Manders Mindset

Why Staying Can Change Everything | Nita Sweeney | 174

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What if the path to healing, motivation, and self-trust wasn’t about fixing yourself… but about staying long enough for change to happen?

In this deeply honest episode, host Amanda Russo is joined by Nita Sweeney, bestselling author, ultramarathoner, mindfulness coach, and mental health advocate. Nita shares her powerful journey from growing up in a family shaped by alcoholism, navigating depression and addiction, and surviving suicidal ideation, to finding healing through sobriety, meditation, and movement.

Together, Amanda and Nita explore what it really takes to rebuild a life when motivation feels impossible, why small shifts (like “60 seconds of jogging” or 2% of your day) can change everything, and how community, boundaries, and self-honesty play a crucial role in long-term growth. Nita also reflects on writing her books Depression Hates a Moving Target and Make Every Move a Meditation, and why staying, on the planet, in the process, and with yourself.... matters most.

This conversation is for anyone who’s struggled with depression, addiction, burnout, or self-doubt and needs a reminder that change doesn’t require perfection... just presence.

🎙️ In this episode, listeners will discover:

🧠 Why sobriety alone isn’t always enough without mental health support
 🏃‍♀️ How “60 seconds of jogging” sparked a life-changing running journey
 🌱 Why the ground has to be “fertile” before change can take root
 ⏳ How small percentages of time (like 2% of your day) create massive shifts
 💬 The importance of finding motivation that pulls you forward
📖 Why one size fits all advice often fails, especially in healing
❤️ What it means to be kind while still holding strong boundaries
🌤️ Why Nita’s most powerful message is simply: stay

⏰ Timeline Summary:

[0:00] – Introducing Nita Sweeney and her path from depression to ultramarathons
 [6:15] – Childhood on a farm, loneliness, and growing up around functional alcoholism
 [12:10] – Alcohol blackouts, losing control, and the early attempts to quit drinking
 [20:40] – Sobriety, marriage, meditation and why everything seemed to fall apart
 [27:30] – Hospitalization, suicidal ideation, and what actually saves lives
 [39:40] – Couch to 5K, “60 seconds of jogging,” and starting in a hidden ravine
 [49:10] – Charity runs, community, and finding motivation outside yourself
 [1:05:30] – Rapid-fire reflections on identity, advice, legacy, and authenticity
 [1:14:40] – Nita’s closing wisdom: why staying gives life a chance to change

To Connect with Amanda:

Schedule a 1:1 Virtual Breathwork Session HERE

📸 Instagram: @thebreathinggoddess

Follow & Support the Podcast:
📱Instagram: @MandersMindset
👥 Join the Manders Mindset Facebook Community HERE!

To Connect with Nita:

Website: nitasweeney.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nitasweeney/?hl=en

Check out Nita's Books that she referenced in the show:

Depression Hates a Moving Target

Make Every Move a Meditation

SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to the Manders Mindset Podcast. Here you'll find both monologue and interviews of entrepreneurs, coaches, healers, and a variety of other people, where your host, Amanda Roosevelt, will discuss her own mindset and perspective, and her guest mindset and perspective on the world around us. Manders and her guests will help explain to you how shifting your mindset will shift your life.

SPEAKER_03:

Welcome back to Manders Mindset, where we explore the power of shifting your mindset to shift your life. I'm your host, Amanda Russo, and I am so excited for today's guest. I am here today with Nita Sweeney, and she is a best-selling author, traathoner, mindfulness coach, and mental health advocate. From struggling with depression to running ultra marathons and writing award-winning books like Depression Hates a Moving Target and Make Every Move a Meditation, Nita brings a raw and relatable take on healing and growth. She's also a longtime meditator, retired Atoni, and total dog mom. And today, she's here to share her journey and the practices that helped her transform from couchbound to thriving. Thank you so much for joining me.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you. I'm really glad to be here. It's talking about my favorite things. Like what's, you know, the good thing.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, no, that's an amazing bio, but who would you say Nita is at the core?

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, well, the adult Nita is probably dog mom and writer. Most that's probably the frontward, the out, you know, the public facing me. The foundational me is the meditator. But I currently am wearing unicorn socks. So I'm actually about three, maybe, or maybe six. Which they always say that's where your trauma started. I don't know. But yeah, so I'm wearing, just so you know, I've got unicorn socks on and pearls. And so that's, you know, aren't we all? We're all, I just think we're all there's I'm in this office. I rent an office space, and there's all these executive people, which is great. It feels very official and something I needed, the space I needed. But I just always imagine them all as like six, maybe ten, running around in their suits, you know, like most of us are.

SPEAKER_03:

I love how you mentioned your unicorn socks. I always, almost always have fun socks on. I don't have any on right now, my feet are both. But like I I have princess socks, I have little momade socks. I that are just fun. And it lights me up a little bit, you know, that childlike joy. So I love that you mentioned that. Now, can you take us down memory lane a little bit? Tell us about your childhood, upbringing, family dynamic, however deep you want to take that.

