, really interesting, really fast.

Starting point is 00:20:02 And I'm a living testament to that because I really like my life. It's not always easy. It's not, you know, I cried myself to sleep when I had to put my dog down, there are painful, painful elements to it. There are hard things. Today we took Emmeline to get her last shots at the doctor and hold your crying baby while she doesn't understand why somebody's poking her with a needle. They're just tough scenes in life.

Starting point is 00:20:27 And, of course, I'm being very, very light. And the people listening have some very, very painful scenes. And yet we can choose to do things with our life that give our life a deep charge of meaning and beauty and go to sleep every night being grateful for the incredible experience that we're having. Yeah, the thing that keeps coming to my mind was this concept of personal agency as you're talking about the fact that it's not that life is going to be perfect. There's going to be ups and downs, but it's how do you treat those ups and downs? How do you have perspective towards them? Can you talk to us about personal agency and what that is? Yeah, personal agency is similar to internal locus of control.

Starting point is 00:21:06 It's belief that you have the power. And the one thing that you have the power over that nobody can take away from you is your perspective on life, including your perspective on very, very difficult things. And so when painful things happen to us, we can either have a victim perspective, which is, woe is me, I'm doomed, please send a rescuer. Or we can actually say to ourselves, wait, this is painful. And also, it somehow benefits me. it's both and that's the prescription that victor frank will give to his patients he would say when something very painful happens acknowledge it don't be a delusional optimist acknowledge it and also realize it comes with benefits and when the most in other words redeem our pain i met a

Starting point is 00:21:58 young man who his son he came home from church his wife had stayed back at the church came up from church and his three-year-old son, they went to take a nap, and three-old son woke up, went into the garage, got back into the car, closed the door, and died of heat exhaustion. And he came to me and he said, Don, I want to write a book about this, I need to process it. And he ended up writing a book,

Starting point is 00:22:28 and now he travels the country, and he helps people understand how to grieve the loss of a child. He did something with it. Now, does that bring back his son? No. But what it does is it redeems the pain and uses it for good. And that has given his life a deep sense of meaning. So any of us can do this. And what's the alternative? You know, the alternative is buy a truckload of whiskey. Get a divorce and drink yourself to death. That's the victim life. And we're not going to do that. We're going to redeem our pain. It's never healthy to stay in a victim's mindset, Yop fam. Here's Benjamin Hardy echoing Donald Miller on the importance of having hope for the future. So the reason Frankel is so important, and again, man search for meaning one of the most important books in the world, he was a Jewish person who in 1942 was taken into the Holocaust, right?

Starting point is 00:23:29 Like the German Nazi concentration camps. And what he found with people who are living in such dire situations, we really, I mean, unless you actually study the Holocaust, you don't even understand what I'm saying. It's gibberish right now. It was almost unfathomable how bad it was. Like the people were starved, they were thrown in gas chambers, people were shot in the head right next to you. Like, you're sitting doing grunt work for months, months, months, years and years and years, everything's been taken from you, even the clothes off your back. You're standing there naked, deprived of everything, deprived of your dreams, deprived of everything. And what Frankel noticed when he was in those situations,

Starting point is 00:24:07 because he was a psychologist, and so, like, he was paying attention to this stuff. He was very in tune with what was going on in people's heads and, like, why some people could be resilient and even be happy in these crazy conditions and why some people would get desperate, lose their minds. And he started to draw an interesting correlation, which was in those dire situations when you're kind of deprived of everything and you're also starved physically. I mean, they were only given, like, a small piece of bread every day. is he saw an immediate correlation

Starting point is 00:24:36 that when someone lost hope toward their future, within days they died in those situations. Like their body didn't have enough to sustain them. If you and I lost hope in our future, we'd start to fall apart physically. Like, we'd probably lose our health. And hope from a psychology standpoint is like air to your physical body,

Starting point is 00:24:54 like food and air. Like you need hope. Because who you are right now is largely dictated by your views of the future. So basically what Frankel found was that unless you had a specific goal, which is a huge aspect of hope, without a specific goal that gave your life meaning and substance,

Starting point is 00:25:12 you couldn't handle the present, especially when it was that bad. And so that's why he always quoted Nietzsche, which is when you have a why to live for you can bear almost anyhow. And so everything he did, and he literally, he layers it, and I share the best quotes of it in future self, but he says, you know, when you lose hope in your future, you know, you're doomed.

