Growing Through Trauma with Janelle Bruland

In this Episode

• [08:15]Janelle Bruland explains the concept of “The Success Lie” in her first book, which challenges societal definitions of success and encourages readers to live by their true values.
• [12:01]Janelle emphasizes the importance of living a holistic life, focusing on all areas such as business, health, mindset, faith, family, and legacy.
• [32:12]Janelle shares a personal story about spending time with her parents before they passed away, emphasizing the importance of cherishing family moments.
• [39:31]Janelle talks about the significance of faith and community in her healing journey, including her experience with a red rose bush as a sign from her father.
• [47:02]Janelle discusses her healing journey through EMDR and holistic modalities, which helped her release memories stored in her brain.
• [51:51]Janelle highlights the importance of creating deep connections with others who share similar values and goals.
• [54:42]Janelle concludes by encouraging listeners to step into their purpose with fearlessness and trust that the path will show itself.

Jump to Links and Resources

Janelle, it’s so great to have you on the show.

So great to be here, Stephan, and thank you for having me.

Let’s start with a little superhero origin story. And of course, we met through Genius Network, Joe Polish’s amazing mastermind and community. And yeah, we’ve known each other for several years now, maybe a few years. Let’s talk about your superhero origin story. How did you end up being the author of two books, having known a successful business, and all the cool stuff that you’ve created in the world up to now?

Well, thank you. It unfolds as we know it is supposed to unfold. But I have always had a dream of running my own business, being an entrepreneur, and starting several ventures. As I was growing my business, I really loved both growing my business and developing people. And I would say that where this really took place was a business I started in the living room of my home, back when I was nine months pregnant with my second child. I had been working in the corporate world, just putting in a lot of hours.

I decided to do something on my own because it would help me really make my family a priority, which I wanted it to be. I started this little side business, this commercial janitorial company. I didn’t know anything about that industry, but I’d heard about it. This was something that I could do for my home. I had a manager who was ready to go for it. I had this tiny little team. I remember saying to them in the middle of my living room, I don’t know anything about this janitorial business, but I do know something about business. If we work together, you teach me what you know, and we will take really great care of our clients. 

They’re going to refer us to other clients, and the company will grow. That’s exactly what happened. We began to have clients ask for additional services. They were saying, “Can you clean my windows? Can you do my carpets? Can you do landscaping for us?” Since I had a property management background and many contacts in the area, I began referring people to colleagues I knew. I thought, this is something we could bring to our clients and actually provide as a service. 

As our clients’ needs grew, we added services, and we became a multi-state operation with 500 team members. We were just very blessed in the growth of this business. I had a wonderful team, and going back to what I found in growing a business, I loved growing a business, but even more, loved developing people. That really led me on this journey to start helping people develop themselves. And then that led forward into speaking and becoming an author as well.

You employed 500 people. What happened to that business? Did you sell it? Did you leave it on autopilot and move on to your speaking and writing career? Like what happened there?

I was, like most entrepreneurs, very, very driven and felt that I could do it all—a little bit of superwoman with running my business, taking care of my children. Something happened that I was on my way to a conference one day, and I, on the airplane, had this very strange blackout experience where I lost a portion of the flight. In doing that, I’ll tell you a little bit about it. Someone was coming down the aisle to take food orders, and I thought, “I would like something, I’m hungry.” I was thinking about what I was going to order. The next moment I looked down, and I had my tray out, and I had a plate of food in front of me. I didn’t remember any of it. I didn’t remember the flight attendant stopping at my row. I didn’t remember making my food order. I didn’t remember the food coming.

That was enough to scare me to go, “Okay, something’s going on here. I need to get this checked out.” I had a lot on my plate, and, as we often do as entrepreneurs, we kept thinking, “Well, later I’ll take a look at some of these things.” “Later, I’ll slow down. After I do this, then I will slow down. There’ll be time to take a break.” I went into the doctor’s office when I got back from this conference. He took a brain scan, did all of the things and came back into his appointment with me and said, “Janelle, I want to tell you that you’re okay, that we don’t need to do anything, any surgery to remove a tumor,” which of course was my biggest concern. And he said, “But you do need to do something else.” He said, “You do need surgery, drastic surgery on your schedule, because the life that you’re living right now is not sustainable. I know you have this awesome business, you’ve got a great family, but the pace of what you’re living is not sustainable.”