SPEAKER_00:

Sure. I grew up in rural Ohio. I'm in central Ohio now in the city, Columbus. And my father was an executive, but we've really lived on a farm. And most of the time when I saw him, he was in jeans and a work shirt, boots, and a hat. We had horses and cattle and dogs and mostly barn cats, which I didn't realize pet cats were that much of a thing until I was older. And my mom had some jobs, stayed home. But the biggest thing was everything was about the farm. So we were repairing equipment, we were taking care of animals, we were doing kind of labor, really, you know, bailing whole from pretty young. I'm the youngest by many years. I have an older brother and sister, but they left. They were grown by the time I was in middle school. So I was almost an only child in a way. So I was always my father's farmhand. And what I didn't realize was that I was in a family of alcoholics. They were very functional alcoholics, but they were still alcoholics. And so I just knew that when I invited kids over, they often didn't want to come again. And I didn't really know why. You know, they were picking up a vibe I didn't understand, and it would take a long time for me to really get that. But I we lived on 50 acres, and I felt lonely a lot of the time. At school, I loved school, I was good at school, and that was sort of a safe space. I was in band, I was one of those band geeks, and that was a safe space. And I also drank, I had my own drinking history, and so a bit of a chameleon, maybe, and there was no outward abuse, there was no, you know, violence. Um, it was all this kind of underlying messaging. My parents, I think, never felt good enough, and so I never felt good enough. And you know, the straight A student always trying to prove outward quality, outward okayness, because the inside didn't match. So it was, you know, from the outside, it looked idyllic. We had white board fences, we had a great big white barn. I had a small house, also white, very green, very well tended. My dad was meticulous about the lawn, and we had a lot of lawn and horses, people say, Oh, you had horses? Yeah, they're like giant toddlers. They're wonderful, but they're also scary and they're afraid a lot of the time, and so you end up tending them. Not sure if that answered. I mean, I answered the question, but I don't know. That's where you're going. But that's kind of where I grew up. And I'm actually writing about that a lot now because the book I'm working on is very much a memoir about my relationship with my father.

SPEAKER_03:

Now, I'm curious. You mentioned you had a history with drinking. When did that start for you?

SPEAKER_00:

Approximately. We were allowed to drink at home. We were kind of my father, especially his theory was if you drank with your family, you would know how to drink, as if that was a thing. You know, as an adult, I think that's insane. But um, they were daily drinkers. And so I didn't drink daily when I was a child, uh, but by the time I was a teenager, any time that it was available, I was finding it. And I very quickly learned that it didn't agree with me. And so most of my drinking history was about trying to quit, was about deciding, oh, this is not going well. Let's try something else, or let's just at least not do that. And so I don't, you know, I don't have a it's not very dramatic, my drinking story, but there was a lot of it. I just was and it was mostly intense periods for a long period of time. And then I did eventually quit and I don't drink anymore. And that was a really good thing. But yeah, we joke, you know, I I joke, um, I didn't think this was going to go down this direction, but what the heck? I grew up in a family where anytime there was fewer than a full case of long neck Budweiser's in the utility room, that was a crisis. It was time to go to the liquor store to the it was a carry-out. It didn't have to be the liquor store. And we measured distances by you know how many beers it took to get places and tasks by is this a three-beer job? Is this a five-year beer job? And that was just the lingo. I mean, that's just the way my family talked. And so that may be why the people didn't want to go little kids and want to come back. I don't know. But yeah, and that, you know, and I remember one of the I don't think I put this in the book, but the book is now yet, so I could change it. But when I got to college and my especially when I got my first apartment, so I'd been in college a little while, and my roommate and I were going to the grocery and came back with bags of groceries to the first trip to the grocery in our new apartment. And she started to put vegetables in the bottom drawers of the refrigerator. And I was completely confounded because in my family, that's where the beer went. Those drawers, those bottom drawers were full of longmoth webweizers. I don't think I ever saw a package of carrots or a you know, a head of lettuce in those drawers. I just said, I'm putting the vegetables in the vegetable drawers. And I went, What? Vegetable drawer? And I was probably, you know, 18. So that's yeah, that gives you some perspective about my family. And we were we didn't even have beer in my in the apartment. I was, you know, not drinking at the time. It was one of my not drinking times. So I don't know what we're gonna do with the drawers were just gonna stay empty.

