Welcome And Medical Disclaimer

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Welcome back to Healthy Mind, Healthy Lies. I'm your host, Cyan, as most of you know, and tonight we are gonna explore somewhat that most conversations about health and resilience refuse to speak about. Past the inspirational arc and into the harder and more honest middle. My guest today is Nancy Deo. Nancy is a former Silicon Valley CEO, a Stanford Distinguished Koreas Institute fellow, and the author of the forthcoming memoir Prelius Essence. After a medical crisis on Mount Kilimanjaro that led her into 15 years of misdiagnosis, chronic pain, opioid dependence, and a complete collapse of the identity that she had built her whole life on. She began to question the very strategies that have made her successful. And tonight, I invite you all on this journey where she's going to take us insight of what it actually looks like to rebuild that life and pushing harder stops working. So, Nancy, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to have you here with me. And um I believe that is something that really comes from a lived experience. So I'm excited to talk about this. Thanks, France. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks, Nancy. So before we get started, a little disclaimer for all the listeners who have tuned in. So some statements may reflect personal belief and experiences and are presented as individual views and our medical advice. Listeners should consult qualified professionals for medical conditions. So with that being said, uh Nancy, before we go into the harder parts of the story, I want to start somewhere more natural

The High Performer Before The Fall

SPEAKER_01 1:52

about your story. I think there's always a before, maybe the version of you that didn't yet know what was coming on that instance on Mount Kiribanjaro. So take me back. Take us briefly back there. You know, what were you operating on? What were you believing about yourself in the years right before that climb?

SPEAKER_00 2:12

Yes, what a great question. My life as a Silicon Valley CEO could not have been more different from what was to come. I was hard driving, I was disciplined, I succeeded by working harder and faster than anybody else. And for me, it was always about the next obstacle I could leap over and the next thing I could achieve. So I started a business that was a girls' technology business designed to get girls to put their hands on computers so they would grow up and be competitive with boys who were playing video games at the time. And it was a real high-profile, high-flying startup that was just the media darling and the investor darling of Silicon Valley until we started to run out of cash. As many startups do before the business model is extremely solid, we ended up needing to sell the business, which for me, as somebody who was destined and driving toward going public, was a huge disaster. And we sold to our number one arch rival. This led me to question who I was, what my worth was, what my value was. And I started traveling the world to try to find myself again, to really understand myself. And that quest took me to Tanzania, to Vietnam, to Peru, all over the world, until finally I concluded that the way I was going to redeem myself was to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. It was my second chance to prove that I could still be successful at something significant.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

Yeah, I I I think that might sound like a disaster upfront, but uh what what I mean, where you're taking us here on the more introspective level. And uh I think that that really requires us to really understand ourselves. And I think Nancy, for a lot of us, um so yeah, quest is definitely a bigger term, but I think uh on a smaller micro scale, I think uh going out on an adventure or just sitting by the nature itself uh does a lot in resetting uh whatever it is that uh you might not be able to see otherwise, and because I think there's a misconception that running underneath uh the high-performing people understand their own bodies.

The Myth Of Endurance Breaks

SPEAKER_01 4:56

Um, you know, there's this belief that the body is something that you direct. You feed it well, you train it hard, you push through all of that, and you know, it keeps performing with you until one day it doesn't. Um so I'm curious to know what's the misconception um about efforts and willpower and the body that really costs people the most when life stops responding to these kind of tools? And also, uh Nancy, what's the I mean, the immediate thing that comes to your mind uh when you have to battle uh or navigate through this circumstance?

SPEAKER_00 5:32

Yes, well, I think that the myth of endurance is that you can outrun and outlast and ultimately succeed. And in my case, there I was at 16,000 feet on Mount Kilimanjaro. I had physically collapsed. My body, my mind. I was 41 years old. I was alone in an orange and gray tent. I could not feel my legs, they felt disconnected from my body. And when I tried to shift, the pain was so horrible that I felt like somebody was driving a steel rod through my spine. And I thought two things to really answer your question. First, I thought I was dying and I thought I was bleeding out, and I had to grapple with the grief and the panic of what that felt like. But the other thing I realized is that I had built my entire life and my identity on pushing harder and pushing through. And all of a sudden, that wasn't working for me. I had to find another way. It didn't challenge just my body, it challenged everything about who I was. And as we'll discuss during this podcast, what I learned about resilience is that it's not about pushing harder. It's you have to find a completely different way to live and a different way to be with your body with all of its pain, perhaps, with all of its limits.