I hadn’t been taking care of myself. I’d been focusing on everything and everyone else except for myself. That really led me to do some deep soul-searching, get to the heart of my values and what was most important to me, and make a huge shift in my life. I created a framework, and that is how I began living my life. Then others began noticing this and saying, “Janelle, you’ve always looked like you’ve had your life altogether. You have this great business, this wonderful, these wonderful girls, but yet now there’s this inner harmony that you didn’t seem to have before, and what’s changed? And so, can you tell me how to do it?” Out of that, while running my business, I kept being asked to speak and to help others. Husband and business partner Graham decided to start a leadership development company. We created these leadership groups to bring people together and, in an iron sharpens iron environment, help us live true to our most important values and make an impact on the world at the same time.

And that’s really how my first book, The Success Lie, came out because this was my story. I had bought into this lie of success that you have to keep doing more and more and more. That was what society was telling us we needed to do, not what was right. As this continued to develop, I decided to step away from the day-to-day of my business, which brings me back to your question. And I’m still an owner in that facility services company today. I’m not involved in the day-to-day operations anymore, so I can focus on leadership development, our impact, the entrepreneur group, and, of course, writing books, which I’m called to do.

Awesome. Did you consider selling the business, or was that not really in the cards?

Good question. I actually brought in partners into the business so I could take some chips off the table. I did do that as a way, because, for hopping over to a financial perspective, I had put a lot of chips into one business, and it’s always good to diversify.

I had spent 25 years in this business and in other entrepreneurial pursuits. But there was a lot there. When I knew I didn’t want to be involved in the day-to-day operations anymore, I could have remained the sole owner of the business. Yet if I did that, I would still need to be more present in the day-to-day operations. I brought in a partner who was able to get some chips off the table for me, so I could still have ownership in the company without being fully responsible for it anymore, which was a great shift for me.

How many years ago was that?

Oh, wow, that was in, let’s see, 2021. I stepped down as CEO of my company.

It’s an interesting time, given what happened globally during the pandemic. So why janitorial? Why did you start with that? Was it just a chance meeting with somebody who happened to be in that field, or did it pop into your mind one day, like, “I should learn about janitorial and start a business in that?” Or what happened there?

People in our lives create this pressure, this image, and tell us what to believe. We’re raised believing what success is, but that may not be our definition of success.

No, exactly right. It was a chance encounter. I’d been doing some business consulting for various clients, and I’d met a colleague with several other business ventures. He had a small janitorial company in our area with just a handful of employees, and he was moving out. He said, “Hey, Janelle, would you like to take this over? It has a manager and just a really small team.” And he said, “I think you could do this.” He knew I’d wanted to run my own company and do something while keeping my family as my priority. That’s really how it started. He made an introduction, and I met the manager, and one thing led to another. I was stepping in at nine months pregnant to say, ‘This is, this is what I’m going to do.’ At that point, we talk about making these strategic plans and where you’re going to take your company. I was just really looking for a solution that would allow me to be more present for my family, rather than working for somebody else for a lot of hours. Things just began to unfold as we did the kind of job that really took care of our clients and really cared about what we were doing. And it naturally began to unfold.

Let’s talk a bit about your first book, The Success Lie.  What is The Success Lie?

The Success Lie is really how society tells us what success is, versus you and me realizing what success means to us. The whole basis of the book is that culture, or people in our lives, create this pressure, this image, and tell us what to believe. We’re raised believing what success is, but that may not be our definition of success. There are several lies about success. One of them that I mentioned as we first started talking about this is the lie that we have to continue to do more and more and more, take on more, never say no, and until we’re just at a place of exhaustion that we think that adding more on is going to bring us this success. And in that book, I talk about a number of lies that we buy into that really take us from that version of ourselves. 

There are simple truths that take us from overwhelmed to a place of inner peace. That’s when we discover our true values, begin living by them, and eliminate everything else.

Instead, there are simple truths that take us from overwhelmed to a place of inner peace. That’s when we discover our true values, begin living by them, and eliminate everything else. That’s a distraction to that. That’s really what I take people through in the book. I talk about my story: I found myself in a very challenging situation, where my first husband abandoned our family when my children were very young. I was at work one day, just busy growing my company, and everything was going well. I came home and found my two youngest daughters, ages four and seven, home alone. I didn’t know how long they had been there. 

They were in my husband’s care that day. Suddenly, my world was turned upside down, and I was a single mom with three children. It was a very, very difficult time, and one of the successes I talk about is that when these challenging situations come up, we feel that they just take our power away, and we aren’t able to get it back. A lot of people will stay stuck in those, in that lie that our circumstances define us. I took steps that I talk about in the book about how we need to, in many ways, get our feet back underneath us. We need to realize that there is a plan, that it’s all good for us, and that we need to take those steps forward; it’s all going to unfold beautifully. 