SPEAKER_03:

I didn't so how did your mindset shift that you were like, no more alcohol?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, in high school, it's when it started. I had gone to a concert with my friends, and we were drinking on the way. The whole point of going to the concert was to drink. One of the friends, they had an older boyfriend, and he had bought a bunch of actually hard liquor for us. And so we started drinking at the high school, and I was driving. I had the biggest car. And I think I, you know, I probably was like the designated driver or something because compared to the other people, I always looked, you know, National Honor Society, and oh, she'll be fine. Yeah, well, she was a chameleon. So I got so it's about 45 minutes from where I grew up to St. John's Arena on the Ohio State University campus where the concert was, it was a heart concert in the 70s. And I remember being on campus, and that's pretty much all I remember. I basically was, you know, driving in a blackout everybody. We call it a brownout. And I remember being in the women's bathroom. I don't remember ever actually making it into the seats. I didn't see any of the concerts. And then I woke up on my bedroom floor. So somebody else drove home. It had snowed, I mean, like a lot. And a friend drove me home. I vaguely recall us not being able to find the car. I have a recollection of that. I think we just waited and enough people left. We finally found it. And yeah, and that was embarrassing enough. You know, I don't know if anybody else was embarrassed by or thought badly of me. These were not I didn't have a lot of close friends. My one probably closest friend in that group was the one who drove us home. But I don't, I just had no recollection. And that scared me. That really scared me. So that's the first time I really tried to quit. And then after that, I would just be a non-drinker for a while. And then, you know, there'd be a cast party or there'd be uh just people gathering, and then we went to college and people drank and I would forget. And I couldn't, I didn't have an off switch. So once I started, I would just drink until I pretty much either blacked out or there was no alcohol left. But I could stop. I could, you know, I'd be like, I mean, I could not start for long periods of time, but I would forget. And so that's what I did basically from when I was about 16 until I was 30. And then the end, I had in a blackout, I had slugged somebody, a friend who was I was playing cards with. I didn't remember it at all. I was in blackout, and I rolled a car and I walked away. And then it took a couple more months before I realized this was not good. And so I did go to recovery meetings, and I am in recovery and use that method. There's lots of ways to get sober, to get clean, or to do that, but that's what worked for me. And some other family members were in those places also, and it took me a little while to get to the place where I realized this really needed to be. But for me, it was more internal, where I just could see the future, could see that it had never gone well and it wasn't gonna go well. And by then I was 30 and I thought this is just not so, but I also knew I couldn't do it alone because I had tried that from when I was 16. So I was I tried to use my willpower, my brain, my you know, self-knowledge, all of that. And so eventually I had to rely on the really a group of people to help me. And I go there still to be reminded that, oh yeah, that's not that's not something you want to do, Nita. Other people can do it just fine. No, no opinion on that. They can do what they want. I'm not judgmental about their ability to drink, but this scale can't do it. Does not go off.

SPEAKER_03:

Thank you for sharing that. I'm sure that was deep, but it is scary as hell, you know, the blackout. And I don't think a lot of people talk about that. You know, society accepts alcohol. It's still a drug in my eyes, but it's socially acceptable. It's still a drug, you know. I have an experience myself where I completely blacked out, and it's like people will talk so much negative and stigmatized on these drugs like heroin and cocaine. And I'm not for them, I'm not promoting them, but society's like, oh, drink alcohol, let's celebrate, let's what is the difference?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it is for me. I know I have to be really careful to kind of stay out of other people's business, but it definitely I noticed, especially during the pandemic, that people I knew who seemed to be able to handle not that you even handle a drink or two, but that just seemed, you know, like social drinkers. They just would go out once in a while, have a drink. People began to rely on it for stress management. And that's the it's a really fine line. And I'm not a therapist. I want to be clear that I'm not trying to give any kind of advice here. But I had one friend who actually came to me, and I don't know that she's alcoholic or that she's got an addiction problem with it, but she realized that it had become her lifesaver. And that was a problem. She was showing up, maybe not drunk, but inebriated, places where she didn't want to be, where, you know, her kids school, work events, and realizing, wait a minute, I'm impaired. And that scared her enough to talk to me because she knew a lot of people know that I don't drink, and I don't talk about it a lot. In fact, for years I didn't talk about it at all because I try to, I don't know, it's not that I'm ashamed of it. It's just sort of not the main part of me. It's not the main thing of who I am at all. So, but they still know. So she came to me and we talked about it. And I told her kind of what I did, and she decided to do that too, and now she doesn't drink. But I don't know for how long. I don't know if it's, you know, I it's just we do it today. But yeah, I try not to go, oh my god, it's so awful. It's with anything. It's like, I don't know. But it's definitely a problem for some people, and it's much more of a problem than they may realize.

SPEAKER_03:

No, I think that's the biggest thing. It's more of a problem than a lot of people realize. I spoke to a guy who specializes in cannabis and works with people with that, and something he had mentioned with it is in terms of anything. If you can't go three days without it, you're addicted. Whether it's cannabis, whether it's alcohol, whether it's whatever. Like, if it's not for medical reasonings, if you don't like, I know people take cannabis for cancer or for different things, and I'm not a doctor, I don't know anything about it. Do what you gotta do. But if it's not a medical reasoning and you can't go three days without something, you're addicted to it.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I haven't heard that particular time constraint, but I just know that for me, it wasn't a daily thing at all, but it was what happened when I started. It just and the fact that I couldn't stop and that things happened that felt very much beyond my control. I knew that ugly. I get it. I think three days was just his opinion prerogative behind. If that makes sense. I think that's it. That see, I would have said, Oh, well, I can go three days. I've gone six months, I'm fine. It was one parameter. There's lots of parameters, and you have to, it's such an internal thing, it's a self-honesty thing with all of this, with the depression, realizing, accepting that I was bipolar. So many things have been me telling myself the truth. And that is often very hard.

