May 8, 2025 • 39 mins
What if the moment that saves your life isn’t a miracle, or even counselling but a word, scribbled on a napkin? Steve Hershberger had lived a life built on his father’s expectations, chasing achievement like a moth to a flame, versus his artistic passions. But after two decades of following someone else’s blueprint, the façade cracked. His physical and mental health collapsed. He stood at a breaking point—until a friend’s intervention, and a single word on a napkin, cracked open a new path forward.
But life wasn’t done testing him. Just as Steve found his footing, life blindsided him again. A brutal cycling accident left him in the hands of a trauma team, hovering near death. In this episode of Chatter That Matters, we trace the route from accepting pain to chasing purpose, and how a man known for racing ahead finally learned to slow down and confront the truth. This is a story of grit, grace, and the quiet power of a single word.
If you’ve ever questioned your path, worth, or where you are, this show will inspire you to believe in yourself.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
It it began with, I think I made a mistake.
My guest today is Steve Hershberger. Steve lived a life
for twenty five years that manifested into a midlife crisis,
a crisis where he lost everything. His mental and physical
health unraveled and even had suicidal tendencies.
(00:21):
What saved him? A single word on a napkin from
the intervention of a friend, which led him to doing the impossible.
And I realized at that point, we all have strengths inside of
us that we can unlock if we choose to, but more
often than not, we choose to keep them hidden away or locked
away, and and we ignore them. We don't feed them. We
(00:44):
almost lost him again. This time, because he was in the wrong place
at the wrong time. And with injuries so severe, he was put in the hands
of a life trauma team. I don't recall it. What I do recall is
the sound of heavy air displacement. Moments not
even a second or two before everything
changed. How has his life impacted him? What has he
(01:06):
learned? And how will it impact you?
Stick around and you'll find out.
Hi. It's Tony Chapman. Thank you for listening to Chatter That Matters presented
by RBC. If you can, please subscribe to the podcast. And
ratings and reviews, well, they're always welcome, and they're they're always appreciated.
(01:29):
Steve Hershberger, welcome to Chatter That Matters. Tony, thanks for having
me. I'm really grateful to be here today. I'm gonna start off with a
single conversation that you had with your dad, even though you've had
many leading up to it. But I think you were in your twenties, and you
said it was the only conversation of this sort that you ever had
with your dad. So just describe maybe your life prior to
(01:50):
that conversation and then get into why this talk
with your dad was so material. I grew up in The United
States like most kids in the seventies and
eighties did. We had a relatively normal childhood that was
middle class. We moved around following,
promotions that my my father had been lucky enough to win
(02:12):
over, a number of of years. I had
one meaningful conversation with my dad, and that conversation
occurred right before he left to
begin a an experimental cancer
treatment that ultimately he didn't survive from.
Growing up, we had lots of superficial conversations.
(02:36):
He was a dad biologically. He lived in the same
house, but he was never really emotionally
present. I was given a checklist of things that I was
supposed to accomplish over the course of my childhood and
my life. And it was essentially check back
in in five years when you've done this. That checklist from what I
(02:58):
researched was really following in his footsteps. You know, you play
sports, you go to the college that he went to, you become
involved in sales, you find your way into management. But that was very different
than who you were. From what I understand, you are a very creative kid.
%, Tony. You know, I remember growing up, one of the things that
my uncle who'd been, an active part of my life encouraged
(03:20):
was the pursuit of some of my artistic endeavors. I was, again,
like you had indicated, I was a really creative kid. I wrote stories. I
was a relatively decent artist. In fact, I remember I sold my
first watercolor painting when I was 11 years old. I was so proud.
When I came home, you know, and told my parents this, one of the
comments he made is, that's great, but you can't make a
(03:43):
living doing that. And so this was his, you know, preordained
path in life for you. And yet let's move it to that
conversation we had because what he tries to say to you
in fifteen minutes before he's packing up and heading off for this experimental
treatment was maybe it was just a pack of lies and his
context was the way he felt about his life and maybe he was trying to
(04:05):
warn you about yours? It it began with, I think I made
a mistake. He, in his own way, did
his very best to apologize, But I don't even think he knew what he
was trying to apologize for. I think he realized
that something was seriously amiss in in his life and something
was seriously amiss in his family's life.
(04:28):
And and perhaps he had given improper
instructions or guidance, but I don't think he really knew
what to do with that or how to unpack it. So it was a it
was a really uncomfortable conversation for both of us. But
it was the one time I think I could applaud him for
being profoundly courageous. I think that took a lot of
(04:49):
guts for him to do because it was something he had
never done before. Did you think it was almost like the atheist
that's praying, you know, moments before they die that he's knowing he's going
away and there's a good chance he's not gonna come back? And he's trying to
repair a lifetime of not being a note emotionally invested? I mean, did you
believe him, or did you just question whether if he did come back, would he
(05:11):
what dad he'd be? Yeah. Tony, I think you're right. He it's the
atheist praying on the plane, in the midst of
the heavy turbulence and the thunderstorm. If I get through this, that, you know,
I'll I'll change my ways. But you have no skills
or you have no muscle memory to change the ways. You know, I
recall sitting there in the bedroom as he was laying his clothes
(05:33):
out wondering what was going on. This was
not a conversation I expected and this this is one I've never had. And I
didn't know whether to believe him or not. The next part of the story, which
is so tragic, it looks like this treatment's working and you're going with
your mom, your younger sister to pick
your dad up, and he had takes a sudden turn with bronchitis.
(05:56):
And because your mom and sister have gone off to get him new clothes because
he's lost so much weight, what your memory serves up is that you're
the only person there, and the doctor's asking you to make a major
decision about how to treat this bronchitis. I was
24 years old at that time. The doctor came and said we need
to give him anesthetic because we're gonna give him a a fairly
(06:17):
stressful treatment. Well, he had never had general
anesthetic, before in his life. So there was no way to know
that he would be allergic to it, which he was. And
when he had his allergic reaction, it it caused a massive heart
attack and and he died in the midst of that process. And how
much did you feel that your decision or dialogue with the doctor
(06:52):
perceived at that point in time into my, I perceived at that point in time
into my personal photo book. It was
seared into my mind forever and as was the the
belief that I had made the decision that
ultimately killed him. Rather than telling somebody, whether
telling my family members or telling a trusted adult or
(07:14):
a a peer or a boss or somebody, I just
internalized it and let it rot and fester. And it did
that for twenty five years. Recently, you realized in
a conversation with that uncle that used to inspire you to do more
art, that in fact, you weren't alone in the room with that doctor. He was
there with you. But for some reason, that had been erased. He and
(07:36):
I had been meeting up for coffee. We live
in the same general vicinity, the same general town.