That’s the purpose of that book, and it helped leaders take a good look at their lives in all areas. As I coach and with our impact entrepreneur group, we really focus on that holistic view of the leader. We want your business to be an amazing success; we want every aspect of your life, your business, your health, your mindset, your faith, your family, and your legacy, all to be deeply rooted in flourishing.

The Success Lie talks about the seven main life areas and how we really need to be putting a focus on in all areas, because if we find ourselves really out of balance, if you’re focusing completely on your work. You’re ignoring your health, and it’s going to cause challenges for you, keeping you from making the impact you want in your job, your family, your finances, and all these different areas. That’s the basis of the first book.

One thing that pops into my mind as you discuss this is that I interviewed David Ghiyam, who is a Kabbalah teacher and motivational speaker. Really brilliant guy and a very successful businessman. But he shared a powerful framework or analogy. And I don’t know if it’s from him or if he learned it somewhere else, but the idea is simple: when you chase the white light, imagine a prism. The white light enters the prism and then emerges as all the different colors. 

If you chase after the white light, all the colors are included. But if you chase after an individual color, such as your health, wealth or your business or a relationship, then the other colors get neglected, and they fall to pieces. Chase after the white light, that’s going to give you everything in life. And the white light, of course, is the light of the creator, your divine connection to all that is. And that is a very true and helpful way to life. 

I agree. That’s where it all starts. We have to have that connection with God. We have to understand that he created us; he created us for this beautiful purpose.  Our job is to understand and move toward that. It unfolds as life unfolds. And being willing just to be open and surrender to that is a really great place to start. 

We have to have that connection with God. We have to understand that he created us for this beautiful purpose.

One thing you said earlier, like a few minutes ago, was that there’s a plan and that it’s for the good, or this is for your benefit, something along those lines. And I wholeheartedly agree with that. I’m curious to have you unpack that in the example of your now ex-husband, when you showed up at home with the four- and seven-year-olds, who were not attended to and were home alone. At the time, it was hard to see the blessing in that, to see that there was a plan and that this was for the good. But now looking back, how do you see that in that kind of light of what you just described of the plan and the good?

Thanks for the question. I look back at it now and see it as a gift in my life, with a purpose. In writing that first book, where I told that story for the first time, and I’m going back a little bit, I was a busy entrepreneur—I had a full plate that I loved. I loved working with my clients. Loved my community, served on some different boards, and, of course, my family was my number one priority. But I kept getting this nudge that I was supposed to write a book, that I was supposed to tell this story. I didn’t want to do that at first, but there kept being these confirmations. 

This one time, I was at a meeting and had just given an opening for someone else at a conference. Somebody came up to me and said, “I’m supposed to tell you that you need to write that book and that this is what you need to be doing.” I said, “What do you mean I need to be doing? You need to be getting up and talking to people about your life and the decisions that you’ve made and how they’ve brought you to where you are today.” So like, “Okay, God, I’ll write the book.”

Once you’ve been called to do anything in your life, all kinds of distractions pull you from that greater purpose.

I ended up putting discipline time aside to actually make it happen because they just don’t come on their own. You have to really make the discipline once you’ve been called to do anything in your life there’s all kinds of distractions that we that we get that pull us from that greater purpose and my purpose was to tell this story and to have people read about that and then be able to reach out and just see the framework that I put together and say that they’re taking action that that I had seen them where they didn’t feel seen before. 

They felt that if I could do it, if I could take back my life and take back my power, then they could do it too. Women and men who had been through challenging circumstances in their lives. So that was really powerful and humbling. And I wouldn’t have had the book if I hadn’t had that circumstance happen in my life, and how it grew me and changed me.

They say I have a chapter in the book, “Bitter or Better.” You can let the difficult circumstances in your life make you bitter or better. And the book was going to be titled “It’s Your Choice,” but my publisher changed it. That was the title of the manuscript when I turned it in, because, at the end of the day, it’s your choice on how you’re going to live your life, how you’re going to show up. If you’re gonna show up in love, with love and gratitude and forgiveness for those hard situations or whether you’re going to be better and allow it to just take you to this place that’s an unhealthy place to live, frankly.