SPEAKER_03:

Oh, it's so hard. Now, so around 30 is when you stopped drinking alcohol. So where would life go for you from there?

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, well, it it went badly. From the outside, I was a partner in a law firm. Um, I did all these things that I thought were gonna be that was gonna fix it. So I thought, you know, oh, if I just stop drinking, then that'll just fix everything. I met a guy, we're still married, learned to meditate. You know, I did a lot of great things. I I ended up leaving my job. I was a partner in a law firm, and I ended up leaving my job because of mental health issues. But what happened was when I stopped drinking and when I got married, and when I started meditating, you know, all those things they sound like solutions. And what happened was all the masks fell away. So all the ability to kind of pull myself up by my bootstraps, and not that I wasn't a lawyer, but that it was more the types of things I was doing, like the particular practice I was in, and that's a whole long story, which we don't have to go into. But um, but I had created a persona to kind of hold myself together, and and it wasn't that it was fake, but it was impossible to maintain at the level of depression that I was experiencing. And I was not treating the depression directly. I needed medication, I needed very intensive therapy, and I had to almost kill myself in order to get that, to be able to set aside all the things I had to set aside. I had to stop working for a while. I had to be married to someone who really, really sees you and is very honest with you. He could see right through. He didn't fall in love with the mask. He fell in love with what he saw behind the mask. And so the mask didn't work anymore. And the same thing with meditation. If you actually meditate, there's a lot of fakeness that falls away. I know we're kind of in this whole influencer culture, so there is a lot of fakeness too. And it's hard to tell sometimes what somebody really is. But for me, the meditation made it impossible for me to pretend that I wasn't miserable at work and I was, I had been very miserable for a while. So from the outside, it looked as if I completely fell apart shortly after I got sober within three years. And it's funny because you hear people talk about their sobriety, and I will say it's one of the best things that ever happened. I mean, I don't know that I would actually be alive if I hadn't stopped drinking, but I had a second disease. It wasn't just the addiction. I had mental health issues that were, they overlap and they can look similar, but the treatment was different. And I wasn't treating that. And until I did, nothing was going to get better. It was just going to get worse and worse. And so it did for a while. It got pretty dark. And I was eventually hospitalized for suicidal ideation and came very, very close to attempting suicide. I mean, I always say I was kind of saved by a phone call because I had a plan and I was ready to put it into action. And I'm highly responsible. And the phone rang, and so I answered it and I went someplace else, which, you know, who knows?

SPEAKER_02:

A pattern interrupt.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, absolutely. That was what was, and that it was just, you know, I'm not. I'm not a big divine inspiration, but I will be forever grateful for that phone call. I didn't even answer the phone. I just it just interrupted the pattern. So so yeah, it looked really bad from the outside, but but and then eventually it came back around. And took a long time.

SPEAKER_03:

I bet it took a long time. What would you say helped you the most to come back around? Oh wow. I'm sure that's hard to do.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it is because it was so many things because the time in the hospital was very short. It was just a couple days. But that that probably saved my life because it completely interrupted, it made me realize how serious it was. Because I thought, oh, I'm just having these thoughts. They're just thoughts. I had a whole entire plan. These weren't just thoughts. This was a well thought out, you know. And so when the therapist said, wait here for a minute, and she brings in the psychiatrist and says, We need you to call someone to take you to the hospital. I mean, it's just very serious. We're gonna take, you know, either that or we'll call an ambulance. You're not leaving here, you're not leaving the building. You realize, oh, these professionals think there's something really wrong here. So that was probably the first biggest kind of wake-up call that, oh, there's a lot more going on here than I realized. And so then the actual hospital itself was it was mostly, oh, what is the word I'm gonna say? It's like a safe space, but it they just contain you so you can't hurt yourself for long enough that you're no longer a danger to yourself or anyone else. And that's the, you know, people think, oh, I'll go to the psych ward and when I get out, I'll be fine. No, that's not the way it works. They just keep you safe and they might adjust your meds, but their job is not to fix you, their job is to keep you safe until you're not dangerous to yourself anymore. And then if it's a decent psych ward hospital, they will come up with a plan. Usually there's a team of social workers, people in the hospital that are working with you right away to try to come up with a treatment plan immediately. Because they're uh a hospital is for acute uh things, just like a physical hospital is for acute uh situations. So they're looking for heart attacks and maybe cancer and things that could kill you right there. And then they send you to your regular doctor or to specialist. So that's what they sent me to the specialist, which would be the psychiatrist. Yeah, I don't know that I can't say that there's any one thing because I needed the medications. My mood was in set, yeah. I wasn't on meds until about a month before I was hospitalized, month and a half, maybe two months, yeah, before I was hospitalized. And um, and they take SSRIs, especially take a long time to work. So it was everything where I'm just really struggling to answer this question because it felt like it took the whole village. It took the meds, it took the professionals, it took my husband, it took my friends, it took my family, it took the recovery community, it took our dogs, it took, you know, it took everything. And I was doing some very extreme exercise, which I don't recommend. And I had to stop that and just start walking and to, you know, to exercise just for more joy because the intense exercise, I'd been kind of anorexic. And then eventually I took up running. That was many years later, I took up running, which is what led to that first book, because my mental health is cyclical. And so I had another pretty severe episode. I didn't have to be hospitalized, but I probably had three or four really serious depressive episodes that have required intense intervention, but only hospitalized once.