Starting point is 00:25:30 But he also said that everything we did, in the concentration camps to give people hope or to even help them to be able to manage their mind or manage their emotions, was we had to give to them a goal in their future, which they could work towards. And he himself, he literally stated the goal that gave him purpose

Starting point is 00:25:48 and gave him meaning and allowed him to endure the trials. And for him it was he wanted to be reconnected with his wife Tilly, who was taken to another camp. He didn't know that she'd already been killed and she was pregnant with their baby, but he didn't know that. He wanted to be reconnected with her.

Starting point is 00:26:02 But also, he wanted to rewrite his book, which was almost done being written when they got basically taken by the Nazis and they took the manuscript and tore it apart. He literally states this in Mansearch for meaning. He said, my deep desire to rewrite that book anew and publish it allowed me to overcome the rigors and the pain of the camps. So when you have a why to live for, you can bear almost anyhow. If you don't have a why to live for, if you don't have hope and commitment in your future, then you're not going to be very productive. I mean, little things in your day can throw you way off. But for him in those situations, it was life or death. It's literally life or death. Now, from a scientific perspective, there's a lot going on in the brain when it comes to trauma.

Starting point is 00:26:45 Neuroscientist Dr. Caroline Leif taught me that just like a tree is made up of branches and roots, a thought is also made up of branches and roots, which essentially are our memories. Memories are literally what's inside of a thought, all the knowledge, in the form of details, information, emotions, choices, and perceptions. And just like, in real life, your brain is full of healthy and unhealthy trees. And unhealthy trees store negative thoughts and negative memories. Dr. Caroline Leaves says the trauma is probably the hardest thought pattern to work on. But it's so essential because these structures in your brain are super powerful. They carry high energy and intensity due to the data and emotions that are attached to the traumatic

Starting point is 00:27:25 event. The good news is, is you can actually reverse these unhealthy memories by reframing the events and memories of your past. So basically, you need to pay attention to what triggers your negative memory and the negative thoughts you have around that memory and then choose to think about that experience differently in that moment. You essentially redesign the thought. So for example, if I have a thought around my dad's suffering and being isolated in the hospital when he had COVID, instead of thinking, why me, why my family, why this happened to us, my poor dad, I feel so terrible, I feel so guilty. How did I not convince the hospital? And all these bad thoughts that I always have whenever I think about him in the hospital, I can choose to reframe that

Starting point is 00:28:03 thought and think about things like he knew that we would be there if we could, if he was conscious. He lived a great and blessed life. His last memories don't define his legacy. There was a high probability he was unconscious and didn't even feel the pain that I think he did, or other thoughts that make me feel better or neutral about the situation. Essentially, I'm going to try to redesign my memory of that experience. But keep in mind, it takes at least 63 days to re-conceptualize one thinking pattern, so you have to be consistent with it and really give it a try. If you want to learn more about reconceptualizing toxic thoughts, check out my episode number 114, Eliminate toxic thoughts with Dr. Caroline Leif.

Starting point is 00:28:41 So while I'm talking about redesigning your thoughts, in the moment and right after a traumatic event happens, you are allowed to grieve and you do need to process your grief. We're allowed to give ourselves time to heal and there are ways we can make the process of grieving a traumatic event a little bit easier. Here's psychotherapist and author Amy Morin on that. So one of the things when I think about trauma and what I know about grief and loss and trauma is that a part of what makes it even more difficult are the rules and let's call the regulations that other people or we ourselves try to abide by. So we have a timeline or our job has a timeline or we read somebody's book that talked about a timeline and how to. how they went back to work or they started dating or after six months or, you know, a year and a half.