And one day not too terribly long ago, earlier
this summer, one of the things that we were
unpacking is regrets that we've
had. For the first time in that I could remember, I brought up
(07:59):
my dad's death and said, I've carried this with me for
so many years, the fact that I made the decision
that ultimately ended his life. He looked at me
with a level of, of almost amazement and
said, that never happened. And it was my turn to look at
him with amazement. I said, Bob, what are you talking about? This
(08:21):
happened. And he said, no, I was there. And I said, no, you weren't. And
he said, if you don't believe me, ask your mom. You and I talked to
the doctor together. They never came in to ask us
whether you wanted to do general or local NASDAQ. They came in and
informed us these were the different choices, and this is what they were
doing. It wasn't your fault. But for twenty five
(08:42):
years, you lived with this burden, and it wasn't like you could
just lock it away. I mean, this thing snuck out of every
corner of that box and and impacted you emotionally, psychologically,
financially. Just give us a sense of living with this memory that
was a lie, the pain it caused you and obviously
anybody attached to you for almost a quarter century. Because I didn't
(09:05):
talk about it, because I just internalized it, it
changed the trajectory of the next twenty five
years. Rather than embracing really who I
was as a as an individual, I decided that
I was going to follow in his footsteps, and I was going
to, for in in some ways, try to complete his life for
(09:28):
him doing what he did even though that wasn't
fundamentally who I was at all. Over the course of twenty
five years, there were a series of very bright
spots when my personality
shone through, and I did what I did very well
because I applied the skill sets that were innate to me.
(09:50):
But there were an equal number of of times where the
headwinds were consistent. And when those things were
consistent, it was aligned with my behavior
in doing things that were not innate to who I was, but really
a character of someone else. And when you talk
about, you know, this roller coaster that you're on, when did
(10:12):
it get to the point where I can't control this anymore?
The headwinds are just hitting me so hard that, you know, the
moments of of salvation when I could be who I am, I could be
creative and stuff were just pushed away. And
with it, things started to unravel. You repeated the same
process over and over and over without a lot of change.
(10:35):
And you became very accustomed, or I became very accustomed,
to this process of one day being
very good, one week, one month, one year being very good, and the next
one not being what it was before.
So it was a lack of consistency in terms
of experience that filled not just my life, but my wife's
(10:57):
life and and to some degree, my kids' life. I
was a bit of a different dad. I was very present in my kids' lives.
I was as, as active as I could be in a in much
more than my father. But what I sensed is normal, if
I look back, it wasn't, it was me being a
method actor reading from a script that
(11:19):
somebody had given me that didn't fit
the character didn't fit the actor, but you did your best
to make your way through it. It starts to take a toll though.
I mean, chronic insomnia, daily panic attacks,
your safety net, your self worth. I mean, during that twenty five years,
is this is it a slow build or is it something that would come in
(11:41):
and come out? It was definitely a slow build. And I think, Tony, the
more I became the character in that
script and forgot who I was, the
worse it got because I got further and further
away from the path that I should have been living, the
one that I was meant to to to head.
(12:04):
The more I ignored it, the worse it got.
It culminated in a couple years back in a in a
business that, we had an investor that didn't
necessarily agree with the approach and the approach has started to work, but
the cost of it to me and and to a lot of employees
was was extreme. We put everything into this
(12:26):
business, emotionally, monetarily, physically.
It took its toll. I was riding competitively
and and that probably was, from a health standpoint, the only thing that
really kept me from imploding. But
emotionally and and psychologically and physically, I was
getting worse by the day. And then one day,
(12:49):
it all came to an end. The investor had had enough and he
decided that he was gonna take over the business and we had a a
battle that became a war that went nuclear. And a
matter of two weeks, everything we'd worked so hard for over years,
had quite literally disappeared. And the
script I had been reading from, it was almost like somebody
(13:12):
had taken it out of my hands and said, you know what? Thanks for
reading. We appreciate it, but you're not right for the part and we're gonna
take the script back. Do you know where you're going to walk after that? I
mean, you've been play acting to the point where it's your life. You lose
everything. Do you even have a role to go into? Do you even have another
script to play? So you're just completely lost. I gained 60
(13:33):
pounds. I I quit being social.
I grew in a dependence to alcohol because it it literally would
short circuit the the panic attacks that were occurring twice a
day. I lived in a state of fear. I
had chronic insomnia, meaning that I would fall asleep around 1AM and I'd
wake up at, oddly enough, 03:14 every single day. And
(13:57):
that happened for two hundred and seventy six days. Your family,
where where are they through all of this? Because they're watching
somebody that even as a method actor was certainly
somewhat engaged in the family unravel. What was their reaction to
all this? My son was old enough to know better. My daughter,
she was in her freshman year in high school. My son was in
(14:19):
college. My wife is an incredibly strong
person, is a force of will, in and of herself. And she
has always been there to pick up pieces and glue them back
together much like a kintsugi bowl, if you will. She did
her very best to shield herself
and our kids from the reality of what was
(14:42):
occurring. My pattern of behavior was
don't talk about it, internalize it and put as brave a smile
on your face as you can. And when everything imploded,
I would leave the house and go sit at a Starbucks,
bite my lip until or my tongue or my cheek until it
(15:02):
bled, because I knew that if I was in a
public place, I wouldn't break down, I wouldn't lose it.
Pushing all of that negative energy inside, which is, you know, a
lot of people do that to a lesser or a greater degree. And once
you, once that becomes a habit, it becomes
normal. From what I understand, this this volcano
(15:24):
inside that you kept putting a cork on got you to the point where
you're even thinking of having suicidal tendencies. But
a friend shows up and he writes a single word on a napkin. There
are synchronicities that that can do occur if we recognize
them. My biggest issue, Tony, is I I ignored all of
that. And then one day I'm sitting in that coffee shop biting my lip
(15:47):
and you're right, an individual comes over and leaves it
a single word on a napkin. I still have the napkin. I went back
to find it the other day. It actually is two words
or three. It is believe in yourself. And this
was a stranger? It was an individual that I had seen
before in the coffee shop, but I didn't know
(16:09):
this individual. I smiled at this person before. I'd sat next to
this person, but I couldn't tell you their name. I thought I'd done
a pretty significantly
solid job in in masking the pain that
I I had inside of me. But apparently,
you know, that pain can and does transcend when people
(16:32):
want to pay attention to it and then do something about it. And this this
one individual had no reason to
scribble some a handful of words on a napkin or or really
whether or not those words would mean anything, but they were profound to
me, not because of the
words per se, but because of the timing and the
(16:53):
context behind it. To me, it was the universe
tapping me on the shoulder and saying, you know, maybe it's
time we try something different because your your way isn't working.
And when we return, Steve tells us the story of how that napkin, well, it
was only the beginning to his journey back from his life threatening accident
(17:14):
to finally finding his true footing. More with Steve
next.
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(18:21):
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It was very bad. I didn't know how
bad, Tony. I went back into my old
mode of covering up. So I started making jokes. How
badly are you hurt? And I said, you know, I think I might be okay.
And I was taking very shallow breaths because I I didn't want
(18:44):
her to worry too much. My guest
today, Steve Hershberger, someone with context, passionate
cyclist. He's training for a race in Iceland, and he gets hit by a black
vehicle in a hit and run, and he's hit hard. He makes
a miraculous comeback and decides that part of his life is gonna be
dedicated to advocating for cyclist safety.
(19:09):
Talk to me a little bit about how you went from
biting your lip to the point of its bleeding, being in a public
space so you wouldn't break down, to
believe in yourself on a napkin to changing the course of your life? Prior
to this, I'd been a competitive cyclist for a long time. It was it
was one way for me to to deal with anxiety,
(19:33):
which is something I'd suffered, from most of my adult life.