SPEAKER_03:

Now, I'm curious, these triathlons and the books and meditating, did this occur after your post-hospitalization?

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, yes, long, like 20 years. Well, let help me math here. My math is not my thing. 14 years, so 2010, 1994 to 2010. Yeah, yeah. And I don't, and by the way, just let me, I gotta get this out of the road. I cannot swim, and bikes terrify me. I'm a runner, so I do marathons. I'm not a triathlete, I'm an ultra marathoner. Just because that you just just when you said that word, these triathlons, I got it's like I started to my throat started to close up. Oh no, just gonna make me swim. My apologies. I did learn how to swim across the pool. It was four feet deep, but it wasn't elliptic-sized pool. When I was 50, I was determined to learn to be able to at least cross that pool. So I did that. But then once I did that, I was like, I'm done. I have friends that are iron men, you know, they do the whole thing, and I always say, Oh my god, there's so much drowning and getting hit by cars on bikes. I just can't, you know, you can be hit by a car running too. But I have so much respect for them though, because that is a full body. I mean, you're swimming and then you're biking, and then you're running, and the whole, oh my god. Yeah, no, I just run full length.

SPEAKER_03:

I have respect for them too. I do. Because it's a lot. All three at the like back to back.

SPEAKER_00:

In the same lifetime for me. It's like all three in the same lifetime, though.

SPEAKER_03:

So wow, you went through a lot of shifts in that 14 years. And yeah, did the books, did the books come out after that too?

SPEAKER_00:

After that, yeah, because that first one, because I was trying. So here's the thing about this is the people always want to hear that story. And you went way, way back, which is great. So I had been on a ton of medications over the years, needed to be on them to stay alive. And some of the medications have really powerful side effects. And for me, the meds that I needed to be on to stay alive made it almost impossible for me to finish writing projects. I did not have the focus, the concentration, even though I was meditating, even though I was doing all the things, I just always felt like I was a little bit in a cloud and sometimes very much wrapped in a cloud, very much in, you know, wrapped in cotton. I just couldn't focus. But I would try. I always wanted to write a book, and so I have all these drafts and I just couldn't finish anything. Finally, I decided to go to graduate school, and I had to find a graduate school where they would accommodate my mental health issues because I still have pretty severe mental health issues. I am mentally ill at just who I am. And so I ended up going to Goddard College, and it doesn't really matter, but that they were able to accommodate me so that I could have a very quiet space. I had extra time to do projects, I had, you know, a lot of things. I needed accommodation. And they were able to do that. And because I thought, well, if I have somebody to help me, then I'll be able to finish a project and possibly get a book published. I really wanted to, you know, I wanted, and I wanted it, you know, I could have self-published a book much, much earlier. A lot of my friends were doing that, and that was a thing, and it's a very valid thing. But I wanted somebody external, a publishing company to say, we think your work is of the quality that we will publish it. And I wanted them to pay me. There was something about that. I called it a gold star. I wanted a gold star. I like gold stars, certificates suitable for framing. I love that. That's my next thing. I haven't been in this office very long, and I'm planning to put all my diplomas on that wall back there. So just imagine my diploma. I'm still and I have unicorn socks on, or my remember, I've got unicorn socks on and certificates suitable for framing. But then I was going to tell that story now. So I got out of grad school and I had this book that I thought was finished enough, and I pitched it to agents, and I kept getting rejections. And after about the eighth rejection, which is actually not very many rejections, after about the eighth rejection, I went, I can't. I just can't do it anymore. And then a whole bunch of people died in one year. Um, 2007. And two of them were my 24-year-old niece and my mother. The same year, my father-in-law, I mean, there's like a lot of people real close to us died. Seven people and a cat in 11 months died. And I was back on the sofa. I wasn't suicidal, I wasn't as desperate, you know. I knew that ending my life was not the solution, which at the one point it seemed like it was. And so I went back into some more intensive therapy. We changed my meds, we do all the things, you know, we're supposed to do. And then I'm sitting on the sofa a couple of years later, and I see this post by a high school friend, and she's about this, you know, same age. And at that time, I don't know exactly, I didn't weigh myself at that time, but I was probably three or four sizes larger than I am now. So I was quite a lot larger than I am. I was uncomfortable in my body very much, having trouble breathing. You know, physically, I was at a very scary weight for me because I'd always kind of had some weight struggles, but I this was probably the worst of it. And so she was about the same size as me. And I knew she hadn't been athletic. I knew she was in, I think she might have been in chorus. We both had horses, so that is athletic. Don't don't come at me, horse people. I know it's athletic, but we weren't in track, we weren't in, I don't know, any of the team sports kinds of things. We just weren't considered jocks, like in the, you know, it was the jocks in school. We weren't any of those. And she posted, call me crazy, but this running is getting to be fun. And after I stopped laughing, I thought, I wonder if we should do a wellness check on her. That just seems wrong. The words run and fun in the same sentence, that just didn't, that did not go together for me at all. But I watched her. And this is lesson number one. If there's gonna maybe the only lesson of this podcast that I will come up with is never underestimate who is watching you when you are doing something that may seem very simple to you. I'm sure it probably was a big deal to her too, but and we did talk about it later, because we're still friends. But I watched her and I was absolutely not having fun, and she looked like she was having fun. So that seed was planted, and it took a few months for me to actually look up the training plan she was doing, which is called Couch to 5K. It's supposed to be a nine-week training plan. But the most important thing was the first thing I saw on the plan, it said a lot of other things, but what it said was 60 seconds of jogging. And I swear, if it had said a minute or anything longer than that, or if it had said running, I probably wouldn't have, I would have gone, oh, can't do that. But there was something about the way it was phrased, 60 seconds of jogging. I tucked that back in my mind, and I thought, I think I might be able to do that. That said a lot of other things too, but that's the thing I saw. And so it was winter then, and I'm in central Ohio, so we have hard winters, and she was in Florida. So I think she's in Texas now, but anyway. And I watched her, and eventually I got brave enough to leash up our dog, a yellow labrador Morgan was his name, and drag out my, I think there were Velcro sneakers or maybe some trail shoes. I had nothing that resembled running shoes. I think I might have pink sweatpants. I mean, it was really not exactly a glamour outfit at all. But that was what I had that seemed like something I could jog in for 60 seconds. But I leashed up the dog as a decoy and took him down into this hidden ravine because I was embarrassed to for anybody in my neighborhood. They probably weren't home. Okay. Just know that that I'm a little paranoid. Or they probably weren't paying attention to. Maybe they were, I don't know. And uh we went down into this hidden ravine and I set that little digital kitchen timer for 60 seconds and we jogged. And that started something. And I followed the plan. I couldn't follow it for nine weeks. I think it eventually took me 20 weeks to even get up to three miles, which is the 5K is 3.1 miles. Uh, took me a much longer. I had to break down the weeks because it just accelerated too quickly for my fitness level, lack of fitness. I mean, I couldn't, I was having trouble breathing walking around the block. So it was a lot for me to jog it all. Yeah. And that's where that started.