Starting point is 00:29:39 And so you figure, okay, if I'm, you know, if I'm okay, then I can do that as well. And so one of the things that is so important as it relates to COVID, but just grief and loss in general, is that there really are not any rules other than what your own heart dictates in terms of what it needs. and a lot of that requires slowing down. I mean slowing down even right here, right now in this room, and asking yourself this very bold and brave question, which is what does my ache need? Rumi, the great writer and thinker and philosopher,

Starting point is 00:30:25 has a quote that I love, and I think it fits so well here, that the wound, W-O-U-N-D, the wound is the place where light enters. And so often we are covering our wounds up and we're ashamed of our wounds and we're trying to get our wounds, you know, into gear. You know, people will, if you hear when I do, you know, my clubhouse events every Sunday morning at 10 a.m. in the east, people often will call and if they begin to cry, they'll say, oh, I'm sorry. And I'll say, what are you sorry for?

Starting point is 00:31:02 And isn't it interesting that when our tears show up, and I believe our tears are our teacher, that we apologize for our humanity. So a piece of what this moment is offering is that we really lean, and I mean lean all the way in to what it means to be fully human, and that is to have losses and, you know, as we've heard each person share, that sometimes it's the birthday or the anniversary, but sometimes it's not connected to anything in particular, except for that your heart aches. Or how about the times where someone feels joy and then they feel guilty? Like, am I allowed to smile? Am I allowed to ever laugh again after, you know, know, the death and the loss of someone who suffered and died alone in COVID, when we think about what happened to, you know, so many people in COVID. And Hala, I know you've shared about

Starting point is 00:32:09 this, people who had to say goodbye to their loved ones over a device, over FaceTime, and where physicians were serving as priests and rabbis simply because family members could not, were not allowed into the hospitals, but I want to caution all of us and those who are suffering tonight with grief and loss and trauma. You know, you may have thought that, you know, your best friend is going to always be there and understand. And every time you talk to him or every time you talk to her, you leave feeling disappointed. Like they didn't get it. You know, they didn't get it or my sister's not getting it. And so what I really want to encourage you to do is pay attention to that part of you that feels that somebody is missing your grief and sorrow because it's sacred and you don't want

Starting point is 00:33:08 to share it with anyone who isn't able or willing or doesn't have the capacity to hold it and hold you in ways that really are constructive and nurturing and soft and tender in such a tough time. So don't grandfather anyone into being close to you unless they have earned the right to walk with you and next to you. We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors. What's up, young and profitors? I remember when I first started Yap, I used to dread missing important calls. I remember I lost a huge potential partnership because the follow-up thread got completely lost in my messy communication system.

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Starting point is 00:36:13 and start building something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at northwestregisteredagent.com slash yapfrey. Now for the remainder of the episode, I want to play some clips that showcase stories of others who have successfully overcome their trauma. First up is adventurer and author Colin O'Bready, who suffered a terrible accident. He was told he would never walk again. But with the help of his mother, he instilled a possible mindset, and he went on to accomplish many unthinkable feats. I found myself in Thailand many months into this adventure. And maybe because I was 22 and didn't have a fully four prefrontal cortex, I'm not sure.

Starting point is 00:36:55 But I saw some guys jumping a flaming jump rope, literally a kerosene-soaked jump rope. And I thought, gee, that looks like fun. So I jumped that rope. And in an instant, my life changed. It literally lit my body. They sprayed kerosene across my body. Lit my body. I'm fired in my neck.

Starting point is 00:37:10 Survival mode and kicked in when I needed most. I jumped into the ocean to extinguish the flames, but not before. about 25% of my body was severely burned. And I was in remote and rural Thailand. There was no ambulance ride. I had a moped ride down a dirt path through a run room nursing station. And I was on island so I couldn't, you know, get to a big city or anything like that. I had eight, you know, eight surgeries over the next week. There was a cat running around my bed in the ICU. I mean, it was a bad place to be for this circumstance. And the physical pain was immense. For sure, I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. But I will never forget the emotion.

