Embracing Her Tragic Paralysis as a Gift: Janine Shepherd #168

Highlights

• Her early, athletic years (3:56)
• The training bike ride that turned tragic (7:58)
• Making the choice to come back (11:48)
• Her recovery begins in “enrichment” and forgiveness (16:05)
• The gift of rock bottom (19:19)
• The importance of gratitude (25:37)
• “I was never going to the Olympics. My life was always laid out kike this” (28:50)
• The importance of reframing crucibles (33:14)
• Janine’s resilience checklist (38:45)
• Choosing not to let her crucibles define her (43:55)
• Her inspiration to become a pilot (47:12)
• Janine’s message of hope for listeners (53:44)

Transcript

Warwick Fairfax:

Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I’m Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Beyond The Crucible.

Janine Shepherd:

Wasn’t really till I got home from hospital, almost six months later, that I really realized, “Wow, this is pretty bad.” I was in a wheelchair, plaster body cast, I’d lost so much weight, there was nothing left of me, I was attached to a catheter bottle, I had to learn to use a catheter. They basically told me, “You’re a paraplegic, and this is the rest of your life.” And I got very depressed, and I wanted to give up.

And I remember, there was this moment where I was in my room, in my bed at night, and I just thought, “No, I want to get out of here.” And I can remember crawling onto the floor in my room and sobbing. And I can remember calling out into the darkness. And I always, I’m very careful with these words, “God,” “universe,” whatever it is that resonates with you. But I remember my prayer was, “God, just show me a way through this or show me a way out of this.” And that was this moment of sort of almost brings me to tears now when I think about, but this moment of choice, where I let go. I knew that holding on to the life that I had was causing me to suffer. And it was like I had a clean slate now. And that was a gift.

Gary Schneeberger:

Emerging from the other side of a horrific traffic accident in the six months of arduous recovery that followed, to discover she’s a paraplegic. That’s exactly the experience our guest this week, Janine Shepherd had in 1986. Hi, I’m Gary Schneeberger, co-host of the show. Shepherd was on track to represent her home nation of Australia in the Olympics as a cross country skier. But then, her dream quite literally crashed, when she was hit by a utility truck, while on a bicycle training exercise with her teammates. But as she explains to Warwick, her identity as Janine, the machine, the elite athlete, was not to be her destiny. She had another calling, learning to fly and to train others to be pilots and inspiring multitudes who have suffered tragedies and trials to embrace loss as their life’s greatest teacher. An in-demand speaker whose TED Talk has been viewed more than 2 million times, Shepherd calls herself a mirror to help people see their own defiance spirits. Her guiding philosophy, “Nothing comes easy, and if it did, it wouldn’t be worth having.”

Warwick Fairfax:

Well, Janine, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Just reviewing some of your material and your story, it’s just amazing. And I’m really looking forward to just your perspective, because I felt like we haven’t even spoken yet and I feel like I’m learning a lot already. And I’ve got, I’m sure, a lot more to learn. But I love the title of a book you wrote, Defiant: A Broken Body Is Not a Broken Person. My gosh, I love, love that title. That is just amazing. So obviously, there is the key crucible moment, but I’d love to just hear a bit about a young Janine, growing up, sort of hopes, dreams, maybe some of the threads maybe went a different direction, but maybe some of the threads went in the direction you’re going now, though maybe you didn’t realize it as a young Janine. But tell us, what was life like for Janine growing up?

Janine Shepherd:

Well, that’s a great question. I don’t often get asked about those early years. Well, I was an athlete. My whole life revolved around sport. I always thought I was going to the Olympics, and I’d gone from track and field, athletics, all sorts of sports. I played many, many sports and then, found myself in the unlikely sport for an Australian of cross country skiing. And people go, “Oh, is there snow in Australia?” And I go, “Yeah, there is.” And it’s actually ideal for cross country skiing. And cross country skiing was a marriage of my whole background of endurance sports, triathlon, marathon, things like that, and just grit. Cross country skiing is looked upon as being probably the toughest aerobic sport in the world. So when I found myself in cross country skiing, sort of later in life, when I was at really starting uni, and picked it up so quickly and thought, “This is my sport. This is the one.”

And I sort of climbed the ranks really quickly, became a member of the Australian Ski Team, had my sights set on the Olympics, was invited by the Canadian Ski Team coach to join up with their team in preparation for the Olympics. I was on top of the world. I felt like, “This is my destiny. Everything I’ve worked towards is getting me to the ’88 Winter Olympics in Calgary.” So that’s where I found myself. My whole life sort of building up to the Olympics, my background in sport, my background in endurance sports. Yeah, my nickname was Janine, the Machine. And I’ll tell you a funny story about that later. Because I trained harder, always trained with the guys. I just, yeah, I was a machine.

Warwick Fairfax:

So where did some of that adventurous machine-like qualities come from? From your parents, grandparents, friends? Not everybody grows up with that just the tenacity and “Whatever I do, I’m just going to go for it.” You just sounded like you had that adventurous… Some people are so afraid of risks and failing that they don’t try and do anything, but that did not seem to be who you were. Where did that sense of machine-like adventurous go for it spirit come from?

Janine Shepherd:

Well, I think I’ve always pushed myself, and my early life was in Dural. You probably know where that is. It’s sort of considered my grandfather came from, they had a peach orchard. My grandfather actually was a POW. I remember listening to a recording of his once, talking about how we had a lot of similarities, and he was a Japanese prisoner of war, built the railway. I feel like a lot of that, what my grandfather, that defiance and the stories that he had about wartime, I can sort of relate to a lot of that.