I imagine that, to be bitter about it, you have to feel like a victim, unjustly treated, or somehow disenfranchised. Whereas if you realize or recognize that you had entered into a soul contract before you were born, to have this very struggle, challenge and opportunity, then it’d be hard to feel bitter about it. Because it’s like, “Hey, I signed up for this. Why would I be griping about it now?” Did you feel like you signed up for this?

Even if we make choices that lead us down a difficult path, our God is faithful and can turn it into a blessing, no matter what happens.

That’s an interesting question. I fully believe that God knows the entire plan of our lives and every ebb and flow. We have free will along the way, and the freedom to make choices that may or may not be in our best interest. Even if we make choices that lead us down a difficult path, our God is faithful and can turn it into a blessing, no matter what happens. So yes, this was always going to be, as it was. And I really learned more of that as I wrote my second book. These last few years have been life-altering, and I’ve really learning about what being present means. 

And Eckhart Tolle says, “And I won’t get this perfectly,” but he says that, “We need to accept the present moment as it is, as if we had chosen it.” Even in those really hard circumstances of our life, and I had a health issue earlier this year that I had changed so much in just accepting what’s happening in my life that I could take and just know that what’s happening right now is for my good. What’s happening there is a bigger purpose in it. When I was in my twenties and early thirties, when this situation happened with my girls, I wasn’t there yet. It was more of a I believed, I had a deep faith, I thought that God was going to take me through the situation. But in going through it, as you can imagine, I didn’t think that it was for my good then.

Looking back, I do now. Now I’m living my life more in line with the concept of the present moment. This is what we have right here, right now. It is such a gift. And this is where we need to focus, not so much on those outcomes. That really led me to go deeper into one of the lies of The Success Lie. One of the lies that I wrote about in the success line, there were five, was that you can’t get beyond the pain of your past, that you’re going to be that victim, as you talked about, because so many people fall there and they never get out of it. And I thought, “I need to go deeper on this.” 

I didn’t even know what the reason was for that then. I had my own learnings through the journey of writing the second book, going deeper into the pain, the unresolved pain of the past. And I really learned about trauma and its effect on the brain and body. My second book that came out, in June of 25, you’re back to happy. It’s about turning the pain of your past into a future of freedom, purpose, and peace. 

It was my journey on how I did that in hopes of helping others who were leading from a place of unresolved trauma. Trauma can make us really good leaders. Many entrepreneurs have faced really difficult challenges in their lives, which makes them better leaders. And it can also show up in ways that are not helpful. When you can resolve that past trauma, it can help you become a more authentic, better leader. That came full circle in the next book.

We’ll talk about that more. I’m curious, before we do, if you see that there’s a connection between trauma and disease, I’m guessing the answer is yes, disease and pain, chronic pain in particular, because, like in the book, the body keeps the score. Are you familiar with that book, by the way? If our body keeps the score as far as the traumas and so forth, and it’s held in our body. If we don’t make peace with the trauma and maybe turn that trauma into a blessing or reveal the blessing in it, then it’s gonna be trapped in our body and kind of fester until the push comes to shove, until we’re forced to deal with it. And at least that’s my understanding of it. And I’m curious to hear your take on that and how it ties into your second.

I agree with that, Stephan. That is exactly right, that our trauma is stored in our body. If we don’t understand and recognize that, then it gets trapped there. And our job is to learn how to release that and let that go. And the second book really came out of it. I was looking at it with my husband, Graham, and we decided that, for our 50th birthday, we’d get some health scans. Let’s just make sure that we’re taking the best care of ourselves that we can. We decided to do a brain scan. We had some friends of ours who had done this through the Amen Clinics. It’s called a SPECT scan. And they felt that it really was, you have, well, that’s awesome.

I’ve done that. I’ve actually had Dr. Amen on the show.

He did a spec scan on both Graham and me, and we wanted to learn about our health and get a baseline, which checks every other organ in your body. When I read his book, Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, it makes so much sense because he talked about how we go to doctors for every other organ in our body, but we don’t get our brain checked. Instead, if we’re feeling sad or we have something going on in our lives, we go to a psychiatrist. They don’t do a brain scan, they just prescribe something, guessing what it is and how he’d helped so many people, including his nephew, realize things going on in the brain that they didn’t even know and were being misdiagnosed. 