Starting point is 00:37:45 pain of the moment the doctor walks in he looks me in the eyes and he says, hey, I hate to tell you this, but based on how badly your ligaments are burdened, your ankles, your knees, et cetera, I don't think you're ever going to walk again normally. You're never going to regain full mobility and range of motion. And that was just devastating. I think that would be devastating for any person at any age. But, you know, as a 22-year-old kid who was like very in his body as an athlete and whatever, it was just like my identity was just like in an instant. I made one mistake and like, boom, like, who am I without this physical capacity that I've kind of depended on throughout my life? The heroin to this story, really the turning point, the story is my incredible

Starting point is 00:38:23 mother. She shows up in Thailand, kind of finds me. It takes her four or five days to kind of track down. I'm in such a remote part of Thailand. It takes her a while to even find me, but she gets there in the hospital. And I can only imagine as a mother what it's like. She tells me now that she was crying in the hallways, pleading with the doctors for semblance of good news, not getting it, but she actually never showed me that fear at all. And this is, this is the crazy part of this story. Like, this is the turning point. This is a thing that changed my entire life. She instead came into my hospital room every single day with this huge smile on her face, this huge air of positivity daring me to dream about the future saying, look, you messed up. We're not going to

Starting point is 00:39:02 sugarcoat this. This is a bad situation. I'm freaked out. But life isn't over. What do you want to do on the other side of this? And she kind of pushed me on that and pushed me on that and pushed me on Finally, I closed my eyes and I said, I just visualized myself crossing the finish line of a triathlon. And again, turning point moment. She could have easily said, yeah, I said set a goal and look towards the future, but like the legs and the bandages and the blood, like maybe something more realistic. Triathlon, probably not in your future. But instead, she didn't do that. She was like, actually, great.

Starting point is 00:39:34 You know what? Let's start training right now. And she yells out to the doctor. She goes, hey, doc, hey doc. Can you bring in some weights? And the doctor's looking, what are you talking about? Yeah, yeah, yeah, my son's training for a triathlon now. So I have this picture of me.

Starting point is 00:39:46 I'm lifting 10-pound dumbbells. There's this Thai doctor looking at me like, this stupid American kid never had to walk in her and tell me he's training for a triathlon. This is ridiculous. But it was fixed in my mind. And definitely, no way I would have had that without my mother's daily support, not just in that moment.

Starting point is 00:40:01 It was several months I was in the Thai hospital, flew back to Oregon where I was from, I was in a wheelchair, hadn't taken a single step when I got home. She taught me how to walk again, one step at a time. Fast forward, I did want to get out of my parents' basement and get on with my life and start my career. So as you mentioned, that the one time I had a quote-unquote real job, I took a commodities trading job in Chicago.

Starting point is 00:40:23 I thought I'd work in the finance industry. And yeah, I was still banged up and bandaged shut when I took that job. But I started my career. But I signed up for the Chicago Triathlon to honor this goal. And just 18 months after being burned in this fire, I started this triathlon, started the race. completed the race, a mile of swimming, 25 miles of biking, 6.2 miles running, I get to the finish line, I cross this finish line, I can't believe it, I've overcome this big stepback and kind of proven to myself that I can be able, potty, and whole again. But to my complete another surprise,

Starting point is 00:40:54 I didn't actually just finish the race. I actually won the entire Chicago draft law, I'm placing first out of nearly 5,000 other participants on the day. I don't share that story as saying, like, oh, I guess that just means I'm a superhuman athlete and I can do whatever the hell I want, like whatever, that's not the point at all and that's not the way I feel about it. Way I feel about it is exactly what we were talking about before, is that I was living in a moment of fear, a moment of doubt, a moment of understandable limiting beliefs. And as you said, the doctor put that limiting belief on me. You are never going to walk again normally. A doctor says a diagnosis. It's very easy to just be like, yep, okay, like, that's the deal.

Starting point is 00:41:31 He's the expert. Right, he's the expert. But in the end, my mother opened the door to what I now call very fondly a possible mindset. She says, look, this is bad, but there's limitless possibilities on the other side of this. And so what I realize is all of us as humans. This is not just a story about me. This is a story about all seven billion of us on this planet is that we have reservoirs of untapped potential to achieve extraordinary things in our life. But it all starts with our mindset. And then we can cultivate and flex and develop that muscle. I love to say the most important muscle any of us have is the six inches between our ears. And we can flex and develop. that. The possibilities are limitless. And so it's weird to say, but sometimes our biggest setbacks

Starting point is 00:42:15 and our biggest hardships buried underneath of the stress and the anxiety and the fear and the pain of those moments are gold, our lessons. And I wouldn't be sitting here with 10 world records. It's crazy to say, but like all of my world records, I use those legs, but the legs after they had been burned, not before they had been burned, after they had been burned, because my mind was so much stronger on the other side. To further inspire you, I want to play a clip from author Alex Beneyan. When he came on the show, he shared the story of Maya Angelou, which whom he got to interview in person.