And in large part, I think I I I suffered from that because I sequestered
all of these negative emotions and thoughts. It's a lot like somebody gets
a, a demand notice in the mail and rather than paying attention to it,
they put it in a drawer and hope that it goes away. And
over time, it starts to solidify and and you start
(19:55):
carrying around heavy weight. And then one day you come
to realize that you've got this unnecessary
load and you wanna get rid of it. I was sixty
pounds heavier. I'd been checked into the hospital a couple
times with heart arrhythmia from stress. The doctor
said, you dude, you need to change this. Otherwise,
(20:17):
in your fifties, you could have a heart attack or you could have a stroke,
and you could die. So the
napkin shows up. A couple days later, I get a knock on the
door from a teammate of my cycling, teammate.
And he's standing on my front door my front doorstep and he looks at me
and said, dude, we're not gonna do this. You look bloody
(20:39):
horrible. And he didn't use that word. He was more graphic
and he said, it's pathetic. You're better than
this. We're going to change this trajectory.
And then he stood there with his hands on his hips glaring at me.
Maybe, my nickname's Hersh. She said, Hersh,
maybe it's time you start believing in yourself. Same words again.
(21:02):
Same words on the napkin. Wow. I didn't know what to do with
that. It's time for you to stand up
and not be a victim. Let's go a different direction and just
believe in yourself. I came back in the house, I came into
the office I had in the home, and sitting on the desk was
that napkin. I sat and stared at it for an
(21:24):
hour. I made a a maybe it was a
spiritual decision, but it was a soul level decision that
I was going to follow the path that I was
meant to follow and the rest of my life would would look different.
Instantly, meaning in a matter of days,
it went from terrible to
(21:47):
there was a light, an opening, an opportunity.
Oddly enough, Tony, the opportunity came in the
form of a of a friend, another friend who I hadn't seen in quite some
time. Let's get together for coffee. So we sat
down, and we spent the next two and a half hours talking
about a challenge he was having in his life. And I, and I realized
(22:10):
about three quarters of the way through that I'd spent all of my
time and emotional energy trying to help him get
through the trauma he was dealing with. It was a a
personal crisis that he was having. Wow. He says,
so what are you doing now? And I said, well,
that's a really good question. I I don't honestly
(22:33):
know. And he said, I I need some help
inside my organization. Would you be willing to take on the
role of change agent in helping my organization evolve and
change? Well, absolutely. And then driving
home, I thought, what the hell do I know about change? I'm the
last guy that should be talking about change.
(22:56):
And so I called up a friend of mine who was in consulting, and and
he was an expert in change management.
And he said, you know, it takes perseverance
and determination, but most of all, it takes
honesty and courage to change. And he said, What
do you know about those things? If you'd asked me a year ago, I would
(23:17):
say, Not much. Here's what was happening in my life, but right now, this is
what's going on. And he says, Steve, I I can't think of anybody more qualified
because you're dealing with change firsthand, And I believe that you can
learn from that process and they can learn from from you. So
I embarked on a career of focusing on change
management and it went really well until I
(23:39):
realized I was sort of treading water. I realized
that I had changed enough without really
throwing the old costumes and the
old way of doing things away. I had kept them.
When you make a decision to change your
life, you have to be all in
(24:01):
to facilitating that change. You can't be in
the middle. I believe that many of us that struggle with
difficult emotions or we struggle with the frustrations of our
life, we know deep down that we're doing some of the wrong things
or all of the wrong things. We really don't wanna do anything about it because
we are so terrified of what
(24:24):
might happen. All of that fear,
the terrors, when all of those things do happen to
you, your perception of the
end is is not the end, it's the beginning. So that
the nightmares, the terrors that are coming for you, that you're
so scared of, that's all paper tiger. It's all just a loud label.
(24:46):
What, what sits behind it is the agent of change.
They're really angels there to move you in the right direction,
whether you'd wanna believe in that or whether it's just a revelation
of I can be who I need to be. You know, Steve, the other
tragedy is that you're starting to really figure all of this
out. You've now become the person with the napkin and the person
(25:09):
knocking in the door in terms of your ability to unpack what
you've learned for others. But on
05/30/2024, you're out cycling. You get
hit. I wasn't just hit. I was destroyed. People say to me
often, it was a hit and run, and aren't you
angry that they didn't find the person? Aren't don't you want retribution
(25:31):
for what happened to you? And and I'm so sorry that this
occurred. The reality is that up until that point in
time, Tony, the the changes I had made
were all for me. I was still being selfish. I
was focused on my well-being and that was it. I
wasn't really willing to positively impact other people's lives.
(25:53):
I was not being of service in any meaningful way. Well, that
day on May 30, when I got hit, I don't recall it.
What I do recall is the sound of heavy air displacement
moments not even a second or two before,
everything changed. And I was going 15, and the vehicle was
probably traveling between sixty and seventy miles an hour when it hit me.
(26:16):
And the last thing I recall was flying towards two fifty five
gallon, trash barrels on a lonely country road and
somebody painted their name on the trash barrels. I'm going, now why would somebody paint
their name on their trash bins? And then I
impacted them, then things went dark. When I
woke up, I wasn't aware that I'd actually been unconscious, but I had been
(26:38):
unconscious for an extended period of time and I
had no idea who I was or where I was. I lay
there face down, I rolled over. When I
started to breathe, I could hear this gurgling
sound. Oh, boy. I am really,
really hurt. If I don't stand up now, I'm
(27:00):
probably not going to survive. And and nothing
hurt yet. When I started to get to my knees
and stand up, what I could feel was the
best way to describe it is a bag of dominoes
rolling and moving over one another, and and those were
the the broken ribs and collarbone and
(27:22):
other bones in my body that were rubbing against the all the soft
tissue damage. A lot of the cyclists, we have what's called a headset
on the bike, and that is this little device that gives you all of your
data, your speed, your distance, and and whatnot. The headset has
an accelerometer in it. And that accelerometer, when it stops
quickly, it sends a text alert and says, there's an
(27:45):
emergency at this location. You should head that way.
My wife, who got the text alert, didn't see it right away and just made
the assumption that that Steve had made a sudden stop and
was up starting again and hadn't answered his phone. As
I'm standing there, and as it turns out, this is close to an almost an
hour after the accident occurred and the driver had driven away. Then
(28:08):
another cyclist came down this lonely country road and he came over me and he
started to say, are you okay? And then he stopped and goes, oh shit, you
are not okay. That point, my phone rang one more time and so he took
it out of my jersey pocket, gave it to me to answer and I
didn't know how to do that. Then he took it and he said, Hi,
my name is John and I have this person's phone.
(28:30):
My wife said, I I'm that person's wife and I'm
nearby. You need to get her as fast as possible.
And I didn't know how bad I was truly hurt. And so I went in,
and the woman in the ER, at reception says, can I help
you? And I looked at her, and I said, what's so special? And she
rolls her eyes, she's, you know, another cyclist that has had a crash and
(28:53):
he's a smartass and here fill out these forms. Well, as I
was doing as I was taking the forms, there was a PA that walked by,
saw me and heard me and goes, what happened? And I said, I was hit
by a truck and it was a hit and run. He called a
code and rushed me into triage. They put me through x
rays and they put me through an MRI. My wife at that
(29:16):
point had come in and my wife knew that I was a lot worse than
I was letting on. She had called
my daughter, and my daughter said, is is dad going to be
okay? And my wife said, I don't know,
but I think so. And my daughter didn't believe her. And
so she came to the hospital to make sure that I wasn't going to
(29:39):
die. And when I saw her, first thing that came
in my mind, because the pain hadn't started, the adrenaline was still
there, was me standing in the
hospital when my dad died and what the
next twenty five years had looked like. I
made the conscious decision that we weren't gonna do that
(30:00):
shit. We were not going to play that game.