And so, I think my parents, we lived a very sort of a frugal life. They weren’t in any way wealthy. We lived in Dural. We lived on property from a peach orchard. And I think a lot of that was just that you got to really work hard. You got to just to get ahead. And I had that mentality. And I think I had, I guess, my gift was in sport and physical abilities. And so, I just always thought that was how I defined myself. My body was my strength. And that was a really important part of my story, because I lost the thing that I thought defined myself. So it was the perfect experience for me to lose that.

Warwick Fairfax:

Wow, that’s an amazing. Well, let’s push pause there. We’ll have to come back to that, because that’s an incredible statement of what you just said. Talk about that day in 1986. From what I understand, you were training in the Blue Mountains, which my parents had a cabin there in Blackheath, so I’m pretty familiar with the Blue Mountains. It’s a beautiful place. So talk about that. You were training one day in the Blue Mountains, and you just tell us about that day.

Janine Shepherd:

Yeah, so we were on a bike ride with my teammates. There were probably maybe 30 of us. We did it a few times a year. We rode from Sydney up to the Blue Mountains, which is about a six hour ride, pretty grueling up through the hills, which I loved. I always loved the hills, trained on the hills. It’s my catchphrase, “Love the hills.” And we’d been on our bikes for around five and a half hours. And I hadn’t been well leading up to that day. In fact, it’s funny, I always look back and think, “Oh, was I meant to go on that ride?” I’d been at uni, I had been overtraining, I hadn’t been well, I’d had some blood tests, and I probably shouldn’t have gone. But I dragged myself out of bed, and all my mates were going. So off we went, and I was really tired.

I remember I was on that hill thinking, “Oh, this is really hard work.” And I just remember looking up, seeing the sun shining in my face. And then, that’s it. That’s my last memory. And I was run over by a speeding truck. That’s my crucible moment. That’s the moment that changed my life. And suffered extensive injuries. I actually have no memory of the accident. The doctor said I had post-traumatic amnesia. And the reason I don’t remember is I left my body, and I broke my neck and my back in six places, broke five ribs on my left side, my arm, my collarbone, bones in my feet, lost about five liters of blood. I shouldn’t have survived. The speed that the driver was going. And some people saw there’s something flying through the air, which was my body, and they stopped and ran back.

And couple of guys in a utility truck had gotten out, and they were about to lift me up and put me in a car. And this lady, called Elizabeth, who’s my soulmate, stopped them, and she just got blankets or pieces of clothes and put them over me. And the ambulance was there very quickly. And had she not done that, I probably wouldn’t, well, wouldn’t have walked, wouldn’t have survived. But she just sat with me. And that’s an incredible story too. And I have since connected with the ambulance driver that picked me up as well. And he said, “She’s not dying on my shift.” And he got to the hospital, I only found this out fairly recently, the United Kingdom. And of course, I turned up, and this was, he’d never seen anything like this. And Gary, the paramedic, had said, “Well, should we call the helicopter from Sydney?”

And he said, “No, she’s not going to make it.” And so, Gary went and pulled out his mate, who was a surgeon at the time in theater and said, “Please come and see this girl.” And this doctor handed over, came out of theater, came into emergency, looked at me and said, “I’m taking over. Stand aside,” to this young doctor, who was out of his depth and just, they called the helicopter up. They got blood flown up from Sydney. They flew me down to a specialist spinal unit. And that’s where I stayed for the next six months. But if it hadn’t also been all of these sort of moments that were aligning, Gary, pulling his mate out of theater, coming to see me, all of these things, there were all these people that sort of intervened along the way. And had it not been for them, I certainly wouldn’t be here.

I do remember leaving my body. I do remember having, what I call, we like to say near-death experience, I say it was a death experience, because I had this sort of moment of choice. “Do I go back to my body? That body is broken, it can’t serve me anymore.” And the really interesting thing about that, and people ask me about that, all the time, people are asking about, “What’s it like? What happened? What did you see?” And I say, “Well, I didn’t come back to teach people about that. I came back to teach people how to live in this life.” And I had to learn that too. Making a choice to come back to a paralyzed, broken body, as I said, was probably the thing that I needed to experience.

And I needed it, because loss is a great teacher. And I always say, “It doesn’t just show us who we are, it shows us who we’re not.” The lesson of that was, I’m not my body. I remember opening my eyes and seeing my father’s face and thinking, just being utterly confused. “This is not what I wanted.” And I guess that’s where the journey began, the journey of disability, of really coming to terms with that loss and the grief. And even though I spent almost six months in hospital, and that was paralyzed, flat on my back, looking up through a mirror that was hanging above me. Actually, it was a very challenging situation, but it was also one of the most enriching experiences that I’ve ever had. And it taught me a lot about myself and about life and about other people, and really stripped me of any sense of entitlement.

Warwick Fairfax:

Wow. And I definitely want to go there. But obviously, there initially must have been some anger, frustration. One question occurs to me, because one of the Resilience Checklists, you’ve got forgiveness, obviously, one of the big ones up there, maybe number one, is forgive that young guy in the truck, that was driving too fast and was doing… Sometimes it’s not people’s fault, sometimes it really is. And sure seemed like it was that person. So I’m assuming you must have given this checklist, how did you manage to forgive? There’s acceptance of your situation, which is tough enough, but how did you manage to forgive that person?