We just got this to help ourselves. A couple of friends who had done it had said it also helped them improve their communication when they did it as husband and wife, because they realized how differently their brains were wired. When we got the results for those scans, the doctor asked if we wanted to go in together or separately. We sat together, and Graham had done his first, and then he said, “Okay, let’s do yours, Janelle.” And he asked me if I knew what PTSD was. I said, “Well, yes, I do have post-traumatic stress disorder. And it happens if somebody’s been through really difficult trauma in their life, if there’s been maybe abuse in the home, or maybe a war veteran.” 

He said, “I want to show you a picture of a normal brain scan,” and he put it down on the table. It showed the brain calm and dark, and then he showed a Scan where he said, “This is the amygdala in the brain.” It’s the fear response of your fight-or-flight response, and he said, “The amygdala should be calm and quiet like this one, said that you’ll see on this scan, which is a classic PTSD scan, that this amygdala is lit up like New York Times Square.” And he said, “That’s because it’s on all the time with this alarm because of the trauma that has gone on. Maybe it’s been one event, maybe several over the years, but it’s created this always-on alarm that makes you feel like you’re always having to escape from something.” 

So I said, “That’s interesting.” Then he laid a scan down next to that one. And he said, “This is your scan.” And it was identical to the scan of the classic PTSD brain. And he said, “Janelle, you show these very same symptoms in your brain. You’ve obviously been through what I would guess are years of chronic trauma in your life.” This was just like a mic drop moment. I had no idea. I felt fine. I had gotten my life back together as far as I thought. I was living a great life. I was happy. I was satisfied, feeling fulfilled, but buried deep inside was this unresolved trauma. 

It was a ‘Wow, this is interesting.’ And then as I began to go deeper, of course, curious and now, now what? And figure it out, I went down the path of, ‘Why is this there?’ And I realized that I had learned from that event years and years ago, that I had been living, I’d been living with an addict. I was married to him for 20 years and had these children with him. And I was living on this roller coaster that I felt was normal, but it wasn’t; it wasn’t a healthy situation. That was my story of really going, “I’d like to figure this out. I’d like to heal this. And I believed that I could.” And that’s my healing journey, which is the basis for this next book.

And you mentioned earlier in this conversation that you had been out due to medical issues this year. Is that related to the trauma that you were working on healing?

No, that came after. I do think that any type of health issue that we have is related, can’t necessarily, but can be related to trauma in our lives. It wasn’t part of this book, and this PTSD came because of years of being in an unhealthy living environment, and really doing what I needed to do to protect myself at that time. This new health issue that came up recently, I believe, was just entered my life for me to get some new information on maybe where my next chapter lies and in my future. 

But I also think it has to do with grief because I recently lost my father, who is very, very precious to me. Having that is a deep wound for sure, and I believe that partially was responsible for the recent health issue that I had. I have a new mind in looking at health at this point and realizing that we have to continue to take care of any trauma that enters our bodies and release it to make sure that it doesn’t turn into these health conditions. So certainly interesting.

So I’m sorry for your loss.

Thank you.

Have a new mind in looking at health, and realizing that we have to continue to take care of any trauma that enters our bodies and release it to make sure that it doesn’t turn into health conditions.

How are you doing now from that? Is that still recent?

It’s been a couple of years now, but I will miss him until I see him again. It’s never easy to lose a parent whom you love deeply, that’s for sure. But I have no regrets in my life with him. Something I teach is that when we talk about our values and what’s most important, it’s really about making life decisions that counter what society tells us to do. We did that with my parents. It was after 2020, and all of that happened. And I’d decided to step away from my business, doing that on a full-time basis. 

I stepped out of the CEO position and was really excited about building our leadership development business. I was writing and teaching, and I felt it was time to take a sabbatical and spend more time with my parents. My dad had been having some health issues, nothing really serious, but they hadn’t been able to do a lot of traveling. I just felt in my heart that we were supposed to take a break, to pause what we were doing and spend more time with my parents and those precious moments. It came out that everything can be our teacher. And it came out of me, actually, having a friend of mine, her mother had passed away, and we were at the service, and she put her hand on my arm and said to me, “Janelle spent every moment that you can with your parents, every precious moment with tears in her eyes.” 

It struck me so much. And driving home with Graham afterwards, it just kept sticking with me. And I told him about this, and I said, “Well, we spend a lot of time with my parents.” They live 30 minutes away and come to dinner as a family every Sunday. We see them quite a bit, but it kept resonating with me. I said to Graham, “How would you feel about us spending more dedicated time with my parents and actually traveling with them, taking them to some of the places they’ve always wanted to go?” And bless his heart with his in-laws, he’s like, “I’m in, let’s do that.” 

