Advice Column

Hope During the Difficult Times

• Lisa Liguori • Season 4 • Episode 2

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Imagine this: You reach the lowest point in your life, trapped in circumstances that seem unbearable. Yet, somehow, you discover that these very challenges, these grueling experiences, are the keys to unlocking unexpected blessings. That's what this episode is all about. We'll hear incredible tales of transformation from our panelists, each navigating through adversity and emerging stronger, wiser, and more resilient. From near-fatal accidents and drug overdoses to surviving human trafficking, these narratives serve as examples of the human spirit's unbreakable strength and resilience.

Connect with the Panelists:
1:35- John Sacco- https://john-sacco.com/
2:38- Allison Graham-  https://allisongraham.com/
4:12- Colin Kingsmill- https://colinkingsmill.com/
5:25- Maanarak Of Grey-  https://maanarak.art/
6:58-Mark Anthony- https://jointhe7figureclub.com/
7:56-Laura Renner- https://www.laurarenner.me/
9:49-Amanda Blackwood- https://growthfromdarkness.com/
11:27- Chad Hufford- https://www.veritasalaska.com/
13:13- Ace Karimi- https://www.multidynasty.com/
15:31- Ann Bell- https://www.aconfidentialconversation.com/
16:55 Betty Refour- https://www.instagram.com/bettyandroserefour/
18:18- Al Lyman- https://theallyman.com/
20:02- Steve Cloward- https://lifeafteraddictionandindictment.com/
22:26- Tracy Slepcevic-  https://warriormom.org/

Connect with Lisa Liguori:
Website: https://LisaL.com

Connect with us at Advice Column:
Website: https://advicecolumn.com/
Instagram: @advicecolumnpod
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheAdviceColumnPodcast
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChYmoafMFOeL7HCNWrXPkJQ

About Advice Column
Advice Column (a program of Happiness Adventure) is a nonprofit, 501(C)3. All content is provided as a free service for the public good. Our mission is to create a platform for you and our community to share life-learning with one another. We believe sharing will help you accelerate your growth and remember you aren't alone. 
 
Advice Column - Crowd-Sourced Ideas for Living with Intention. 

Speaker 1:

I suffered a near fatal drowning and had to be resuscitated after being pulled out of the water.

Speaker 2:

I thought this was the end of my world, and I didn't know how I was gonna come with it.

Speaker 3:

It opened up a whole floodgates of memories when I had expressed for most of my life.

Speaker 4:

Things went wrong, and it resulted in chronic neuropathic and pain.

Speaker 5:

Hello, friend. Welcome to advice column where we share our life experiences with one another so that you know you're not alone. And so that we can all get more wisdom and experience from learning from one another than we could get on our own. In this episode, I wanna ask you, are you going through a difficult situation right now? I'm really encouraged by how many times someone shares with me. That a very painful situation in their life actually turns out to be a blessing. I know that's not always the case But in trying times, it helps me to remember the stories of those for whom it's true. So I thought it would be fun to compile some experience shares from people who went through something very challenging and it turned out to be one of the silver linings or blessings in their life. I'm really grateful for our panelists sharing their very raw stories with us in this episode. So let's dive right in and hear what they have to say. And I hope you find encouragement and listening.

Speaker 6:

One thing that happened this year, someone very close to me had an accidental fentanyl overdose, he's alright. He's recovering. It's gonna take some time, but it was looking pretty sketchy there for a while, and I'm there with his parents and everybody. And just trying to be there and be supportive. And it kinda turned my world upside down. Everybody around us was kind of been a panic about it. And I was trying real hard to be the rock, you know, the stable person in the middle of the storm there. And it really taught me that I had that ability in me to keep things together for everybody else around me and I liked being that person. And it really taught me that I could be calm under extreme situations, extreme stress, and that I can be there for people when they need me and that was a valuable lesson for me as a person.

Speaker 4:

I had a surgery. It should have been fairly simple. And unfortunately, things went wrong. And I it resulted in chronic neuropathic pain. And that ultimately is difficult as it was turned out to be a blessing for me because it sent me on a new path. Before the surgery, I was one of those people who was, you know, working eighteen hour days. I actually had a posted note on my mirror. That said deserve to hit the pillow. If I hadn't earned enough to feel as though I contributed enough, to society or other people's success that I wasn't allowed to sleep. And while that may seem noble, it's actually drenched in I'm not good enough and, you know, unrealistic expectations and serving everybody else and not having boundaries, etcetera. So I only had two to five hours of functionality a day, and that forced me to reevaluate how I was spending my precious resources to do think, feel, and b. It ultimately taught me that I needed to be okay, relaxing. And I had to learn how to be comfortable with just taking time off and and serving my body. I now teach people how to get control of their stress. And I ended up developing deeper relationships instead of so many surface relationships. And ultimately it ended up leading me to doing the work I do now.