Janine Shepherd:

That’s a great question. And my Resilience Checklist, which is what I say, the 12 steps that I actually took to recover. I’ll just get to forgiveness in a sec. When I was in hospital, I wasn’t really angry. There was one particular time where I got very, very depressed, when I thought I was counting down the weeks till I got out of bed. And then, the doctors came and said, “Well, actually, no, we’re going to start the clock again. It’s another two months.” And I just felt like giving up. And they did something was very wise and clever, which is they moved me next to someone who was much more injured than I was. So they moved me next to a young girl called Maria. We were similar in age, and she was a complete quadriplegic, who’d been in the back of a car that had had an accident.

I could never complain, because I looked at her and she was in a much worse situation than I was. And she was also an incredible human being. She was always smiling, always happy. And she taught me a lot about what it means to accept. And we became great friends. So that also came, we talk about these interventions, things that have happened in my life just at the right time, that have showed me and taught me a lesson. And so, it wasn’t really till I got home from hospital, almost six months later, that I really realized, “Wow, this is pretty bad.” I was in a wheelchair, plaster body cast, I’d lost so much weight, there was nothing left of me, I was attached to a catheter bottle, I had to learn to use a catheter. They basically told me, “You’re a paraplegic, and this is the rest of your life.”

And I got very depressed, and I wanted to give up. And I remember there was this moment where I was in my room, in my bed at night, and I just thought, “No, I want to get out of here.” And I can remember crawling onto the floor in my room and sobbing. And I can remember crawling out into the darkness. And I’m very careful with these words, “God,” “universe,” whatever it is that resonates with you. But I remember my prayer was, “God, just show me a way through this or show me a way out of this.” And that was this moment of sort of almost brings me to tears now when I think about, but this moment of choice, where I let go. I knew that holding on to the life that I had was causing me to suffer. And it was like I had a clean slate now.

And that was a gift, because my life revolved around sport and training and that’s who I was. And now, it was like, “Okay, this is a rebirth, a new beginning.” And it wasn’t until I got to that point, that letting go, that my life literally changed. It was as if my eyes were open to a new way of seeing. And of course, that’s the moment when, after that, when I was outside and an airplane flew over, and I looked up and thought, “Okay, if I can’t walk, then maybe I can fly.” It was ridiculous, but that was the letting go.

And part of that, and I’ll tie that into forgiveness, is realizing that, by holding onto my anger towards the driver, who was suffering? I was suffering. So I did some exercises, I wrote a forgiveness letter, I posted it to him, even though I didn’t have his address. And that was really symbolic for me. And I always say, “You don’t forgive to let someone off the hook, you forgive to let yourself off the hook.” That’s one of the very practical things that I did to, well, let us both off the hook really, but there was a hard one, that was the black belt forgiveness. Because he was charged. He was charged with negligent driving, and he got an $80 fine.

Gary Schneeberger:

Oh my.

Warwick Fairfax:

Seriously? $80 for what has put you through or anybody through? $80 for a six month body cast and permanent disability? That’s just, yeah, doesn’t seem like justice. But I guess the law is the law. But wow.

Janine Shepherd:

And I thank him now. I know his name, and it’s taught me a lot. I can’t imagine a better way to learn about forgiveness than the person that ran you over and changed your life forever, which now it’s been a gift. It is a gift. It always has been. But I like to say to people, I talk about WTGIT, what’s the gift in this? And there’s always a gift.

Gary Schneeberger:

One of the things that you said to me when we first talked comes to mind now, and that is, you said, as you were just describing what you were describing, how difficult that was, how painful that was, how forgiveness was difficult, how you were in this facing this uncertain future, you said that you realized, in that moment, that maybe rock bottom was a great place to start figuring out what your life was going to be. That was a turning point. And I want listeners to both hear what you said to me off air and then, hear what you say now. Rock bottom can be a gift. Rock bottom can be the turning point. It can be Go on the monopoly board of life. And that’s what you experienced, right?

Janine Shepherd:

Yeah, absolutely. Rock bottom is the perfect place, the only place, at times, to start. And I think we can go through life and we have all these things that the sort of scaffolding that we place around ourselves, the way that we define ourselves. We define ourselves through our jobs, through our relationships, through the things we own, our car, our house. And when you lose all of those things, that’s when the inner journey really starts. That’s when you get to ask the really important questions. “Well, who am I? What is my purpose in life?” And these are really important questions that we don’t often get to the point where we ask those questions, because we’ve got such busy lives, things around us that we think form our identity. And so, as I said, with sport and my body, with this strong body, I really had to ask those questions to dive deep.

And it was a gift, because I realized, my TED Talk, the original title was, You’re Not Your Body, it’s now, TED, when they put it on their site, changed it to A broken body isn’t a broken person. But when I was speaking with Mike Lundgren, the curator of TEDxKC, and he said, “Wow, what an incredible story. What’s the most important thing you learned?” And I sort of thought, “Hmm, all right, well, I guess the most important question is I’m not my body.” And that’s important, because we’re not our jobs, we’re not our relationships, we’re not our home, we’re not our car, we’re not anything that we think defines us. And when we build our identity on things, it’s a very slippery slope.

