Who am I and what gives me any authority on this?
My name is Jodie Thalheimer. I started my career as a registered nurse. Like many young adults, when it was time to choose a career, I didn't have a clue what I wanted to do, so I followed logic. Nurses were in high demand, the pay was decent and I had great marks in all the sciences. I sailed through post secondary and straight into a mortgage, three kids and a mini van. In every way, my life was exactly what I grew up knowing. Just enough money to live month to month with a job I didn't love and a family I didn't remember deciding to have. I felt like it all just happened to me, like I was on autopilot.
Working in health care caused two of my strongest values to glow so brightly I couldn't ignore them for long.
- 1. I have no tolerance for labelling illness as incurable. I see people as strong and capable of creating their own wellness. If they have the desire to feel better they have the ability to live a happy and full life.
- I do not believe in living with just enough. I believe we are born with a desire for our own life to be a certain size. Some people believe a nursing income is more than enough. Depending on how they also desire to live their life, they might be exactly right. As a child I can recall having a sharp awareness of my desire to be wealthy. I wanted to outgrow the experience of not being able to do what I wanted to do. Dance classes were too expensive, holidays had to be simple, travel was out of the question. I watched my friends having experiences I desperately wanted. I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a career but I knew I wanted money to be easy and abundant. As I settled into what I thought was supposed to be my forever job, I found myself dreading every moment but taking extra shifts for the overtime pay. Money was not easy and it certainly wasn’t abundant. It was just enough, no matter how much or how little I made.
I am so grateful to my desire for wealth because it opened my eyes to what would become the next chapter in my story.
After working 10 years as a nurse I had developed experience in two main areas. Acute medical (heart attacks and renal failure) and psychiatry. During my time in the medical world, I noticed patterns in patient’s personalities that corresponded to their ability to heal. To me, it seemed obvious who would be back with a failing prognosis and who was using their illness as an opportunity to start listening to their body. I found my area of interest wasn’t a predominant focus in the hospital. It took me a few years to realize this didn’t mean the hospital was wrong, it meant I was in the wrong profession. Before I became wise, I set my sights on finding my passion in psychiatry. Mental health seemed more closely aligned with my interests and still made use of my degree so I spent the next 5 years working in acute and later outpatient mental health as a clinician.
It was here that I began to understand the power of the mind.
I witnessed and listened to 100’s of clients recall the havoc their minds played on their ability to have a normal life. Relationships suffered, physical health suffered, medications solved one problem and caused several more. Careers were difficult, emotions ran out of control. Hormones were blamed, traumas were blamed, neurochemical transmitters were blamed, chronic pain was blamed, parents were blamed, children were blamed, abusive relationships, passive personalities, bullies, street drugs, shame….so many different stories and an endless stream of medications and interventions to try and relieve the client’s suffering. And again, something really bothered me, I didn’t see any of these people as incurable but I was asked to. I was told to understand it is insensitive to give hope when none is realistic.
I found myself interested primarily in Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT). At the time this was a cutting edge treatment modality considered to be most effective at managing symptoms of clients diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. What caught my attention was the mindfulness and emotional regulation focus. I spent hours leading group therapy sessions with rooms full of what we professionally considered the most challenging population of clients in our scope of practice. It didn’t feel challenging to me. The idea that these women weren’t broken, they simply lacked an understanding of how emotions and thoughts impact their decisions made me treat them like they were not incapable of growing and changing. I believed they did not have to continue to fall victim to their own behaviours that made relationships unhealthy, careers unlikely and health issues rampant. I saw each client as capable of learning and changing but unfortunately by the time I met these ladies they had already been told they were incurable. They were more aware than most how BPD plays out. They knew the likelihood of medication working was low, the future of their relationships were rocky, the chance of death by suicide was high. These were the statistical truths and the clients believed every word of it. What I saw was more evidence that a client’s prognosis has more to do with their belief about their future than it does with what their experiences have been categorized as.
I loved working with these ladies but I recognized I was swimming against a powerful current. I knew I was not wrong to see all disease be it (physical or mental in presentation) as rooted in the habitual thinking patterns of a person. I knew it but I was in an industry that focuses primarily on the physiology for treatment. My passion started to take shape during my nursing career but it really came to life once I left and started working as a network marketing rep.
In nursing I found very little support in my desire to focus on the power of the mind to create wellness. In network marketing I found a sea of people aiming for a different life than what they currently had and the only tool promoted and utilized successfully was mindset. I became a personal development junkie and quickly rose to a level in my company that afforded me exactly the same lifestyle I had while nursing. And that’s where I stayed. Year after year attending every conference, gobbling up every book on mindset I could find. I heard motivational lectures and read books from Mel Robbins, Rachel Hollis, T Harv Eker, Jen Sincerro, Gabriella Bernstein, Brenden Buchard, Eric Worre, Bob Proctor. Jim Rohn’s audio played in my car for weeks. Personal development podcasts played in my ears daily for almost 10 years. I invested in numerous self directed programs. I studied and I did everything I could to apply the knowledge to myself in a way that would change the results I was getting. But year after year I did not reach my financial goals. No matter what happened, divorce, single parent, two incomes, one income, part time job along with networking gig…..it never mattered, I consistently maintained the same financial situation. Always enough but never a dollar more.
After the better part of 10 years and doing everything I could think of the change my environment to change my results I became acutely aware that there was something invisible, something inside of me that was working to keep me exactly where I was.