Speaker 3:

A year ago, I was given a gift of letters from my mother to her best friend when I was a child probably should have never read them at least they weren't intended for me. And it opened up a whole floodgates of memories that I had pressed for most of my life. But it was truly a gift in the end because I recognized, finally, some childhood trauma that I didn't recognize for at all ever. And I really quickly cleared that up by jumping into some therapy, jumping into some coaching, and some other work, meditation, mindfulness. I took that gift by the reins and dug deep, dug quickly, and it turned into a real blessing because I've been seeing my life through these lenses of unworthiness and the desire to be somewhat different, somewhat better, and to strive all the time. So it was a real blessing in the end, and I feel liberated. I've set boundaries with people and never felt better. So the gift which was very tough to receive and discover turned into a true blessing.

Speaker 7:

A very painful situation for me was my breakup of that happened three years ago, the relationship that I was in for five years. And at the end, this person told me a lot of things that essentially, they could have told me at the beginning of the relationship, and I think it would have saved us a lot of time. But what I actually consider a blessing is not the situation itself. It's the lessons I've learned and is the process of healing that I went through afterwards that got me into writing again. I started writing poetry again about this specific situation. And I also wrote a short story and I published it and my readers because it's such a personal story started sharing their personal stories with me, and I, in turn, started making deeper connections with people around me. And it that has been, for me, the bass blessing, you know, the relationship was a bit abusive as well, and I lost my voice. So kind of regaining my voice and telling my story, sharing my story. And in turn, getting to have these deeper relationships or or deeper conversations with people that I thought I would never have That has been the biggest blessing for me.

Speaker 8:

As a college kid, I was the best sales rep at this company that sold advertising, they did not pay me my commission. That was a big deal. It was at the time six hundred dollars, thousands in, you know, today's market. And what I wound up doing was suing him, winning, which was great and satisfying. But more importantly, I went into actual competition with the guy. And then about three years later, I actually wound up taking over his entire business. I actually took over his offices, his accounts, and basically, he's not paying me a small amount of money. Became a driving force that I refrained into a way to go into business, do what I knew well, and it fueled me to keep doing better and better.

Speaker 9:

After my traumatic brain injury and emergency brain surgery. I hit rock bottom, was in the deepest depression, having constant panic attacks, and really just wanting to be dead. And unfortunately, these were familiar thoughts to me. I suffered from depression and anxiety for most of my life. And these were just significantly worse and really dark. And thankfully, one day, I had this shift where I realized if I don't change my mindset, then I really am going to die. And so this led me down the path of exploring personal development and self healing. I started reading a ton of books, listening to podcasts, taking a bunch of personal development courses. Embracing positivity for the first time in my life. And as a result of this, I was able to uncover that I'd experienced a lot of significant trauma in my life. And from there, I went deep into trauma healing and exploring all the trauma healing therapies I could find a lot of nervous system regulation, mind body connection, somatic therapy, EMDR, and so on. And through this, I was able to realize that I had been living so much of my life severe anxiety, fear, and shame, and I wasn't happy. And as I continued doing this work on myself, my life, completely transformed. I left my career in nursing, I wrote a book, and I was inspired to share my story to help others heal and improve the quality of their lives and had it not been for the brain injury. None of this would have happened. I would have continued living with the blinders on thinking that I'm keeping my head up of water and doing okay, but I really wasn't. And now I'm finally at a point where I'm happy and loving my life and I'm forever great pull to be moving forward on this path.

Speaker 2:

I am a survivor of human trafficking. In twenty nineteen, I found out that the last person who trafficked me made me famous on our pornography website. At first, I thought this was the end of my world and I didn't know how I was gonna cope with it, but that turned out to be one of the greatest blessings of my life. Was thirty one years old. The last time I was trafficked, I was thirty nine when I found out about the pornography. At first, I was really scared. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know who to turn to. And I learned how to very quickly ask for help. I'd never really gotten that before. So we reached out to an anti trafficking organization that immediately paired me up with popular and legal services that reached out to these different pornography websites and started talking to them and having them pull this stuff down. But every single time one went down, two more went up, It was like I was fighting this uphill battle when I just couldn't win. So I reached out to another anti trafficking organization and they put me together with a therapist. It was through the therapy and through the learning how to fight back and through finding out that there were things like pro bono legal services that helped me to find my voice. It was through these services and finding out that there were people who genuinely cared and wanted to help, that it was finally able to figure out how to fight back how to speak out. And now the band who trafficked me, he doesn't bother me anymore. It's more afraid of me than I ever was of him.