Warwick Fairfax:

Wow. There’s so much wisdom in what you’re saying, it’s hard to know which thread to pull on. But I try and pull on as many as I can. It’s just amazing, because these are things that come up from time to time. It’s just I’m both learning, but just some of the things you’re saying about forgiveness, you forgive, because you are kind of worth it. One of the phrases we talk about is “Lack of forgiveness is like drinking poison. It destroys you.” And so, by forgiving, you get out of prison, stop drinking poison, and it’s exactly what you are saying. And you use the word “choice,” which is such a good word. You can’t choose some of the consequences of what happened to you, but you can choose how you choose to react to that and reframe it, which is what you’ve done magnificently. You talk about blessing. I have a feeling you probably learnt these things a lot quicker than I did, because some of these concepts are more recent ones for me.

Janine Shepherd:

One of the things about my speaking is I don’t stand up and say, “Life is great. You can do anything.” My message is, life is tough. Life is really tough. Life is filled with hills. Once you accept that, then the fact that it has hills doesn’t matter anymore. You can sort of roll up your sleeves and go, “Okay, well, this is what it’s about. I have this awareness, and now, I know what it’s all about.” And yeah, we’re all going through it. We all have our crucibles, we all have our challenges, we’ve got to stay in our lane. Comparison is a thief of joy. And that’s one of the challenges that we have living in an age of social media that we have. And talking about my TED Talk, I’m a great fan of Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist, who wrote about the Hero’s Journey. So my TED Talk, which you’ll see has five chairs on stage, is actually created around Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey.

And each chair, when I was planning my talk, each chair represented a challenge or a struggle and an insight, until the final insight “I’m not my body.” So I’ve actually done workshops at, I call it the chair five chair workshop, where I get people to actually think about where they are now, which chair are they on? Are they on the chair of acceptance? And looking at whatever struggle they’ve got. Because you see, life is about patterns. We’re continually going through these challenges. The hills never stop. You get over one hill. “Oh, great.” It’s not like, “Okay, that’s it, I’ve done it.” It’s like, “Okay, the next one’s coming.” And once you see the pattern, then it becomes almost like a game. You start to sort of go, “Yeah, I get this. I know where I am now. Okay, what are the tools that I used? What are the tools in my toolkit? What can I use? Which one will I pull out now?”

And so, it’s really fun to look at it like that, to look at everything is, as I think, Gary, we talked about this, things don’t happen to us, they happen for us. So “What can I learn from this? What tools have I developed?” And that’s where my PhD is based on that at the moment, the resilience course that I wrote, based on the steps that I took in my recovery. And so, I’m even sitting here looking at them now, going, “Okay, now which one can I use now?” And I also, this morning, actually, I was listening to your interview with my dear friend, Dr. Suzy Green.

Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah, she’s fabulous.

Janine Shepherd:

Yeah. In fact, I’ve got a picture behind us, you probably can’t see it, which is, from Suzy, a strengths chart. So my resilience course is based on positive psychology interventions. And the last step on this course is gratitude. And I look back, when I was in hospital, gratitude wasn’t even a thing. And now, it’s the most highly researched aspect of positive psychology. But I decided, very early on, that every single person that came in to visit me, I’d be grateful, and I would thank them for coming in. And what I didn’t know what we know now is that gratitude changes our brains. And there’s a lot of positive psychology interventions around gratitude. But that simple act of saying “thank you” and being grateful allowed me to lie in that hospital bed for almost six months. And it’s my go-to tool even today. Every morning, “What am I grateful for?”

Warwick Fairfax:

It’s so important. One of the things I’m thinking of is, your whole life, you trained as an Olympic athlete, there was this determination, I love the phrase you used, Janine, the Machine, as I’m thinking back, none of that was… Well, the core of that was never lost. The physical part, but Janine, the Machine just moved in a different direction. “Yeah, okay, I’m injured. Great. There’s a big hill. I love hills. Let’s power up the hill. Okay, there’s a challenge. I can do this.” So I just feel like that inherent training wasn’t lost. You thought you were training for the Olympics, you were training for the Olympics, it was just a different Olympics, not one you entered into, nor would anybody want to sign up up for. But does that make sense that your determination, your training, the Janine Machine mentality, you used every part of that to come back from your crucible and to get to a point of gratitude, does that kind of make sense?

Janine Shepherd:

Oh, absolutely. And along the journey, I’ve learned so many lessons. I’ve dived into acceptance and commitment therapy. I’ve learned mindfulness training and meditation, and I’ve learned about letting go. I’ve learned about loosening my grip on the things that I think define me all my life. Every single day is a challenge when you have a disability. Every day, you wake up and you get out of bed. It’s like, “Okay, I need to pull out these tools in my toolkit,” because it is challenging. And I do laugh, that I have a friend that came around recently and said, “You know what? I think you’ve moved on from Janine the Machine.”

Warwick Fairfax:

Oh, really?

Janine Shepherd:

And gave me a new nickname, which is hilarious, and calls me Janini Linguini.

Warwick Fairfax:

Really?

Janine Shepherd:

Which I thought, “Yeah, okay, I’m going to embrace my inner Janinin Linguini.” Linguini, which is flexible and goes with the flow. And so, that’s my new nickname now, Janini Linguini.

Warwick Fairfax:

There you go. That is a good one.