And I recall my wife telling me she said, you just kept repeating a
mantra. It's okay. It's okay. It's okay. It's okay.
What were your injuries? I mean, I don't need the whole laundry list, but what
was the most serious injury? A broken back and a broken
neck. Yeah. Numerous others. I mean, I
(30:23):
mean, it was, as the doctor said, he goes, literally, it's a laundry
list. Yeah. You wrote an article sixty nine days later where you
talked about you were starting to heal physically.
But through that healing process, there was a
silver lining, and that silver lining shone down and maybe for
the first time in your life, you kinda understood who you were.
(30:47):
As my memory started to come back, I came to the
realization that there are things that had happened during
that time between the accident and and accident and and reawakening
that were profound. The the first was when I got hit, my
wearables recorded all that that information. My
vitals had stopped for nearly a couple of minutes, and I wrote about
(31:08):
that. And what it taught me was
there's a reality beyond just what we experience. There was a famous
philosopher named Alan Watts who said, Ordinary everyday consciousness leaves out
more than it takes in. As we go through our lives, we leave out a
lot, we ignore a lot. Change in profound
ways is entirely possible if we believe it and and we
(31:31):
wish it to be, but we have to embrace it and and we have
to understand it for what it is, which is a
profound change in paradigm. You have to think differently
and act differently to be different. Physically, I
healed remarkably quickly. And over the course
of the injury is I would go out and about, I
(31:53):
I'd have conversations with people and I would start sharing the
belief that you can move past whatever bad thing is
occurring in your life because it's nothing more than a a
really loud label. Whatever terrible things you believe
might occur, they might not be as bad as you think and you're
probably a lot stronger than you believe. And I recall
(32:16):
in one instance being back in that same coffee shop and having a
discussion with a woman who had just been diagnosed only a month
before with stage four breast cancer and had double mastectomy.
She was a marathoner and she and a friend were having a discussion
and she was under this the profound belief that
her life was over and that, that she would be fighting cancer for the rest
(32:38):
of her life. And she was done racing marathons because she didn't have it in
her. And she said, well, what happened to you? And I said, well, this is
the accident. She said, well, when did this happen? And I said, well, I was
released from the trauma center four days ago. And she said, well, how is this
possible that you're here doing this? So it's a belief. It's a mental belief.
She said, you're living proof. If you're standing here and all everything you've
(32:59):
told me is true, there's no reason why I can't
accomplish the same thing. Will you give me your cell phone number? What
came of all of this, Tony, was the
migration from I'm going to fix myself
and live my own life and not be of service to others,
to I can fix myself, I can do
(33:22):
what many believe is impossible, and I can share that with others
so that they can do the same thing. And it's incredible that you've
got you finally have a pair of shoes that you can stand in and you
believe. But for the people listening, and there's a lot of people I've
interviewed in the past, they've John Ruffalo, who had a bike accident who's
might never properly walk again. Part of this is
(33:45):
incredibly fortunate that your body healed the way it did, and
part of it, I think, is mind over matter. Is that fair? %. I keep
on my desk, a good friend of mine sent me a block of
tungsten because it's the hardest element. And I look at it every
day and it reminds me that we, we all have
our own challenges. We all have our own difficulties and we
(34:07):
are often stronger than we believe. And
that little block of tungsten that sits on my desk reminds me I've been
through things that are worse than this and I will, in
fact, not only survive, but I will thrive. And
my job isn't necessarily just to do this for
me, but to motivate and help others to find their
(34:30):
own strength. Do you think that all of what happened to you was for a
reason now that this is in fact giving you the
context, the authenticity, personal experiences
that you can take this upon yourself and saying from this point
forward, a big part of who I am and why I matter
is my ability to offer the status? Yes. Very much so.
(34:52):
The first set of terrible experiences, had I
not had some purpose to
lift up and act on, I wouldn't have
made it through. I I I probably would have survived, but I I I
would have never recovered. And then being hit, I
truly believe that I'm here for a reason. And Steve, how do people get
(35:14):
hold of you? I mean, is your is your thought nowadays that you wanna you're
gonna write a book on this, you're gonna speak about this? I mean
or are you just gonna have these interventions in coffee shops and
where you listen generously and question whether you could step in and
be the person now brings the words on the napkin. I always do that. I
I look for opportunities to be of service and to to share
(35:37):
encouragement wherever I can. Some people will ask and they'll wanna know
the story. Some people have heard about it and they've asked me to to come
and talk to their group. So I'll always do that.
I'll always put the words on the napkin for people because that's what we're all
supposed to do is quality members of the human race who all are
interconnected. We all share some common experience and purpose for
(35:58):
being. So selfishness is not something that
we should ascribe to. For the latter, I believe that part
of my purpose is to continue
to champion change. And I'll do that in a day
job, but I'll also do it in the opportunity
to to speak to groups, be on
(36:20):
important shows like yours. Maybe someday there's a book in
there. My final question, your your wife and your daughter, what do they
think of the new Steve? How do they feel? Do they understand you?
Do they know who you are? Are they accepting of this change? My
wife's comment after the accident is about damn time.
Our relationship is stronger today than it's ever
(36:42):
been because she's starting to, to see the person
that she fell in love with and married so many years ago re
emerge. That is something that, that I must do, not
just for my family, but for myself and for those individuals
that I'm destined to to run into, to meet, or
to impact in some way. The old Steve was not
(37:04):
capable, willing, or didn't really have the right to
do that. But the original one, the one that sits in front of you
now, that's in large part what that person's
purpose is. So the old script has been burnt and the ashes
scattered. The new one is being written as it goes. You know, Steve, I always
end my podcast with my three takeaways. And the first is just
(37:27):
so much of your life living with a lie and then living
a lie in terms of just trying to be who you were supposed to be
and not be like your dad and all the roller coasters and stuff that came
with you. And that's a tough thing to deal with because that's a big
chunk of your life, but I think it as you said, it was part of
your path. I love your this concept of the universe as a
(37:48):
higher power if we allow it, and I'm a believer in that. But I think
very often, we succumb, succumb, we see ourselves as
victims, we feel things are insurmountable, and it's not like there's a magic
wand solution. But I do believe that regardless of the
headwinds or the storm, there is silver lining. But the
interesting thing that really struck me through this is
(38:10):
your initial part of your life, you were in service to your dad and his
checklist. Now you're in service to others, but it
has nothing to do with the checklist. It really it comes down to
these words that you've defined yourself, the chosen path,
believe in yourself, better than this. All of which
is now leading you to probably the most important three words
(38:32):
for who you are and maybe why you were put on this
planet is to believe in others. My heart goes out to the
path you had to follow to get to that point. My heart also
soars for the fact that you've got some insights into life
and who you are at a time in your life where many people
question, has it been a life well served? You're now
(38:54):
realizing that this point forward, my life is to serve.
So for all of that and for your honesty and your, authenticity, I I
do appreciate you joining me in Chatter the Matters. I heard from a very smart
guy on a podcast not too long ago. It's more about
transformation and less about proclamation. I think we often
proclaim that we're victims or we proclaim that we're suffering or
(39:16):
we proclaim that we want this or want that, and and we get
frustrated with that. It doesn't really matter. It's just it's about how do we
transform ourselves and how do we transform and be of service to others.