Speaker 10:

Most of my teenage years, I lived in fear of failure. I didn't wanna start anything if I wasn't pretty sure I was gonna succeed or at least do very well. So I turned over a huge leap in college when I decided to try to walk on the track team at my local university. I was in my senior year. I was just about to finish my degree. And I figured, let's give it a shot. The worst they can do is reject me, which of course was afraid of. To my astonishment, the coach said yes. I'll give you a shot. You can walk on. He gave me the numbers that I needed to hit and the week before our very first event, our very first meet. I tore my quad and I was a sprinter, so not being able to walk made it pretty hard to sprint. And I remember that very public failure. Limbing my way off the track realizing that I was not gonna spread that year because it was my senior year. That was it. I was not going to sprint in college. And what that taught me though, even though it was very, very painful in a moment, even embarrassing. Is it got me over my fear of failure. And I realized that failure isn't final. In fact, that moment in times huge stepping stone into putting myself out there, taking risk, opening myself up to opportunities though as well. And really trusting in the process. I worked as hard as I possibly could, and I left that season knowing that I gave it my own, and it didn't work out. And it gave me courage to try other much more meaningful things. My life, but I think that was the day that I started getting getting over my fear of failure.

Speaker 11:

So my story started seven years ago when I finished college. I started in my parents basement building out my business. For those first eighteen months, it was the greatest struggle trying to grow because all I was trying to focus was on sales, trying to get clients, trying to pitch and not so much working on myself as much. And through that journey, I realized the only true way to grow is to work on herself. I had very much negative habits. None of my habits were serving me. Right? I'd still go out and drink on the weekends and actually drinking even on the weekdays when I wasn't feeling the best. I was turning to substances like smoking weed and just trying to numb myself from actually dealing with the things that mattered most in growth. Which was developing myself. I learned that in order for me to grow and level up my business, I had to grow and level up myself. One of my mentors says, the true purpose of life is to create the person that you admire and give that person to the world. That hit me very deep because I realized when I looked at the mirror and I took accountability, I had not fully admired myself yet. I had not created a person worth admiring and respecting. So I went back to the laboratory and I started looking at every little ways that I could improve. Slowly dropping one habit after another, improving myself every day, getting in the gym, waking up early, focused on positive self talk lifting myself up from this dark place that was in. And it feels like a full one eighty compared to where I was now. You know, I got into my personal development routine. And now where I'm at, we have a multimillion dollar real estate portfolio. Every single day I wake up, I'm just blessed to be alive because that energy is actually the true gift to be able to be alive today, to be able to go out and serve the world, to continue to improve myself, and in doing that, I can improve the world. You know? That's that's really all it is. Right? We are a reflection of the world. And if we can improve ourselves, then we can improve the world.

Speaker 12:

The time that was very painful for me was when I was twenty nine years old, and I became a widow overnight. And I had this dream of marriage and family and home, and that was taken away from me suddenly. And it left me be worldred, and it left me very sad, and it left me searching and seeking why did this happen? I didn't really have a belief system at that point, and that's when I was able to rediscover myself and embrace my spiritual reawakening of what was left of life for me. And was there anything else out there? And that's what I've been spending the last many years doing is discovering who I am. I became a massage therapist, I'm twenty six years in that. I became a coach. And I have to tell you I have a pretty good life now, but I believe my husband steps gave me the gift of me, and that I'm forever grateful for.

Speaker 13:

I was working a flight from Mexico City to Dallas for Worth when we hit clear air turbulence. I was a flight attendant at that time. And I was injured. I sustained three bad discs in my back. And about four months into that with therapy and such, wasn't feeling a whole lot better, but I was concerned about finances, future, etcetera. And I was talking to my doctor and, you know, what am I gonna do? You know, I need to go back to work and So she she suggested I paint. I'd never painted before. I was an illustrator, but I'd never paint it. So I thought she was crazy. But the next day, I went and purchased canvas and paint, and I started painting. And I got positive feedback right away from friends and family. And I got commissions. Not long after, I started a business that feature the artwork of my sister and I who my sister has autism and I am her caregiver now. And asserted a line of no cards. And since then, we have sold art and cards to people all over the world.