Gary Schneeberger:

I suspect that Warwick’s going to get you up in the air here soon. Before we get you, as a pilot, again, we do pre-interview calls with all guests, just so we have the ability to ask informed questions. And I have my notes from our pre-interview call right here. And I wrote this question down when we first started talking, to ask you, when you think back, you were on the trajectory to go to the Olympics, and now, you’re doing what you’re doing now, as a speaker, as an educator, about resilience. And I asked you, “Is there any way that you can compare it? Is this more gratifying?”

And here’s what you said to me. I’m going to read it right here to make sure that I got it right. “I was never going to the Olympics,” you said. “My life was always laid out like this.” That, talking about, and we’ll give you listener, where you can find this Resilience Checklist, that shows someone who’s completed the 12 steps, who’s not just completed them, but had to learn them, had to then teach them, that’s a pretty bold statement to make. Obviously, you stand by that statement, that your life was never about the Olympics, right?

Janine Shepherd:

Oh, yeah. No, it wasn’t. And I’m a believer that we have a destiny, that we have a sacred contract in life, and we need to get onto that path. And when we’re on that path, we just know it. It’s this intuitive internal knowing of “This is what I’m meant to do.” And as hard as it’s been, these are the experiences that I needed to have. And I also believe that we’re not given anything without also being given the strength to rise to the challenge.

Warwick Fairfax:

I just want to dwell on that thought that Gary mentioned. I was really struck by that, when you said, “I was never going to the Olympics. My life was always laid out like this.” That’s reframing and acceptance at an incredible level, as I try to put that on in my life, saying, “Well, how would that apply to me?” And our probably listeners are thinking, “Gee, what would that mean for me?” And the translation for me would be I was never going to be in a leading position to be in charge of John Fairfax Limited, even though, in theory, in terms of shares and various other things, in theory, if I’d waited long enough, I probably would’ve been, just objectively. But yet, reframing says there was always a greater purpose or different purpose, and being a person of faith and from my theological construct that God is sovereign and he has a sovereign will, and despite my stupidity and naivety, if he wanted it to happen, it would’ve.

But it was always the plan for it not to happen doesn’t remove any of the stupid choices I made. But as I look back on it, I’m very grateful, because I’ve been married over 30 years to my wife, who’s American. I have three adult kids. I love what I do at Beyond the Crucible. My kids are all hardworking, humble, thriving people. That would’ve been really tough for them growing up in a wealthy background in Sydney. So I look at my life, and I feel incredibly blessed. The crucible, it’s a different crucible. Every once in a while, there’s a little twinge. “Gosh, look what I did. And gosh, how stupid was I?” But yeah, there’s a sense of acceptance and blessing. But that notion, I’d never thought about it that way, saying, “I was never going to be in charge of John Fairfax Limited.”

That’s with the application of your principle, if you will. That’s a powerful principle that I think that a lot of people can use. Thinking, if you believe in destiny, “What happened was my destiny. How can I use this? What’s the meaning? And what’s the purpose?” You and Suzy, I’m sure, know a lot more about this than I do. But when you find meaning and purpose out of a crucible, that is a path to some degree of psychological healing. And that’s, every day of your life, that’s what you do in your own life and for others, try to help people see gratitude, meaning, and purpose in the crucible. Would that be part of the center of how you get back from your worst day, if you will?

Janine Shepherd:

Yeah. For me, it’s about that whole idea of, when you can’t change what’s happening on the outside, you’re given the opportunity to change what’s happening on the inside. You have this sort of circle of influence. “What can I influence? What’s in my control?” And I realized that, for me, lying paralyzed in a spinal ward, I couldn’t change what was happening to my body, but I could change my reaction. I could simply decide to be thankful and grateful to everyone that came in to visit me. And the interesting thing about that is it actually is, as I said, one of the most research aspects of positive psychology now, that gratitude actually changes our brains, makes us more optimistic.

We know that, when we’re optimistic, we’re better problem solvers, we have better perspective, we’re happier, we’re healthier, we flourish. So these are actually concrete things that we can do. And deciding to reframe things is also a really important aspect of positive psychology, making the choice to say, “Okay, it didn’t happen to me, it happened for me.” My belief that we do have a certain destiny, and I’ve had enough sort of inner spiritual experiences to confirm that to me, that I am doing what I was meant to do, was never about the Olympics. It was about learning to live fully and fearlessly in this life right now.

Warwick Fairfax:

And I think what you’re saying is, you talked about identity, is that, as wonderful as the Olympics are, it just felt like you realized there’s a lot more to Janine Shepherd than being an Olympic elite athlete, which is wonderful, but there’s a lot more to you than just that. And I don’t mean to demean that at all, but I don’t know if that makes any degree of sense that who you are as a human, you have so many gifts and experience, and our identity shouldn’t be in one thing. It’s like, does it seem a bit constricting? “Oh, who’s Janine?” “Olympic athlete?” “Well, yeah, but there’s a lot more to me than just that.” Does that make sense? What have you learned about identity in that whole experience?

Janine Shepherd:

Absolutely, and that’s why so many elite athletes struggle when they give up their sport, because they’ve attached themselves, “That’s who I am.” And as long as you do that, you never really get to ask the questions, you never really get to experience the essence of who we are, spiritual beings, having a human experience, you never really get there. And so, that’s why loss has been a great teacher for me, particularly losing the thing that I thought defined who I was. And also, and there’s a lot of research around this too, altruism and getting out of your own story. And I think, for me, speaking, writing, sharing my story, gave me the opportunity to hear other people’s stories.