SPEAKER_03:

I I love that. And I love how because it was phrased as 60 seconds versus even one minute, which is the same amount of time, it seems like in your mind, it but it might just do differently, you know? Which it makes sense. Like how we say things, how we read things, it sounds different. Seconds versus minutes, even if it's the same amount of time, sounds different in our minds.

SPEAKER_00:

I don't know what I thought it was gonna say, but when I saw that, I was just like this big sigh. Oh, okay, I can do that. A gradual progress.

SPEAKER_03:

You know, I have a fitness journey myself, and I was pretty heavy. I was almost 200 pounds at my heaviest, and I'm little, I'm barely five feet. So, like almost 200 pounds. There's nowhere for it to go because I'm so little. And it was actually the book Atomic Habits that was a big thing that started to help me like make that shift. And it was very small. Like I started with literally just walking, like walking outside before I even got the gym membership. And this woman, Rachel Hollis, I don't know if you've heard of her, yeah, had had talked about moving your body for 30 minutes every day. And I was like, 30 minutes? I like listening to podcasts. I can listen to a podcast and walk for 30 minutes outside. And that's how it started for me. And it was so simple. And I'm very big on numbers. So I even I looked up, I was like, How much time percentage is 30 minutes of my day? And it was only 2%. So my mind was like, 2% of my day, that's nothing. I can do 2% of my day every day. And I literally shifted my mindset to be like 2%. If I don't value my health enough to spend 2% of my day, I obviously don't value my health at all.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, that's I love that. I love that 2%. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

And and I I use that to tell people, and like an hour is only 4% of your day. And like when you hear an hour, hearing an hour, it sounds like that's a long time. But if someone says, Do you have four percent of your day?