We met with my parents in the next month, and we sat down in their apartment, and I said, “Dad, do you have any things that you haven’t done, places you haven’t traveled, something that you’ve wanted to do that you haven’t done?” He said, “I’ve always wanted to do a cruise around Mexico.” And I said, “Really?” Goes, “Mom and I were looking at booking it several years ago, and we just never did it.” I said, “Well, how about we do that together?” And he looked at me with this big smile on his face, and he said, “Really?” I said, “Yes, I’ll take care of all of it.” 

And so that was the first thing that we did. I signed us up for this cruise, and it was just grandma, my mom, and my dad. It was the most beautiful time together, just amazing. We had to slow down to keep up with their pace. They were in their eighties at that time. And, but it was just so much fun. We played cards in the evening, toured around, and got to know them as people. It just really improved our relationship. 

And then we continued to do that. We took several, several trips with them before my dad passed away very suddenly. He was very healthy and then got diagnosed with cancer and died within 10 months. I look back at that time and that decision, and what a beautiful thing. I wanna tell everyone, just take time away from your job and be with your family in ways that will change you.

When you’re describing that moment at the service where your friend grabs you by the arm and tells you that message, that reminds me of Garrain Jones, who’s also a Genius Network member. I interviewed him on the show. He shared this pivotal moment in his life where he was a homeless person who knocked on the window of his car, and Garrain was homeless at the time, living and sleeping in his car. And the homeless man wanted money, and Garain yells at him to get away, and just like, “I’m homeless too, what are you doing?”

And the guy walking off yells at him, “Change your mindset, change your life.” And then just disappeared. Now he has a book titled Change Your Mindset, Change Your Life. And he is a multimillionaire, and he’s got an amazing family and incredible life path, trajectory of amazing stuff. It’s amazing. Well, that moment was a message, that moment with the homeless person. And so you had that moment with your friend at the funeral or the service, and it feels to me like that was a divine setup. Like those exact words and that exact moment were preordained. Do you think that?

Absolutely, absolutely I do. It encouraged me to go deeper. Everyone listening should be open to those divine moments and miracles, because they’re all around us. As entrepreneurs and leaders, we have schedules that are often so full that we’re rushing from one thing to the next, and we don’t take the time to pause, breathe, meditate, pray, or just be quiet. It’s in those moments that we get those messages, and they can show up in completely unexpected places. I was there to support my friend Cindy at her mom’s funeral service, and just to help her, when she gave me a message I believe was divine that had me look deeper. I thought my dad and I were still playing golf together, and I mean, he was so healthy and took such great care of himself. I never dreamed those would be the last few years of his life. I never dreamed that.

There is hope and healing, and it is absolutely possible to get your life, confidence, and peace back if you feel they’ve gone missing.

And we were spending time with them. We saw them regularly, but it was different. It was going deeper into that relationship. ‘And how can we make this relationship even better, even more special? And how can we give back to these beautiful parents, these people who have raised me and done everything for me? What can we do for them now, in this very act of giving? When they no longer felt comfortable traveling on their own, we could do it with them.’ So it just became, they were blessed by it, we were blessed by it. We miss those moments so often in our lives.

Do you feel your father’s presence? Do you feel like he’s with you, supporting you, cheering you on, rooting for you?

Definitely, there was an interesting story that comes to mind that I haven’t shared that I’m supposed to share here, so I will. There was a time, a few months after his passing, that I was just upset because I wasn’t feeling him, and I missed him so much. I remember saying to God, “Where is he?” Having doubts about all of it. When you lose somebody and just say, “Is there life after this? Are you okay? God, can you show me something that he’s okay?” I went to bed that night, and I got up the next morning, and I looked out, and I had a flower garden outside my window, and I saw this red, and I thought, ‘What is that?’ 

I ignored it and went and got my coffee, and I came back, and I looked again, and in my garden there was a red rose bush in full bloom. I have roses in that garden. I don’t have a red rose in that garden. And I knew then, I’m getting goosebumps as I’m talking about it again now, that that was a sign to me that everything was “Okay,” that he was okay and that that was God showing me in a miraculous way that I couldn’t recreate that. Miracles are there, and they’re all around us and that everything was okay. And I just felt red rose and that symbol of love. I just felt this deep love from my heavenly father, from my father. It was just such an encouragement to me.