SPEAKER_01 7:02

That's interesting. What do you exactly mean by those last two sentences? Uh, if you could perhaps break that down further to our listeners, you know, uh what what is that you learned uh about resilience that you don't find on the textbook, per se?

SPEAKER_00 7:17

Well, I used to think that resilience meant bouncing back, bouncing back from a crisis, having the endurance and the willpower to stick with something. But for me, what I realized is that that didn't work for me. Every time I pushed, when I had 15 years of chronic pain, I would crash because I wasn't listening, I wasn't tuning in to my body, I wasn't tuning into my mind, and I wasn't in sync with what I was really able to do. So I had to learn to listen, to focus on what I can do in that moment, and then figure out how to move forward. And to me, that's a completely different definition of resilience and being strong, bouncing back, pushing through, because some people might view it as failure or as weakness or as giving up. But for me, it was about accepting it and living with it.

SPEAKER_01 8:20

Love it, love it. That's the word that I was uh hoping for acceptance, right? Resilience is very much tied to acceptance, but um, there's this belief, or uh on the surface level at least, that people understand it as bouncing back off a surface. But uh, that's not really true. Uh that's just you trying to fight against the system, and it's the same analogy as why you should swim in the direction of a tsunami rather than you know fighting back against it, right? It's kind of the same analogy.

Life In Bed And Opioids

SPEAKER_01 8:53

So I want to ask you, Nancy, because uh you did things during those years that most people would consider impossible because you attended graduate school lying on an arbitrage, you travel to all these places, uh, you know, uh four or five airprint seats, and you return to work while living inside uh chronic pain as well. That's not uh a usual story, I would say. So I want to ask you about that everyday texture at that point in your life. Like, what did a regular Monday maybe actually look like for you in those years?

SPEAKER_00 9:28

Well, in the years, if I back up for a moment before I went to graduate school, my day was spent completely lying down with a cocktail of opioids on a side table. Sometimes there was a commode next to the bed because I couldn't make the steps to the bathroom. I would watch television if I had the attention span. I would meditate, I would do anything I could do lying down. I knitted, I watched a movie, it was isolated, it was lonely, and I really thought my life was over because society doesn't know how to handle somebody who can't sit or walk or stand. And when I realized that the medical system had given me all the solutions it could give me, and that this might be my life, I knew that I had to very slowly and intentionally find a way to still move forward. So I realized that my mind was still functioning despite the anxiety about my future, despite the sadness about what I had lost. But I really wanted to go back to graduate school to find a new path. And so I enrolled in a graduate degree in international studies so that I could do the global work that I was interested in. The only way I could do that was if I was still lying down. So, as you mentioned, I fashioned an army cot that was portable, that I could set up in a minute, that had an inflatable mattress, that I could set in the middle of a seminar square surrounded by my fellow students, and still learn. And what that taught me, it taught me two things. One is that there are so many ways to be in the world. Yeah. And one of them just happens to be a way that the world isn't used to, but that's horizontal. And that led me to think I could work again, I could travel if I have three seats to stretch out across and lie down. And so I began to do that. And it didn't mean the pain was gone, it just meant that I was managing it and able to find some purpose for my existence beyond lying in my bed in my small house in San Francisco, California, by myself.

SPEAKER_01 12:13

Yeah, and that's perhaps something that I want uh the listeners to sit with, right? Um understanding that collapse is not just physical, it happens on all the levels. It's a slow dissolution of the self, you know, that body that I've been carrying. And I think something that is shared, Nancy, that uh I really resonate with is that the moment you stop trying to put that self back together and start letting a different self emerge, I think the narrative changes right then and there, right?

Acceptance As A Practical Skill

SPEAKER_01 12:48

It stops looking like you gotta recover and it it it becomes more of a return to yourself, which I I want to bring this into the everyday next life uh and to just make it more practical for all the listeners listening to this right now, because uh you talk about uh discovering not a cure but a different way forward. I think that phrase really does indeed matter. So um, because I think they they want the pushing strategy to start working again, but what you're pointing at towards is something different, it's towards acceptance, and I love that idea. So I I I want to make this more practical for the listeners. So uh what would that look like? I mean, what does that different way actually look like in practice? Because what would you say listeners to unlearn today is what I want to hear.

SPEAKER_00 13:41

I think that acceptance in living in a different reality isn't that you necessarily like what's happening. It means a few things. It means you're not fighting against reality. It means that you might have a bad day, but it's not a failure. It means being in your body as it is without trying to override it. And it means finding a way that still works that gives you a sense of moving forward, not toward who you were, because getting to be normal again may not be possible. But as one of my psychotherapists told me, there's a new normal. And it might be your horizontal life. And what you need to do, you don't need to give up, you're not surrendering, you're just giving in enough to stop fighting with yourself. And that's what I had to do in order to take that step forward, and part of that's mindset in orienting your head around feeling positive about small steps, about small things that you can do.