Tony, thank you. Once again, a special
thanks to RBC for supporting Chatter That Matters. It's Tony
Chapman. Thanks for listening, and let's chat soon.
It it began with, I think I made a mistake.
My guest today is Steve Hershberger. Steve lived a life
for twenty five years that manifested into a midlife crisis,
a crisis where he lost everything. His mental and physical
health unraveled and even had suicidal tendencies.
(00:21):
What saved him? A single word on a napkin from
the intervention of a friend, which led him to doing the impossible.
And I realized at that point, we all have strengths inside of
us that we can unlock if we choose to, but more
often than not, we choose to keep them hidden away or locked
away, and and we ignore them. We don't feed them. We
(00:44):
almost lost him again. This time, because he was in the wrong place
at the wrong time. And with injuries so severe, he was put in the hands
of a life trauma team. I don't recall it. What I do recall is
the sound of heavy air displacement. Moments not
even a second or two before everything
changed. How has his life impacted him? What has he
(01:06):
learned? And how will it impact you?
Stick around and you'll find out.
Hi. It's Tony Chapman. Thank you for listening to Chatter That Matters presented
by RBC. If you can, please subscribe to the podcast. And
ratings and reviews, well, they're always welcome, and they're they're always appreciated.
(01:29):
Steve Hershberger, welcome to Chatter That Matters. Tony, thanks for having
me. I'm really grateful to be here today. I'm gonna start off with a
single conversation that you had with your dad, even though you've had
many leading up to it. But I think you were in your twenties, and you
said it was the only conversation of this sort that you ever had
with your dad. So just describe maybe your life prior to
(01:50):
that conversation and then get into why this talk
with your dad was so material. I grew up in The United
States like most kids in the seventies and
eighties did. We had a relatively normal childhood that was
middle class. We moved around following,
promotions that my my father had been lucky enough to win
(02:12):
over, a number of of years. I had
one meaningful conversation with my dad, and that conversation
occurred right before he left to
begin a an experimental cancer
treatment that ultimately he didn't survive from.
Growing up, we had lots of superficial conversations.
(02:36):
He was a dad biologically. He lived in the same
house, but he was never really emotionally
present. I was given a checklist of things that I was
supposed to accomplish over the course of my childhood and
my life. And it was essentially check back
in in five years when you've done this. That checklist from what I
(02:58):
researched was really following in his footsteps. You know, you play
sports, you go to the college that he went to, you become
involved in sales, you find your way into management. But that was very different
than who you were. From what I understand, you are a very creative kid.
%, Tony. You know, I remember growing up, one of the things that
my uncle who'd been, an active part of my life encouraged
(03:20):
was the pursuit of some of my artistic endeavors. I was, again,
like you had indicated, I was a really creative kid. I wrote stories. I
was a relatively decent artist. In fact, I remember I sold my
first watercolor painting when I was 11 years old. I was so proud.
When I came home, you know, and told my parents this, one of the
comments he made is, that's great, but you can't make a
(03:43):
living doing that. And so this was his, you know, preordained
path in life for you. And yet let's move it to that
conversation we had because what he tries to say to you
in fifteen minutes before he's packing up and heading off for this experimental
treatment was maybe it was just a pack of lies and his
context was the way he felt about his life and maybe he was trying to
(04:05):
warn you about yours? It it began with, I think I made
a mistake. He, in his own way, did
his very best to apologize, But I don't even think he knew what he
was trying to apologize for. I think he realized
that something was seriously amiss in in his life and something
was seriously amiss in his family's life.
(04:28):
And and perhaps he had given improper
instructions or guidance, but I don't think he really knew
what to do with that or how to unpack it. So it was a it
was a really uncomfortable conversation for both of us. But
it was the one time I think I could applaud him for
being profoundly courageous. I think that took a lot of
(04:49):
guts for him to do because it was something he had
never done before. Did you think it was almost like the atheist
that's praying, you know, moments before they die that he's knowing he's going
away and there's a good chance he's not gonna come back? And he's trying to
repair a lifetime of not being a note emotionally invested? I mean, did you
believe him, or did you just question whether if he did come back, would he
(05:11):
what dad he'd be? Yeah. Tony, I think you're right. He it's the
atheist praying on the plane, in the midst of
the heavy turbulence and the thunderstorm. If I get through this, that, you know,
I'll I'll change my ways. But you have no skills
or you have no muscle memory to change the ways. You know, I
recall sitting there in the bedroom as he was laying his clothes
(05:33):
out wondering what was going on. This was
not a conversation I expected and this this is one I've never had. And I
didn't know whether to believe him or not. The next part of the story, which
is so tragic, it looks like this treatment's working and you're going with
your mom, your younger sister to pick
your dad up, and he had takes a sudden turn with bronchitis.
(05:56):
And because your mom and sister have gone off to get him new clothes because
he's lost so much weight, what your memory serves up is that you're
the only person there, and the doctor's asking you to make a major
decision about how to treat this bronchitis. I was
24 years old at that time. The doctor came and said we need
to give him anesthetic because we're gonna give him a a fairly
(06:17):
stressful treatment. Well, he had never had general
anesthetic, before in his life. So there was no way to know
that he would be allergic to it, which he was. And
when he had his allergic reaction, it it caused a massive heart
attack and and he died in the midst of that process. And how
much did you feel that your decision or dialogue with the doctor
(06:52):
perceived at that point in time into my, I perceived at that point in time
into my personal photo book. It was
seared into my mind forever and as was the the
belief that I had made the decision that
ultimately killed him. Rather than telling somebody, whether
telling my family members or telling a trusted adult or
(07:14):
a a peer or a boss or somebody, I just
internalized it and let it rot and fester. And it did
that for twenty five years. Recently, you realized in
a conversation with that uncle that used to inspire you to do more
art, that in fact, you weren't alone in the room with that doctor. He was
there with you. But for some reason, that had been erased. He and
(07:36):
I had been meeting up for coffee. We live
in the same general vicinity, the same general town.
And one day not too terribly long ago, earlier
this summer, one of the things that we were
unpacking is regrets that we've
had. For the first time in that I could remember, I brought up
(07:59):
my dad's death and said, I've carried this with me for
so many years, the fact that I made the decision
that ultimately ended his life. He looked at me
with a level of, of almost amazement and
said, that never happened. And it was my turn to look at
him with amazement. I said, Bob, what are you talking about? This
(08:21):
happened. And he said, no, I was there. And I said, no, you weren't. And
he said, if you don't believe me, ask your mom. You and I talked to
the doctor together. They never came in to ask us
whether you wanted to do general or local NASDAQ. They came in and
informed us these were the different choices, and this is what they were
doing. It wasn't your fault. But for twenty five
(08:42):
years, you lived with this burden, and it wasn't like you could
just lock it away. I mean, this thing snuck out of every
corner of that box and and impacted you emotionally, psychologically,
financially. Just give us a sense of living with this memory that
was a lie, the pain it caused you and obviously
anybody attached to you for almost a quarter century. Because I didn't
(09:05):
talk about it, because I just internalized it, it
changed the trajectory of the next twenty five
years. Rather than embracing really who I
was as a as an individual, I decided that
I was going to follow in his footsteps, and I was going
to, for in in some ways, try to complete his life for
(09:28):
him doing what he did even though that wasn't
fundamentally who I was at all. Over the course of twenty
five years, there were a series of very bright
spots when my personality
shone through, and I did what I did very well
because I applied the skill sets that were innate to me.