Speaker 1:

I'm now sixty three, but when I was ten, I suffered a near fatal drowning and had to be resuscitated after being pulled out of the water. What followed in the months after was a series of additional traumatic experiences, not the least of which was my parents trying to do the right thing by me, signing me up for swim lessons with my town's recreation swing program. What a disaster that turned out to be? I didn't go into water any deeper than waste deep. From that moment forward for the next twenty six years. Here's what happened at around my thirty sixth birthday. I was sitting on the couch with my nine year old daughter, watch watching the Hawaii Iron Man World Championship on TV. It was a really exciting intention filled race. And in a moment of pure excitement and adrenaline, without even thinking about how ridiculous the idea was, I shouted out to anyone who was listening, that I was going to do the iron man. Oh, my daughter turned to me and just laughed, as any unassuming young lady might do when her dad said something really silly. Two years later, I did my first Ironman distance try and two years after that, I qualified for the Ironman World Champion ship in Hawaii. And I finally had achieved this hope, this dream, this wish. Since then, I've gone on to become a coach, get analysis lab owner and therapist, speaker, and author who would have imagined. In the end through that experience, I've been able to learn and grow and share and thus positively impact thousands of other lives through my speaking, writing, and coaching.

Speaker 14:

In December of two thousand and ten, I found myself being handed a federal indictment Again, I was handed a nineteen count federal indictment for conspiracy to commit mortgage fraud. There was nothing that I did illegal that should've, you know, had me in that situation. And after going through the process almost about two years and going through with just a nightmare, losing everything, I found myself going to federal prison. I was bitter, I was angry, and I was really in bad place. Anytime I had a problem, I was able to figure out a way to get out of it, or I had relationships people who would help me, that we would find, you know, ways out of it. But this was something that was out of my control. I didn't have the ability to get out of this. And that was difficult. I was a tell till the swallow. So I left to go to prison, my wife, and five kids, my oldest being a senior in high school. And The things I learned from this incredibly difficult situation is even though it was unfair, I was angry. I realized that it was a blessing because I had lived my life regarding business and really the way I'd been you know, really my whole adult life was focused on money, business, success and thought that's what defined me. And as you get into prison, you realize really quickly what is important. And the things that we take for granted are the people we love the most, it seems. And it doesn't take you long to be sitting in prison, having everything taken away, losing everything, your family's struggling, and you're not having the ability to do anything to help them. To realize just what really does matter. Even though I think a lot of us do know that deep down, it's so easy to get caught up in the things that don't matter. You know, I thought those things mattered because I was allowing those to define who I was. But going through that process sitting there and they don't look at the man in the mirror day in and day out for fourteen and a half months, It really gets you to focus on the things that do matter. And so even though it was horrible and it turned my life upside down, it was a blessing. Because I was able to do that inner reflection and that inner work and to focus on and understand truly what matters.

Speaker 15:

Many years ago when my son was diagnosed, with autism, I thought it was the end of the world. But as the years went on, I realized that this amazing individual that came into my life actually gave me purpose. And today, with that purpose, I am able to assist so many other parents in the world on their journey to discovering autism and how to heal underlying conditions associated with autism so their child can function. So what I thought was my end all be all back in the day has now been my saving grace, and I am truly grateful.

Speaker 5:

Wow, it's incredible what people go through in their lives, and I admire the ability to transform pain into something positive. If you wanna connect with our panelists, that would be terrific and we will link up all of their contact information in the show notes. They're linked to their bio and how you can get in touch with them. What resonated most with you from what you heard and what was the takeaway? I was really impressed with the concept of gratitude actually, which I wasn't expecting to hear in the shares. But the share about having freedom taken away by being in prison really made me think about how grateful I am to be sitting where I am right now, feeling free and having the choice to be with the people I love. And I felt a little bit of conviction that I am often critical and not as grateful as I could be of them. Overall, I just heard time and again from these experiences that something really sad or hard can not only become a blessing for me, but also something I learn from and then use to support others. And that's very exciting. I hope you found encouragement from this episode. As always, the reason we produce this is we would like to be an encouragement to you. And if you would like to share anything with us, we are on social media and that's all linked up below. And we'd love to just continue this journey of being in community with you. So thank you for listening and we'll see you in the next episode.

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Lisa Liguori

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