That’s beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. That reminds me of a beautiful video that went viral of this elderly lady. It was her mother who had passed, and maybe there was a sister or somebody else in the video, but they were together, and there was this cardinal. That actually flew up to them and then landed on the daughter. They knew that that was their mother, or that was a sign from their mother. And after it just sat on them for a while, it’s like, “Okay, you can fly off now.” And then she moved her arm to get it to fly off, but it flew right back onto her again. 

It’s clearly non-native behavior for a bird to do that for a wild bird. There are many stories of people who have encounters with animals that act in unusual ways as a message. It’s like the loved one’s soul temporarily takes them over to say, “This is a message for you.” It’s really heartwarming.

I love that. Well, and I would say to your listeners, just going back to the book, Your Way Back to Happy, sometimes when I talk to people about unresolved trauma, which is really what the book is about, I’ve had leaders say to me, “Well, I haven’t had any trauma.” I think that people, as I did, thought that trauma had to be this really awful thing, like these years of childhood abuse or a war veteran. But trauma is simply this. It’s a situation where you feel out of control, as if you don’t have power, and it’s this helpless feeling.

That can happen if you’ve been in a car accident or if you’ve obviously lost a loved one, not having control over that or being through a divorce or being through a really challenging thing in your business, maybe with a business partner or something like that. All of that is trauma. We stack that over and over when we don’t realize that capability. That’s what I did. The typical entrepreneur thinks, ‘I’m okay. And I pain, what pain?’ We push it aside because we have other things we need to do. And we are strong. And we’ve been told by others in our lives that if you’re a leader, if you’re a business owner, you’re seen as a strong person. 

Then that never lets you get in touch with the emotions and challenges you may not have dealt with. I would encourage those listening to take time to take a look within yourself and ask yourself this question: “Is it possible is it just possible that there is something from your past that’s holding you back from this best future is there something that’s happened, something that you may not even realize, like I didn’t, that is keeping you from this amazing, freein,g authentic self?” I have been transformed into a new, more authentic version of myself living in freedom and peace, as I’ve never had before, when I finally let those chains of unresolved trauma go. And so many of us just want to ignore that that’s really there. We all have something we can break free from.

Our listener must understand that there’s the capital T trauma, but there’s also that small T trauma that we tend to overlook, dismiss, or minimize. That’s what can eat at us without us even consciously realizing it.

There are so many things we don’t have the answer to, and I’m curious about them. As you begin to dive deeper into who you are and who God is, it becomes even more of a mystery.

No question. On your way back to happiness, I talk about the conventional approaches that often don’t work. Of course, when I was told I had PTSD, the first thing that they wanted to do was put me on meds and prescribe me a prescription to make me feel better. I didn’t want to do that. When I started going down the journey, I was having a really hard time finding ways that were healthy and ways that were holistic to heal trauma. I provide several modalities, things that I’ve tried in the book and others that I’ve seen have success in other people’s lives. It can be a journey where, when you’re trying to go through anything that’s mentally or physically holding you back, it can get really frustrating to go through the system to figure it out. But I want everybody to know that there is hope and healing, and it is absolutely possible to get your life back, to get your confidence and your peace back if you feel like they’ve gone missing for you.

What was the modality that made the biggest difference for you? Was it EMDR? Was it like psilocybin, or some sort of ketamine or some substance? What got you the majority of the way there?

I did several different modalities together. I would say one of the most helpful things was EMDR, because I had the memories there. Dr. Don Wood, who is now a friend, is an incredible trauma doctor in Orlando, and he’s actually a member of our Impact entrepreneur group. And he says, “We often find ourselves thinking there is something wrong with us when there’s nothing wrong with us.” He just says, “There’s a glitch in your brain, where you’re still seeing a scene from your past in high definition.” When something happens today that you may have a big reaction to, but you’re having the same kind of reaction that you had in this scene from the past, because your subconscious doesn’t recognize the present from the past. It thinks the past is still happening if you’re still hooked into that moment.

So his tip program is excellent. I’ve already been through my healing journey before I saw him, but he’s helped so many people overcome their trauma. His process is somewhat like EMDR, but different in some ways as well. EMDR, you’re remembering a particular situation that is in that high definition, and you’re going through it in a way where the practitioner is helping you release that and let that go. By the time you’re done processing that memory, where maybe it was an eight, nine, or 10 in its reaction for you, it becomes a two. 

It scrambles the signal.