One of my favorite things when I give a presentation is I’m usually there for hours talking to people afterwards, as they share their story with me. And very early on, when I started speaking, I realized, as people shared their stories, “Well, wow, I’m not alone. I’m not the only one going through stuff.” So it really got my story out of that “Why me” into the “Why not me?” I realized that we’re all going through something, and there’s a great healing that happens from sharing our stories, hearing other people’s stories, and getting out of our own smaller story into a larger human story.

Warwick Fairfax:

And I feel like there’s sort of almost drops of grace as people, I’m sure, many people have come up to you and said, “Janine, I didn’t go through what you went through. I had a different crucible, but what you shared helped me, it gave me hope.” Now, you’re not doing this to get the thank yous or the drops of grace, but it’s an inevitable byproduct that says, “Okay, I’m seeing a bit more of some grand plan or some more purpose.” Does that make sense that, when people say “thank you,” that, obviously, that’s a gift, but it doesn’t make everything go away? Clearly, there are certain things that will never go away, but there’s a bit of element of healing. Do you find that, when people just show their gratitude to you?

Janine Shepherd:

Absolutely. When someone comes up and says “thank you” to me, I say “thank you” to them, because it’s a circle. We’re all giving and taking. And what I say is that I just carry a message when I’m on stage. I like to think that I’m holding up a mirror, so that people can see their own lives. And I think that’s the thing about my storytelling or sharing on stage, which I tell a story, I weave a lot of interventions into that, that people can take away and use in their lives. But I think what I do is I get people to go, “Oh, yeah,” and see a part of their life reflected in my story.

For example, looking at the chairs, “Where am I now?” And I guess there is that real sense of hope that comes from knowing that someone’s been through something similar, and they’ve survived. So yeah, I think that we’re all helping each other. There’s that great sort of circle of influence that we’re giving and taking and giving and taking. And that’s what happens with storytelling. We are storytellers, all of us, from ancient times sitting around a fire and sharing our stories. That’s how we learn, that’s how we grow, that’s how we get insight, and that’s how we get healing.

Warwick Fairfax:

As I’m looking at some of the things in your Resilience Checklist, you’ve got the five principles, you were never alone. The universe always says yes. You are the producer, director, and actor in the story of your life. Choice is the most powerful tool you have. This too shall pass. And then, the 12 steps at the back, there’s so much wisdom. Maybe this is an obvious question, but when you look back at what you went through, is it possible that Janine Shepherd would’ve had a fraction of this wisdom without that experience? It almost feels like you have Olympic level wisdom that came with an Olympic level crucible, if you will. Nobody wants to get wisdom that way, but it sure seems like… Is there any way that you could have had the depth of wisdom that you have now without what you went through? Hope there’s a way to answer that question without seeming too arrogant. But I do believe you have wisdom. Let’s just take it as written as the lawyers say, let’s enter into evidence that Janine Shepherd has a lot of wisdom. Let’s just make that assumption. You get the question.

Janine Shepherd:

Well, thank you. I appreciate it. I think we all have it. We all have an innate wisdom. It’s just tapping into it. And I think that’s what I work on every day is trying to understand the things in life that get in the way. It’s like a dirty window. You just have to clean that window sometimes to see outside. And I think that we have so much stuff around us that gets in the way of really understanding who we are at the deepest level. And I’m a long-term meditator. To me, meditating changes our lives, because it gives us an opportunity to just quieten the mind and just to drop into something much, much deeper. And as long as we’re scrolling on our phones and reading the news, it’s just always about the outside. And to me, life is always about the inner journey.

And had I not had my accident, well, as I said, I can’t even go there, because Gary, I was always going to have my accident. That was my destiny in this life. And it’s a rich and meaningful life, and it is a blessing. And every single person that I’ve met along this way on this journey, that has shared my story, one thing I’ll take from this is that everybody has something. Everybody has some crucible. And I know that, because I’ve stood and I’ve listened to so many stories. And I just think that’s what connects us all.

Warwick Fairfax:

So I guess what I’m getting at is I’m not sure that you would’ve had the same level of wisdom that you do now without the accident. It’s sort of like, it was sort of a catalyst, a turbocharge, maybe the wisdom was all there to be harnessed, but you still got to harness it. You still got to capture it, bring it in. You’re like fishing. The fish are there. But I feel like maybe one of the greatest gifts about what you went through is the level of wisdom you have. It’s hard… Obviously, there’s no way of knowing what the alternative path would’ve been. You would’ve maybe different kind of wisdom. But one of the key gifts from my frame of reference in a crucible is the opportunity to have tremendous wisdom, tremendous learning that comes out of it. Does that kind of make some degree of sense?

Janine Shepherd:

Absolutely makes sense. And it’s hard fought. You don’t learn these things without having to go through the dark night of the soul. And I’ve been through many of those. I feel like my accident, which people know about, that was one thing. But I went through a marriage breakdown. I was a single mom for 10 years. I lost my home, moved to another country, with nothing behind me. I’ve had all these different sorts of challenges. And I think that’s one thing about my story. And in my latest memoir, Defiant, I write about those different experiences. And in many ways, they were actually harder than my accident, because it involved more than just me.

Being a single mom to three kids, that was probably one of the most challenging experiences of my life. Feeling that my marriage had broken down, there was a sort of sense of guilt and failure around that. So all of these crucibles, these dark nights of the soul, nothing comes easily. And if it did, it wouldn’t be worth having. If everything was just, “Hmm, okay, I’ve learned that,” it just wouldn’t have that same the potent sort of sense of meaning that it has when you’ve really experienced it and appreciated for what it is. All of those steps on the checklist, I look back on those, and I can see where they came from and how I learned those things and how I use them every day in my life.