SPEAKER_01 15:14

Yeah, it's uh it's an important honoring, I think. Uh but I'm curious to know what is the horizontal uh vantage point that you're referring to, if you could uh just share a bit more context uh to what is what is the horizontal way of living that you're referring to in this.

The Reality Of Horizontal Living

SPEAKER_00 15:33

Well, what I'm referring to is that because of my disability, I was unable to sit. Now you can see that I'm sitting right now, and that as I got out into the world, amazingly enough, my very deconditioned weak body started to strengthen. And in time, I was able to achieve more. But my horizontal life meant that everything I did was from a lying down position. My friends would come visit the few that I had left, and they would sit in a chair while I lay down. I would work lying down, I would write papers lying down. I basically lived in a way that wasn't the normal vertical way of moving through the world as a human.

SPEAKER_01 16:34

Yeah, I think that really, I mean, uh, I was seeing it as a metaphor uh to this conversation. Um, but after hearing, you know, what you went through and the way you you bounced back, but not necessarily fighting for it, I would say, you know, by accepting uh that you're indifferent. And I think uh for a lot of people uh that is that is the starting point.

You Are Not Your Pain

SPEAKER_01 16:59

So for the person listening to this right now who is in the middle of a health crisis, might have to uh, you know, sacrifice their dreams even in in the extreme case or or in the middle of a slow collapse of the life that they used to know. What would you want them to hear from you right now, maybe from a woman who has stood exactly where they're standing right now, slowly built a different life on the other side?

SPEAKER_00 17:22

I would say a couple of things. Number one, you are not your pain. You are a human with a unique set of skills and things to offer the world, and that you don't have to let your pain or your disability be the end of your life. There are different versions of you, different parts of you that can come forth through a difficult period, and you may become a very I became a very different person than I was, and one that I would have never expected, and one that I did not ask for. But that if your mind is open to the possibility of a different future, it is something you can slowly step by step work toward while still accepting that you have health issues or challenges or pain that you're experiencing.

SPEAKER_01 18:35

Absolutely. I I totally agree. And I think that's what I would want the listeners to sit with uh as we wrap this off. Because I think what I would want you to take forth uh from this conversation is the idea of resilience, because I think uh the moment you stop fighting a version of reality that you wish it could be true, I think a different kind of strength comes um to you, right? It becomes more available, and I think that kind really isn't built on pushing, but really more on the listening side, more on the introspective side. So, Nancy, if there's anything that you would like to add on to that, I would leave that to you.

SPEAKER_00 19:14

I would just say listen to your body. Your body tells the truth, your mind tells the truth, even if it's inconvenient, even if the medical system can't fix it, even if you feel like there isn't an answer. If you can listen, you can focus on what you can do and take that first step forward.

SPEAKER_01 19:40

Beautiful. I think that's that's that hit Holmes. And uh we come we come back a full circle at this point. So

Where To Follow Nancy’s Work

SPEAKER_01 19:47

uh for the listeners who actually resonated with what we uh just talked about, Nancy, because this has been an honest conversation from uh point zero. And I know there are people listening today who are going to uh want to find your work and your forthcoming memoir and walk a little further with you. So, where's the best place for them to find you at? And uh brilliant as and when it's out in the world.

SPEAKER_00 20:08

Yes, I would invite listeners if they want to join this community and continue to read and follow me. That I have a Substack called Life Inside Pain. For anybody who's experiencing pain or illness or loss that is looking for a way through that isn't about pushing and endurance, that they join me on that journey. And so that's either Substack at Nancy Deo or Life Inside Pain.

SPEAKER_01 20:47

Perfect. I'll link that in the show notes so that people can easily reach out

Pause, Listen, And Close

SPEAKER_01 20:51

to you. So, uh, folks, uh, with that, if something in this conversation perhaps moved in your ride, I would want you to not scroll past this, maybe where wherever you're sitting right now in the car going to work, uh maybe sitting after a direful day. Um, if you are someone who has been pushing through something for too long, uh, who has been ignoring what maybe your body has been trying to tell you for uh a long time, uh this is maybe the invitation to pause, maybe just for today. And uh, folks, with that, uh that single act of listening is where I think the new life begins. So, this has been Cyan on Healthy Mind, Healthy Life. And Nancy, thank you once again for the depth and honesty of this conversation. And to you all listening, take care of yourself, folks.