(09:50):
But there were an equal number of of times where the
headwinds were consistent. And when those things were
consistent, it was aligned with my behavior
in doing things that were not innate to who I was, but really
a character of someone else. And when you talk
about, you know, this roller coaster that you're on, when did
(10:12):
it get to the point where I can't control this anymore?
The headwinds are just hitting me so hard that, you know, the
moments of of salvation when I could be who I am, I could be
creative and stuff were just pushed away. And
with it, things started to unravel. You repeated the same
process over and over and over without a lot of change.
(10:35):
And you became very accustomed, or I became very accustomed,
to this process of one day being
very good, one week, one month, one year being very good, and the next
one not being what it was before.
So it was a lack of consistency in terms
of experience that filled not just my life, but my wife's
(10:57):
life and and to some degree, my kids' life. I
was a bit of a different dad. I was very present in my kids' lives.
I was as, as active as I could be in a in much
more than my father. But what I sensed is normal, if
I look back, it wasn't, it was me being a
method actor reading from a script that
(11:19):
somebody had given me that didn't fit
the character didn't fit the actor, but you did your best
to make your way through it. It starts to take a toll though.
I mean, chronic insomnia, daily panic attacks,
your safety net, your self worth. I mean, during that twenty five years,
is this is it a slow build or is it something that would come in
(11:41):
and come out? It was definitely a slow build. And I think, Tony, the
more I became the character in that
script and forgot who I was, the
worse it got because I got further and further
away from the path that I should have been living, the
one that I was meant to to to head.
(12:04):
The more I ignored it, the worse it got.
It culminated in a couple years back in a in a
business that, we had an investor that didn't
necessarily agree with the approach and the approach has started to work, but
the cost of it to me and and to a lot of employees
was was extreme. We put everything into this
(12:26):
business, emotionally, monetarily, physically.
It took its toll. I was riding competitively
and and that probably was, from a health standpoint, the only thing that
really kept me from imploding. But
emotionally and and psychologically and physically, I was
getting worse by the day. And then one day,
(12:49):
it all came to an end. The investor had had enough and he
decided that he was gonna take over the business and we had a a
battle that became a war that went nuclear. And a
matter of two weeks, everything we'd worked so hard for over years,
had quite literally disappeared. And the
script I had been reading from, it was almost like somebody
(13:12):
had taken it out of my hands and said, you know what? Thanks for
reading. We appreciate it, but you're not right for the part and we're gonna
take the script back. Do you know where you're going to walk after that? I
mean, you've been play acting to the point where it's your life. You lose
everything. Do you even have a role to go into? Do you even have another
script to play? So you're just completely lost. I gained 60
(13:33):
pounds. I I quit being social.
I grew in a dependence to alcohol because it it literally would
short circuit the the panic attacks that were occurring twice a
day. I lived in a state of fear. I
had chronic insomnia, meaning that I would fall asleep around 1AM and I'd
wake up at, oddly enough, 03:14 every single day. And
(13:57):
that happened for two hundred and seventy six days. Your family,
where where are they through all of this? Because they're watching
somebody that even as a method actor was certainly
somewhat engaged in the family unravel. What was their reaction to
all this? My son was old enough to know better. My daughter,
she was in her freshman year in high school. My son was in
(14:19):
college. My wife is an incredibly strong
person, is a force of will, in and of herself. And she
has always been there to pick up pieces and glue them back
together much like a kintsugi bowl, if you will. She did
her very best to shield herself
and our kids from the reality of what was
(14:42):
occurring. My pattern of behavior was
don't talk about it, internalize it and put as brave a smile
on your face as you can. And when everything imploded,
I would leave the house and go sit at a Starbucks,
bite my lip until or my tongue or my cheek until it
(15:02):
bled, because I knew that if I was in a
public place, I wouldn't break down, I wouldn't lose it.
Pushing all of that negative energy inside, which is, you know, a
lot of people do that to a lesser or a greater degree. And once
you, once that becomes a habit, it becomes
normal. From what I understand, this this volcano
(15:24):
inside that you kept putting a cork on got you to the point where
you're even thinking of having suicidal tendencies. But
a friend shows up and he writes a single word on a napkin. There
are synchronicities that that can do occur if we recognize
them. My biggest issue, Tony, is I I ignored all of
that. And then one day I'm sitting in that coffee shop biting my lip
(15:47):
and you're right, an individual comes over and leaves it
a single word on a napkin. I still have the napkin. I went back
to find it the other day. It actually is two words
or three. It is believe in yourself. And this
was a stranger? It was an individual that I had seen
before in the coffee shop, but I didn't know
(16:09):
this individual. I smiled at this person before. I'd sat next to
this person, but I couldn't tell you their name. I thought I'd done
a pretty significantly
solid job in in masking the pain that
I I had inside of me. But apparently,
you know, that pain can and does transcend when people
(16:32):
want to pay attention to it and then do something about it. And this this
one individual had no reason to
scribble some a handful of words on a napkin or or really
whether or not those words would mean anything, but they were profound to
me, not because of the
words per se, but because of the timing and the
(16:53):
context behind it. To me, it was the universe
tapping me on the shoulder and saying, you know, maybe it's
time we try something different because your your way isn't working.
And when we return, Steve tells us the story of how that napkin, well, it
was only the beginning to his journey back from his life threatening accident
(17:14):
to finally finding his true footing. More with Steve
next.
Hi. This is Tony Chapman. I wanna talk to you about what RBC Wealth Management
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(17:36):
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(17:59):
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aging and start planning for your future. Healthy
(18:21):
aging? Well, that matters to you, to me, and to RBC.
It was very bad. I didn't know how
bad, Tony. I went back into my old
mode of covering up. So I started making jokes. How
badly are you hurt? And I said, you know, I think I might be okay.
And I was taking very shallow breaths because I I didn't want
(18:44):
her to worry too much. My guest
today, Steve Hershberger, someone with context, passionate
cyclist. He's training for a race in Iceland, and he gets hit by a black
vehicle in a hit and run, and he's hit hard. He makes
a miraculous comeback and decides that part of his life is gonna be
dedicated to advocating for cyclist safety.
(19:09):
Talk to me a little bit about how you went from
biting your lip to the point of its bleeding, being in a public
space so you wouldn't break down, to
believe in yourself on a napkin to changing the course of your life? Prior
to this, I'd been a competitive cyclist for a long time. It was it
was one way for me to to deal with anxiety,
(19:33):
which is something I'd suffered, from most of my adult life.
And in large part, I think I I I suffered from that because I sequestered
all of these negative emotions and thoughts. It's a lot like somebody gets
a, a demand notice in the mail and rather than paying attention to it,
they put it in a drawer and hope that it goes away. And
over time, it starts to solidify and and you start
(19:55):
carrying around heavy weight. And then one day you come
to realize that you've got this unnecessary
load and you wanna get rid of it. I was sixty
pounds heavier. I'd been checked into the hospital a couple
times with heart arrhythmia from stress. The doctor
said, you dude, you need to change this. Otherwise,
(20:17):
in your fifties, you could have a heart attack or you could have a stroke,
and you could die. So the
napkin shows up. A couple days later, I get a knock on the
door from a teammate of my cycling, teammate.