Starting point is 00:42:50 And she told him how she transformed her darkness into light. One of my favorite interviews was actually from Maya Angela. And those of us who are familiar with Maya Angelou's work know that she's one of the most celebrated poets in American history. She is one of the best-selling authors of all time. Her book I Know by the Cagebird Sings is still one of the top books. But what most people don't know is where her life came from. You know, Maya Angela was born in Stamps, Arkansas, or raised up in Stamps, Arkansas, at a time where the city, the town was strictly divided between blacks and whites.

Starting point is 00:43:29 And as a young black girl, you know, she grew up at a time where you could see, you know, crosses burning and lynchings and, you know, it was a very, very dark, time in American history. And at about age eight years old, she got raped by her mother's boyfriend. And when she told her brother what had happened a few days later, the brother, of course, did the right thing and told the mother. And the man was not only arrested, but a few days later, he was found dead behind a slaughterhouse. And what the eight-year-old Ma'Angelo thought, because that's how kids' brains

Starting point is 00:44:07 work sometimes is that she thought that her using her words caused this man to die. So she became a mute and didn't speak to anyone for years. And her life continued to unfold full of tremendous challenges. She faced tremendous domestic abuse. She faced teenage pregnancies. She lots and lots and lots of challenges, you know, face racism at every corner. But what's so amazing about Maya Angelou to me is not, the darkness she endured. It's how she turned that darkness into light. It's how she channeled

Starting point is 00:44:43 her experiences into works of art and transformed them into ways of healing for millions of people. And one of the things I asked her is if, in everyone in their own ways, goes through those cloudy times. I know I've been through it. You know, my dad got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and past a year later. I've had people I love go through, you know, bowel. of abuse and have to get out and I was asking her almost selfishly when you're stuck in the storm when you're stuck with the clouds what do you do and she said I want you to write she literally and she has a beautiful way of talking she goes young man I want you to write this down on your notepad right now and I said yeah of course and I said what do I do and she said I want you to

Starting point is 00:45:31 write this down this is a line I once heard from a country song and I think it answers your question perfectly. And I said, of course. And she goes, write this down. Every storm runs out of rain. Every storm runs out of rain. And you just have to get to work. And what's so powerful about Maya Maya Angelou is that because she had endured so much, she had this ability to help me get some perspective that, yeah, hard things happen, but they're impermanent. But you've got to get to work. And one of my other favorite things she said, so I interviewed her the year before she passed away.

Starting point is 00:46:20 And one of my final questions for her was, you know, what's your final piece of advice for the next generation? And she said, get yourself out of the box. Read Caesar Chavez, read Martin Luther King, read Nelson Mandela, read. read. You know, not everything will work for you, but try it out and see what does work. There's all this wisdom out in the world. And if we stay hold up in our little boxes, we'll never see all of the wisdom and all the riches the world has to offer.

Starting point is 00:46:54 And then she said this beautiful final line. She said, life is short no matter how long you live. Get to work. What a good way to end this yapsnacks. Like Maya Angelou says, life is short. Get to work. The sooner you can get out of a victim's mindset, the quicker you can live out your wildest dreams.

Starting point is 00:47:16 If you're going through something right now, I hope this episode gives you tips to get through your trauma and grief, or at least some assurance that you can. I'm rooting for you. And if you like this Yap Snacks, be sure to check out the full interviews. We're going to link all the interviews in the show notes. And don't forget to drop us a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform.

Starting point is 00:47:35 You guys can find me on Instagram at Yap with Hala or LinkedIn. Just search for my name. It's Hala Taha. And if you like watching your podcast, check us out on YouTube. Big thanks to our amazing Yap team. Stay young and profit. This is your podcast, Princess Halitaha, signing off.

Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Lessons From Nazi Camps, Near-Death Experiences, and Other Life Traumas | Dr. Edith Eger, Donald Miller, Benjamin Hardy, Amy Morin, Colin O’Brady, and Alex Banayan | Human Behavior | YAPSnacks

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