Warwick Fairfax:

I feel like maybe the last word on this that occurs to me is coming back to that “choice” word, you made a choice in the phrases we used not to be defined by your worst day. You made a choice not to be defined by the crucible of the accident, of divorce, and being a single mom. Each one of those required choices. You made a choice. Not only would you not be defined by them, but you would seek to learn wisdom from them, seek to be grateful for them, and seek to see them as a gift. That all came with a choice. And after the choice came a lot of hard work.

But that, to me, is the key lesson point for listeners is we’re, in some senses, sum of our choices, a choice to forgive, not necessarily condone, a choice to accept, a choice to see it as a gift, a choice to see that we’re put on this earth for meaning and purpose, to serve others or serve some greater good, whatever that means for you. We’re the sum of our choices, and that’s kind of why you really teach, is make those choices. Take those 12 steps of acceptance, forgiveness, compassion, optimism, values, strengths, hope, meaning, humor, which I love, connection, mindfulness, gratitude. And so, you are really teaching people to make positive choices, to help use what they’ve been through to be grateful and to use it in service of others and a greater good. It’s just really inspiring. So thank you for what you do. It’s incredibly uplifting.

Janine Shepherd:

Well, I’m grateful to be given the opportunity. And it’s funny, when you talk about choice, I don’t know if you know the spiritual teacher, Carolyn Myss, and she talks about choice being our greatest power, because even whether you agree or not even greater than love, she said, because you’ve got to choose to love. So choice is very powerful. And for people out there that are struggling and feeling like they have no choice, that’s also okay, because the world, the last few years, has been incredibly difficult and challenging. But even at my very lowest moments, I’ve always felt like I chose to come back to this body.

That was a choice. That was the ultimate choice. So I’m going to make it count. I’m going to find out why, and I’m going to create something of this life that, as difficult and challenging as it’s been, it was a choice. And interestingly, I think, even though I remember clearly from my NDE, my near-death experience, and the choice to come back, we’ve all made that choice to be in this body. Warwick, you made the choice to be in this body you’re in now. Gary, you’ve made the choice to be in the body you got now. So you just ask the question, “Okay, so now what?”

Gary Schneeberger:

What’s great about that, you just built, Janine, a runway for me to ask this question. And it’s appropriate that it’s a runway, because…

Janine Shepherd:

I’m a pilot.

Gary Schneeberger:

There you go. So the part of the story that we’ve not gotten to, because this is so both inspirational and equipping, is, while you were in that bed, while you were in recovery, something happened, you saw something above you, and that changed the trajectory, one would say, could say, the flight path of your life. Talk about that a little bit.

Janine Shepherd:

Well, it did. That’s when I decided, in a wheelchair, that, if I couldn’t walk, I’d fly. And I was lifted up into an airplane, and everyone thought I was crazy. “Well, shouldn’t be learning to walk?” And I went on and I became a pilot. I got my private license, my commercial license, which was crazy, because I’m actually a paraplegic, I’m a walking paraplegic. I became a flying instructor, an aerobatics flying instructor, commercial pilot. It was sort of crazy and unlikely. And flying is a great metaphor for life. My PhD title actually is, If I Can’t Walk, I’ll Fly. And obviously, it’s physical, it’s spiritual, it’s metaphorical. For me, flight is the ultimate freedom. So it was perfect for me, because it’s such a great spiritual metaphor about freedom. And flying really gave me my life back. Taught me a lot about, well, here I am, I’m a paraplegic, and I’m teaching people to fly upside down. I am not my body.

And I learned a lot about flying. One of the formulas that we teach people in flying, one of the first formulas, is attitude plus power equals performance. It’s actually what flies an airplane from a 747 to a glider, it’s a formula, mathematical formula, that doesn’t fail. So I talk a lot about that in my presentations. I talk about attitude, because the attitude is with the picture of the airplane in relationship to the horizon. And I talk about our attitude, “What is our attitude to life?” Our attitude is, what I say, the story of me, built on beliefs and opinions and judgments that we’ve collected throughout our lives, that we don’t realize how firmly we are stuck to those things, which are just things. It’s not who we are. So once we get to the point where we can sort of unpack that suitcase and pull out those things and go, “Okay, well is this keeping me stuck? Is this helping or hindering me?”

And a lot of the time, when we are really struggling in life, we go back to our early childhood and our training, that has formed our attitude. And once we get to the point where we get to this sort of choiceless awareness, where we can observe things and look at things and look at them in a very objective way and be curious and go, “Hmm, where did that come from?” Then we can start to unpack it and create a new belief or a new mindset that serves us going forward, into a much healthier sense of who we are.

Gary Schneeberger:

That sounds you heard, listener, you’ve heard me say it before, but not many times with a pilot, and a pilot who flies upside down and teaches people how to fly upside down, that sounds you heard was the captain turning on the fasten seatbelt sign, indicating that we’re about to descend the plane of this conversation. But we’re not there yet. Before we do that, Janine, I have a couple things I want to do with you. One, who was the friend that gave you the new nickname?

Janine Shepherd:

Oh, my friend, Jim gave me the nickname, Janini Linguini.