SPEAKER_00:

You're like, That's not a lot. That's right. I love that. Sometimes I still have, you know, my oh my god, 30 minutes, but oh wait a minute, it's only 2% of my day.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, no, it's true. And like, even I love how you mentioned too about the the heavy exercising. And at times, you maybe you're not able to do that, but the walks, like I still go for a walk every single day now, and you know, it brings me joy. It's not even just for the fact of like I'm losing weight or I'm trying to maintain this, but it's like I get enjoyment out of moving my body, you know.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I get it. I get it, took me a while to get to realize I was getting enjoyment out of moving my body, but what I got was enjoyment of being outside, of being in nature, the fresh air, the green. It's so the spring here. You're in Boston, or you're not in, she's not in Boston, folks. Sorry, she's in Massachusetts. So you know, but you're you're East Coast, so you have the big trees, you have the flowers, you have the I mean, spring is like this riot of color. It's and after the darkness and grayness and whiteness of winter, the slush and the slug and the uh spring is just oh my god, it's like they turned all the lights back on. And so that's I think that was part of it for me was a seasonal thing where my body was ready to go outside and be in nature and see the green and see the purples and all the reds, all the beautiful colors that come out. And everybody is so different. I mean, there's kind of broad categories, but when I do some coaching, and a lot of times the motivation for somebody has to be something outside themselves, something helpful or something they can't like for me, it was much more motivation about me not wanting to die. That's you know, that's kind of the thing, is me wanting to get off the sofa because I wanted to be an active member of society again, which I, you know, sometimes that's where I get where I just go into kind of slug mode and I can't be out there. But other people, they need to be helpful or they need to be making a difference, or they need to be having something that excites them, something to look forward to, or something that makes them an individual. I mean, we have these different personality types. So the other thing that happened, which I would probably still be down in that ravine with the hidden, you know, place where I started running, if it wasn't for my sister, because it was her daughter, her only child, who had died during that year when everybody died. I jokingly say I made the mistake of telling her that I had taken up running, which I didn't tell anybody for a while because I was just so I had so many experiences where I told people I was gonna do things and then couldn't, you know, I'm gonna publish a book. Yeah, that didn't work. I'm gonna do this, that didn't work, you know, again and again and again over the years. And so I was embarrassed to even say, Oh, I'm running, you know. And when I did tell her, she said, Oh, that's great. There's this 5K that will raise money for the type of, you know, for research for the type of cancer that my niece died from. And I'll tell you, I wish that my first response would be had been, oh, that's fantastic. I'll play along. No, no, no. My first response was, oh no, I'm a private runner. I only run in the ravine or in my neighborhood. I'm not going anywhere where there's other people. That was I mean, I'm a little embarrassed because you know, this is like a charity run. It's a great thing. So it took me a little while to get over myself and to, I mostly just remember my niece and how much she suffered and what an incredibly smart and funny person she was, and how difficult it was for her. She was sick 500 days, and it was just awful. It was really awful. And so I thought, okay, you can do this. But it took a lot for me. I'm an introvert, and I'm, you know, I was so embarrassed by myself in general. And funny, I look at my pictures now from that race, and I mean, I wasn't small, but I wasn't big. I wasn't, you know, I wasn't like, I don't know, it's just your perspective is just so messed up. My perspective, I should speak to myself. Um, and so yeah, I fell in love. I went to that 5K, and there were people of all shapes, all sizes, all ages. They had strollers, they had dogs, they had, you know, cotton shirts and pink sweatpants, like I did, people with velcro shoes. And then, of course, there were the speed demons with their lycra and their spandex and their, you know, the big sneakers and all that. And but most of the people were just like me. They were just like me. They weren't any, and there wasn't anything special about them except that they were trying to raise money. They were moving their bodies and raising money for a good cause. And so I always suggest to people when they're having trouble with motivation, is find the thing that pulls you toward the goal. You know, because we think we have to be self determined, we have to be you know self empowered. Nothing wrong with that. But if you can't get that, then find something else to empower you. And for me, it was the depression. That was my motivator. And then if Eventually it became more the charity things and the fellowship and the, you know, all the other stuff, the kind of goal-oriented, the medals and the shiny stuff that came later. That wasn't what I was in it for at all. So I think that initial spark has to come from whatever your core thing is at the time. And that might be different than mine. I love the two percent. I'm really I'm really gonna remember that two percent. Perspective. Oh my god, our perspective can be so off.

SPEAKER_03:

I know, I know. And I I literally looked it up because I was trying to like prove to myself that I didn't have 30 minutes to walk. And then I would I wouldn't want that. I didn't have the time. And then I was like, it was like a slap in my face and being like, I don't have two percent. And now anytime I want to, I'm thinking to do something, I'm like, you obviously don't care that much. You don't want it bad enough if you can't spend two percent. And I'm like, oh shit, I don't.

SPEAKER_00:

I love that. That perspective just really, really helped me because that's the thing. I'm working on this book right now, and I feel as if I have to spend a hundred percent of my time on this book, but I really could carve out two percent for some, whatever the thing is. It can be, you know, anything.