And he's standing on my front door my front doorstep and he looks at me
and said, dude, we're not gonna do this. You look bloody
(20:39):
horrible. And he didn't use that word. He was more graphic
and he said, it's pathetic. You're better than
this. We're going to change this trajectory.
And then he stood there with his hands on his hips glaring at me.
Maybe, my nickname's Hersh. She said, Hersh,
maybe it's time you start believing in yourself. Same words again.
(21:02):
Same words on the napkin. Wow. I didn't know what to do with
that. It's time for you to stand up
and not be a victim. Let's go a different direction and just
believe in yourself. I came back in the house, I came into
the office I had in the home, and sitting on the desk was
that napkin. I sat and stared at it for an
(21:24):
hour. I made a a maybe it was a
spiritual decision, but it was a soul level decision that
I was going to follow the path that I was
meant to follow and the rest of my life would would look different.
Instantly, meaning in a matter of days,
it went from terrible to
(21:47):
there was a light, an opening, an opportunity.
Oddly enough, Tony, the opportunity came in the
form of a of a friend, another friend who I hadn't seen in quite some
time. Let's get together for coffee. So we sat
down, and we spent the next two and a half hours talking
about a challenge he was having in his life. And I, and I realized
(22:10):
about three quarters of the way through that I'd spent all of my
time and emotional energy trying to help him get
through the trauma he was dealing with. It was a a
personal crisis that he was having. Wow. He says,
so what are you doing now? And I said, well,
that's a really good question. I I don't honestly
(22:33):
know. And he said, I I need some help
inside my organization. Would you be willing to take on the
role of change agent in helping my organization evolve and
change? Well, absolutely. And then driving
home, I thought, what the hell do I know about change? I'm the
last guy that should be talking about change.
(22:56):
And so I called up a friend of mine who was in consulting, and and
he was an expert in change management.
And he said, you know, it takes perseverance
and determination, but most of all, it takes
honesty and courage to change. And he said, What
do you know about those things? If you'd asked me a year ago, I would
(23:17):
say, Not much. Here's what was happening in my life, but right now, this is
what's going on. And he says, Steve, I I can't think of anybody more qualified
because you're dealing with change firsthand, And I believe that you can
learn from that process and they can learn from from you. So
I embarked on a career of focusing on change
management and it went really well until I
(23:39):
realized I was sort of treading water. I realized
that I had changed enough without really
throwing the old costumes and the
old way of doing things away. I had kept them.
When you make a decision to change your
life, you have to be all in
(24:01):
to facilitating that change. You can't be in
the middle. I believe that many of us that struggle with
difficult emotions or we struggle with the frustrations of our
life, we know deep down that we're doing some of the wrong things
or all of the wrong things. We really don't wanna do anything about it because
we are so terrified of what
(24:24):
might happen. All of that fear,
the terrors, when all of those things do happen to
you, your perception of the
end is is not the end, it's the beginning. So that
the nightmares, the terrors that are coming for you, that you're
so scared of, that's all paper tiger. It's all just a loud label.
(24:46):
What, what sits behind it is the agent of change.
They're really angels there to move you in the right direction,
whether you'd wanna believe in that or whether it's just a revelation
of I can be who I need to be. You know, Steve, the other
tragedy is that you're starting to really figure all of this
out. You've now become the person with the napkin and the person
(25:09):
knocking in the door in terms of your ability to unpack what
you've learned for others. But on
05/30/2024, you're out cycling. You get
hit. I wasn't just hit. I was destroyed. People say to me
often, it was a hit and run, and aren't you
angry that they didn't find the person? Aren't don't you want retribution
(25:31):
for what happened to you? And and I'm so sorry that this
occurred. The reality is that up until that point in
time, Tony, the the changes I had made
were all for me. I was still being selfish. I
was focused on my well-being and that was it. I
wasn't really willing to positively impact other people's lives.
(25:53):
I was not being of service in any meaningful way. Well, that
day on May 30, when I got hit, I don't recall it.
What I do recall is the sound of heavy air displacement
moments not even a second or two before,
everything changed. And I was going 15, and the vehicle was
probably traveling between sixty and seventy miles an hour when it hit me.
(26:16):
And the last thing I recall was flying towards two fifty five
gallon, trash barrels on a lonely country road and
somebody painted their name on the trash barrels. I'm going, now why would somebody paint
their name on their trash bins? And then I
impacted them, then things went dark. When I
woke up, I wasn't aware that I'd actually been unconscious, but I had been
(26:38):
unconscious for an extended period of time and I
had no idea who I was or where I was. I lay
there face down, I rolled over. When I
started to breathe, I could hear this gurgling
sound. Oh, boy. I am really,
really hurt. If I don't stand up now, I'm
(27:00):
probably not going to survive. And and nothing
hurt yet. When I started to get to my knees
and stand up, what I could feel was the
best way to describe it is a bag of dominoes
rolling and moving over one another, and and those were
the the broken ribs and collarbone and
(27:22):
other bones in my body that were rubbing against the all the soft
tissue damage. A lot of the cyclists, we have what's called a headset
on the bike, and that is this little device that gives you all of your
data, your speed, your distance, and and whatnot. The headset has
an accelerometer in it. And that accelerometer, when it stops
quickly, it sends a text alert and says, there's an
(27:45):
emergency at this location. You should head that way.
My wife, who got the text alert, didn't see it right away and just made
the assumption that that Steve had made a sudden stop and
was up starting again and hadn't answered his phone. As
I'm standing there, and as it turns out, this is close to an almost an
hour after the accident occurred and the driver had driven away. Then
(28:08):
another cyclist came down this lonely country road and he came over me and he
started to say, are you okay? And then he stopped and goes, oh shit, you
are not okay. That point, my phone rang one more time and so he took
it out of my jersey pocket, gave it to me to answer and I
didn't know how to do that. Then he took it and he said, Hi,
my name is John and I have this person's phone.
(28:30):
My wife said, I I'm that person's wife and I'm
nearby. You need to get her as fast as possible.
And I didn't know how bad I was truly hurt. And so I went in,
and the woman in the ER, at reception says, can I help
you? And I looked at her, and I said, what's so special? And she
rolls her eyes, she's, you know, another cyclist that has had a crash and
(28:53):
he's a smartass and here fill out these forms. Well, as I
was doing as I was taking the forms, there was a PA that walked by,
saw me and heard me and goes, what happened? And I said, I was hit
by a truck and it was a hit and run. He called a
code and rushed me into triage. They put me through x
rays and they put me through an MRI. My wife at that
(29:16):
point had come in and my wife knew that I was a lot worse than
I was letting on. She had called
my daughter, and my daughter said, is is dad going to be
okay? And my wife said, I don't know,
but I think so. And my daughter didn't believe her. And
so she came to the hospital to make sure that I wasn't going to
(29:39):
die. And when I saw her, first thing that came
in my mind, because the pain hadn't started, the adrenaline was still
there, was me standing in the
hospital when my dad died and what the
next twenty five years had looked like. I
made the conscious decision that we weren't gonna do that
(30:00):
shit. We were not going to play that game.
And I recall my wife telling me she said, you just kept repeating a
mantra. It's okay. It's okay. It's okay. It's okay.