And so that it does, and it’s huge. It just unlocks that piece of your brain. For me, obviously, coming home that day to find my girls home alone and my first husband gone, that was a traumatic event. That was in high definition for years, and I didn’t even realize it. Going back and actually facing that event. With a trusted practitioner, super important, someone you can trust, then they take you through that. I took that down to a place where I can look at that situation. Certainly, that was a sad situation; it was a hard time in my life, but I don’t have that reaction anymore. It’s just a part of my life. It’s part of that beautiful fabric of my life.

When we come together in our impact group as colleagues, we really want to support each other. We have three core values: faith, family, and impact.

Earlier, you mentioned free will and that you have choices to make mistakes and go off the path God wants you to take. Do you think that there are multiple timelines, multiple versions of reality where you may have made some different choices that perhaps were not part of the plan, perhaps were off the path and that those played out, and maybe you’ll get to see them in your life review when you’re back in the non-physical.

Honestly, I don’t know. There are so many things we don’t have the answer to, and I’m curious about them. As you begin to dive deeper into who you are and who God is, it becomes even more of a mystery. I think, and sometimes you can drive yourself crazy trying to figure it all out, and I don’t think that we will in this timeline. I do believe, and what I’ve done in those circumstances is I put it in this box, and I think, and this is something that I get to ask God someday, and I can’t wait to do that. When you look at your life, is that where you came to this crossroads and made this decision? 

Do you ask God things? Do you ask God things now, or are you holding them all till later?

No, I definitely ask God things now. No question. It was like when I was feeling, for a moment, all those doubts: is anything that I have believed real? God, you’ve got to show me something so that I think you’re there, that I believe there is this ongoing life. He showed that. Those things that are important to me and God aren’t afraid of our questions or our anger. I mean, he loves us so much. We can bring him anything he wants. So how about you? Have you asked him that question?

I ask him questions every day. I keep a journal and write down the messages I get from him.

It’s a beautiful thing when you get together with others who share your values; they know they’re here to create an impact. That impact is so much bigger than we can imagine if we open ourselves.

Oh, I love that. I keep a journal too. And that’s really important. I’m also keeping a journal right now. This is relatively new this year, where I’m expectantly awaiting the miracles because, as I said, “We need to open our eyes to the miracles happening around us.” We miss it so much. Just writing those down, being aware of them and going, “Wow, this amazing thing just happened.” It just came to me as this gift. And that it was something I had prayed for and hadn’t acknowledged till I really began to think about it: well, it has already shown up. And so just recognizing those moments and writing them down. 

The more you see them, the more they come. You draw those to you, which is so beautiful. We just need to live in that space more. When we come together in our impact group as colleagues, we really want to support each other. We have three core values: faith, family, and impact. Those are all really important to us. When you create deep connections with other people who have similar values, they are constantly bringing these messages to you, too. I mean, I’ve had someone in the group come to me and just say, “I was praying about this, and I was given this for you.” 

It’s a beautiful thing when you get together with others who share your values; they know they’re here for a purpose. They know that they’re here to create an impact. And that impact is so much bigger than we can imagine if we just open ourselves to it and surround ourselves with others who believe the same thing, because it just takes us higher, and we can take them higher.

The impact is huge. It ripples across universes, it ripples across timelines, and we’ll only really understand the true depth and breadth of it when we have our life review, when we’re back home in the non-physical.

That’s right. That’s right, for sure.

Amazing. Thank you so much for sharing with such candor, vulnerability, authenticity and wisdom. Thank you for your two books. I bet there’s another one in there from you coming in the future. And thank you for being a light in the world, having a purpose you take action on and don’t let sit in the back seat, but one that drives the bus. That’s awesome.

Thank you, Stephan. This has just been such a pleasure, and thank you for this opportunity to be with you today. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed our conversation, and it can be really helpful to those listening to take back their power and step into what they’re being called to with fearlessness, knowing that the path will show itself.

Awesome. All right. And so if our listener wants to read either or both of your books, they can get those on Amazon. And where do they find you online? Where do they connect with you? Perhaps join your mastermind? And I don’t know if you offer coaching or anything like that as well, but how do they work with you?

Yes, I do. We have our faith-based entrepreneur group, and I also do, and Graham as well, offer private coaching for executives, CEOs, and business owners. You can reach out to us at legacy-leader.com to find out more. And please reach out to me on social media @JanelleBruland. Would love to connect and do whatever I can to bring value.

Awesome. Well, thank you, Janelle. And thank you, listener. Thank you for being a light in the world as well. Go out there and make it a great week, make it a great life, and put your light out into the world. We’ll catch you in the next episode. I’m your host, Stephan Spencer, signing off.

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