Gary Schneeberger:

All right. With apologies to Jim, I thought of a new nickname as you were talking. Because Janine the Machine was the old nickname. Based on what you’ve talked about, to help you offer people to hope you offer people, I’m going to think of you as Janine the Canteen, offering a cup of cold water to people who need a sip after they slip. That’s the way I’m going to think about Janine Shepherd from this moment on.

Janine Shepherd:

That’s cool. Everything rhymes.

Gary Schneeberger:

Yeah, there you go. That’s the old writer in me. Before we turn it back over to Warwick and the plane is on the ground, I would be remiss if I did not let you talk about where listeners can find out more about you and the services you offer, and especially this Resilience Checklist that Warwick’s been talking about. In fact, what you’re going to talk about, at your website, there’s also a resilience quiz that you can take for free, which I did, and I was happy to find out I’m a Weeble when I took that quiz.

Janine Shepherd:

Oh, good.

Gary Schneeberger:

Yes. So where can people find out more about Janine Shepherd online?

Janine Shepherd:

Well, I love being a Weeble. My girlfriend told me “Weebles wobble, but they never fall down.”

Gary Schneeberger:

Yeah, indeed.

Janine Shepherd:

So good for being a Weeble. Well, they can go to my website, janineshepherd.com. They can do the free resilience test. They can follow me on LinkedIn, on Instagram, Janine_Shepherd, I think it is on Instagram. Look, I don’t do Twitter very much to be honest. But really, Instagram, LinkedIn, website. And I would say, go and look at my TED Talk. Just put in Janine Shepherd TED. And that’ll give people a good idea of my story and what I do.

Gary Schneeberger:

And because my last name is Schneeberger, which no one can spell or pronounce, because Warwick has a name that has a silent W in the middle, how do they spell Shepherd? Because there are a couple ways. So when they’re doing the search, how do they spell your last name?

Janine Shepherd:

That’s a good question, because people always spell it incorrectly.

Gary Schneeberger:

That’s right.

Janine Shepherd:

So Janine, J-A-N-I-N-E, and Shepherd is S-H-E-P-H-E-R-D. And Instagram is Janine_Shepherd, LinkedIn Janine Shepherd, Twitter Janine Shepherd, website. And stay tuned. We’ve got lots of exciting things happening. We are, at the moment, actually about to sign off on a screenplay for my latest book, Defiant. We have a wonderful female crew working on the screenplay, director, Claire McCarthy, who’s one of the top female directors in the world. So stay tuned for the movie of Defiant. I’ll let you guys know.

Gary Schneeberger:

Warwick, take it away.

Warwick Fairfax:

Well, thank you, Janine. I really appreciate you being here. Kind of one question that we often end on is, Beyond the Crucible, we have many listeners, and there could be some out there, who, today, might be their worst day, maybe some terrible crucible’s happened to them and they’re not seeing much hope. As one recent podcast guest said, “The bottom of the pit was so deep he couldn’t see the bottom. There was an endless bottom that could only get worse, no light, just worse,” which is an attitude, when he was at the bottom of the pit. So for those that may be today, may not be a great day, maybe their worst day, what’s a word of hope you would offer somebody in that situation?

Janine Shepherd:

I know there’s going to be a lot of people out there that are struggling right now, and what’s really important is to be compassionate with yourself. When I have a bad day, and I still have bad days, I always have a little go-to list of things that I enjoy, that are a part of practicing self-compassion, whether it’s being out in nature, listening to music, having a hot bath, being with friends, do those things. If you’re having a bad day, do those things that nurture you, your sense of who you are. And of course, my go-to exercise, which is gratitude, and we know that it does change our brains. We also know, from neuroscience, that you don’t actually have to find anything.

If you think, “Oh, there’s nothing to be grateful for,” just asking the question, “What am I grateful for?” starts the change. If you can do that for even every night or morning, get up in the morning and finish your day with “What am I grateful for?” And make it tangible. Think of the things, like, “Well, today, I called a friend and had a really good conversation. There was some agency in that, because I had to make that decision and that choice to pick up the phone.” Write this down, write these things down, keep track of it, journal, keep your journal for 21 days, and then, just, at the end of that time, really check in and say, “Well, how am I now?” There’s always something. I’m a firm belief that there are tools out there that we can use that can help us and give us hope, even on our darkest days.

Gary Schneeberger:

I have been in the communications business long enough to know when the last word on the subject’s been spoken, and of course, Janine Shepherd’s going to land the plane perfectly. She just did. So until the next time we’re together, listeners, please remember this, you’ve heard it in this conversation, oh my goodness, we understand that your crucible experiences are tough. We understand how painful they are. But we also understand that, if you learn the lessons of them, if you realize, as Janine talked about, in a way that was revelatory to Warwick and me, if you think about them in a way that says, “This is how your life was meant to be. This is where your destiny was set,” if you think about it that way, if you learn the lessons of the crucible, if you follow some of the things on Janine’s Resilience Checklist, it’s not the worst day of your life, your pit, you can come out of, and you can end up in the most rewarding spot in your life, where Janine’s ended up, where Warwick’s ended up. And that is a life of significance.

If you enjoyed this episode, learned something from it, we invite you to engage more deeply with those of us at Beyond the Crucible. Visit our website beyondthecrucible.com to explore a plethora of offerings to help you transform what’s been broken into breakthrough. A great place to start? Our free online assessment, which will help you pinpoint where you are on your journey beyond your crucible and to chart a course forward. See you next week.