What were your injuries? I mean, I don't need the whole laundry list, but what
was the most serious injury? A broken back and a broken
neck. Yeah. Numerous others. I mean, I
(30:23):
mean, it was, as the doctor said, he goes, literally, it's a laundry
list. Yeah. You wrote an article sixty nine days later where you
talked about you were starting to heal physically.
But through that healing process, there was a
silver lining, and that silver lining shone down and maybe for
the first time in your life, you kinda understood who you were.
(30:47):
As my memory started to come back, I came to the
realization that there are things that had happened during
that time between the accident and and accident and and reawakening
that were profound. The the first was when I got hit, my
wearables recorded all that that information. My
vitals had stopped for nearly a couple of minutes, and I wrote about
(31:08):
that. And what it taught me was
there's a reality beyond just what we experience. There was a famous
philosopher named Alan Watts who said, Ordinary everyday consciousness leaves out
more than it takes in. As we go through our lives, we leave out a
lot, we ignore a lot. Change in profound
ways is entirely possible if we believe it and and we
(31:31):
wish it to be, but we have to embrace it and and we have
to understand it for what it is, which is a
profound change in paradigm. You have to think differently
and act differently to be different. Physically, I
healed remarkably quickly. And over the course
of the injury is I would go out and about, I
(31:53):
I'd have conversations with people and I would start sharing the
belief that you can move past whatever bad thing is
occurring in your life because it's nothing more than a a
really loud label. Whatever terrible things you believe
might occur, they might not be as bad as you think and you're
probably a lot stronger than you believe. And I recall
(32:16):
in one instance being back in that same coffee shop and having a
discussion with a woman who had just been diagnosed only a month
before with stage four breast cancer and had double mastectomy.
She was a marathoner and she and a friend were having a discussion
and she was under this the profound belief that
her life was over and that, that she would be fighting cancer for the rest
(32:38):
of her life. And she was done racing marathons because she didn't have it in
her. And she said, well, what happened to you? And I said, well, this is
the accident. She said, well, when did this happen? And I said, well, I was
released from the trauma center four days ago. And she said, well, how is this
possible that you're here doing this? So it's a belief. It's a mental belief.
She said, you're living proof. If you're standing here and all everything you've
(32:59):
told me is true, there's no reason why I can't
accomplish the same thing. Will you give me your cell phone number? What
came of all of this, Tony, was the
migration from I'm going to fix myself
and live my own life and not be of service to others,
to I can fix myself, I can do
(33:22):
what many believe is impossible, and I can share that with others
so that they can do the same thing. And it's incredible that you've
got you finally have a pair of shoes that you can stand in and you
believe. But for the people listening, and there's a lot of people I've
interviewed in the past, they've John Ruffalo, who had a bike accident who's
might never properly walk again. Part of this is
(33:45):
incredibly fortunate that your body healed the way it did, and
part of it, I think, is mind over matter. Is that fair? %. I keep
on my desk, a good friend of mine sent me a block of
tungsten because it's the hardest element. And I look at it every
day and it reminds me that we, we all have
our own challenges. We all have our own difficulties and we
(34:07):
are often stronger than we believe. And
that little block of tungsten that sits on my desk reminds me I've been
through things that are worse than this and I will, in
fact, not only survive, but I will thrive. And
my job isn't necessarily just to do this for
me, but to motivate and help others to find their
(34:30):
own strength. Do you think that all of what happened to you was for a
reason now that this is in fact giving you the
context, the authenticity, personal experiences
that you can take this upon yourself and saying from this point
forward, a big part of who I am and why I matter
is my ability to offer the status? Yes. Very much so.
(34:52):
The first set of terrible experiences, had I
not had some purpose to
lift up and act on, I wouldn't have
made it through. I I I probably would have survived, but I I I
would have never recovered. And then being hit, I
truly believe that I'm here for a reason. And Steve, how do people get
(35:14):
hold of you? I mean, is your is your thought nowadays that you wanna you're
gonna write a book on this, you're gonna speak about this? I mean
or are you just gonna have these interventions in coffee shops and
where you listen generously and question whether you could step in and
be the person now brings the words on the napkin. I always do that. I
I look for opportunities to be of service and to to share
(35:37):
encouragement wherever I can. Some people will ask and they'll wanna know
the story. Some people have heard about it and they've asked me to to come
and talk to their group. So I'll always do that.
I'll always put the words on the napkin for people because that's what we're all
supposed to do is quality members of the human race who all are
interconnected. We all share some common experience and purpose for
(35:58):
being. So selfishness is not something that
we should ascribe to. For the latter, I believe that part
of my purpose is to continue
to champion change. And I'll do that in a day
job, but I'll also do it in the opportunity
to to speak to groups, be on
(36:20):
important shows like yours. Maybe someday there's a book in
there. My final question, your your wife and your daughter, what do they
think of the new Steve? How do they feel? Do they understand you?
Do they know who you are? Are they accepting of this change? My
wife's comment after the accident is about damn time.
Our relationship is stronger today than it's ever
(36:42):
been because she's starting to, to see the person
that she fell in love with and married so many years ago re
emerge. That is something that, that I must do, not
just for my family, but for myself and for those individuals
that I'm destined to to run into, to meet, or
to impact in some way. The old Steve was not
(37:04):
capable, willing, or didn't really have the right to
do that. But the original one, the one that sits in front of you
now, that's in large part what that person's
purpose is. So the old script has been burnt and the ashes
scattered. The new one is being written as it goes. You know, Steve, I always
end my podcast with my three takeaways. And the first is just
(37:27):
so much of your life living with a lie and then living
a lie in terms of just trying to be who you were supposed to be
and not be like your dad and all the roller coasters and stuff that came
with you. And that's a tough thing to deal with because that's a big
chunk of your life, but I think it as you said, it was part of
your path. I love your this concept of the universe as a
(37:48):
higher power if we allow it, and I'm a believer in that. But I think
very often, we succumb, succumb, we see ourselves as
victims, we feel things are insurmountable, and it's not like there's a magic
wand solution. But I do believe that regardless of the
headwinds or the storm, there is silver lining. But the
interesting thing that really struck me through this is
(38:10):
your initial part of your life, you were in service to your dad and his
checklist. Now you're in service to others, but it
has nothing to do with the checklist. It really it comes down to
these words that you've defined yourself, the chosen path,
believe in yourself, better than this. All of which
is now leading you to probably the most important three words
(38:32):
for who you are and maybe why you were put on this
planet is to believe in others. My heart goes out to the
path you had to follow to get to that point. My heart also
soars for the fact that you've got some insights into life
and who you are at a time in your life where many people
question, has it been a life well served? You're now
(38:54):
realizing that this point forward, my life is to serve.
So for all of that and for your honesty and your, authenticity, I I
do appreciate you joining me in Chatter the Matters. I heard from a very smart
guy on a podcast not too long ago. It's more about
transformation and less about proclamation. I think we often
proclaim that we're victims or we proclaim that we're suffering or
(39:16):
we proclaim that we want this or want that, and and we get
frustrated with that. It doesn't really matter. It's just it's about how do we
transform ourselves and how do we transform and be of service to others.
Tony, thank you. Once again, a special
thanks to RBC for supporting Chatter That Matters. It's Tony
Chapman. Thanks for listening, and let's chat soon.
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