SPEAKER_03:

It's true. But I love how you mentioned find something to use to motivate you, like whatever the thing is, whether it's the charity, whether it's in my case, I was I walked up a flight of stairs. I lived on the third floor at the time, and I was out of breath. And I was like, this can't be. I can't do this no more. Nope. I had nothing in my hands, and it was that small little shift, and I was like, Nope. So, whatever it is for you, like something that's gonna, we're all different, but something that's gonna help you make that shift, make the change.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, you have to find, you know, for some people, it's like one of my friends, her dad got really sick, and he was diabetic, he was overweight, he had heart disease, and she was very concerned about him, but she realized that was the path she was going down. That was the same path, and that's what the shift was for her. So it can be often it's I mean, that's a big deal when your parent is sick. That's a big deal. But often, I mean, that was big for you, but a flight of stairs, it's an instant, it's a couple of minutes that makes that shift. And the other thing is the ground has to be ripe. You know, how many times had you walked up that flight of stairs or had you just not even paid attention to what was going on with your body? Because that's with me. I mean, I was this all this collapse of the momentum I'd had from the first major breakdown. I mean, I had pulled my life kind of back together and was doing some things that felt important to me. And to a lot of people, I looked like I was doing great. But the decline from that happened very slowly over a long period of time. And then the wake up happens sometimes very quickly. Sometimes it's very gradual. But for me, it was very quickly. It was just sitting on that couch going, Oh my gosh. It was kind of a if she can do this, I can do this. I didn't do it right away. I had to keep watching her and let it percolate, sort of. But there was definitely that moment when I saw that after I got done laughing and thought maybe we should do a wellness check. Then I went, wait a minute. Okay, we're the same age. She's we're the same size. Neither of us have been athletic. Okay. There's not, I see nothing here that can that I can use. I was looking. And oh, the other thing I did eventually I joined a running club, but I didn't join right away. I went to one of their information sessions, and my reason for going to the information session was so they could talk me out of joining, which who would do that? I mean, what business would do that, right? But no, I ended up talking to this great guy who was in charge of it at the time, and and he looks at me, he says, Well, my mother, who is 65, just ran her fifth half marathon or something like that. I went, Oh, that's not what I wanted to do. Excuses gone. That did not work. My plan did not work.

SPEAKER_03:

Five years ago, that I Googled, and it was Google, not even ChatGPT I used to ask how much time is 30 minutes because I was trying to convince myself I didn't have 30 minutes. And five years later, I'm still telling people, 30 minutes is only 2% of your day. I love how you mentioned sometimes it happens quick, and you're just like, no, this isn't no more. I had lived in that apartment for years, and I'm sure I'd walked up those stairs multiple times with nothing, but there was that one day, and I was like, I don't want to feel like this. Like, I'm out of breath. There's nothing in my hands. I'm pretty young. I was like 19, I'm not even old enough to drink, and I can't even breathe walking up the stairs.

SPEAKER_00:

Not that should matter, but it was just all these thoughts, and I'm like, no, no, you know, you just have to get in drinking, and they talk about hitting bottom, but I think it's the same thing with any kind of mindset thing, and that's why I talked about the soil, the first the ground was fertile. You have to have a place where the message will be received because I am sure that my high school friend is not the first person who I saw take up running. I mean, I can't tell you who they were, but I cannot imagine at the time I was, what was I 49, I think, or 48, that in my 48 years, I didn't know a thousand people who had taken up running and told me how great it was. Um, I know some other people had told me about breaking a sweat a couple of times. A few people talked about, like I think one woman played tennis, another woman rode her bike. And it was just, you know, the ground wasn't fertile. I wasn't ready to hear the message. I wasn't ready to make the change. It just didn't, it was inconceivable that it would make a difference. And then, man, when it did, it was like lightning struck. Well, it wasn't quite like lightning struck, but a little more gradual than that. But it was definitely a jarring change in a good way. In a good way.

SPEAKER_03:

I like how you mentioned you have to be ready to hear the message because you could hear it from the wrong person at the wrong time, said a certain way, and it's not gonna stick with you. Honestly, that's why I try saying stuff even on the podcast in different ways. Even like some people might hear the 2% and be like, who cares that it's 2% of my day? But if somebody else might hear it and be like, Oh my god, Manders, that makes so much sense, you know, and it might shift something.

SPEAKER_00:

Yep. Yep.

SPEAKER_03:

I really appreciated this convo, Nita. This was amazing. Have you heard of a man named Jay Shetty? Yes. I'm a big fan, big fan. He has a podcast called On Purpose, and he ends it with two segments, and I've stolen them. So I end my podcast with those two segments as well. First segment is the many sides to us, and there's five questions, and they need to be answered in one word each. What is one word someone who was meeting you for the first time would use to describe you as?

SPEAKER_00:

This is what I hope will say. Okay, I'm just gonna say what I hope. Real.

SPEAKER_03:

What is one word someone who knows you extremely well would use to describe you as?

SPEAKER_00:

One word, oh.

SPEAKER_03:

Terrified. What is one word you'd use to describe yourself?

SPEAKER_00:

Persistent.

SPEAKER_03:

What is one word that if someone didn't like you or agree with your mindset would use to describe you as stubborn? What is one word you're trying to embody right now?

SPEAKER_00:

Authentic.

SPEAKER_03:

Second segment is the final five, and these can be answered in up to a sentence. What is the best advice you've heard or received?

SPEAKER_00:

Just because an expert says that's how you should do it doesn't mean it's right for you.

SPEAKER_03:

I like that advice. Why is that the best?

SPEAKER_00:

Because one size doesn't fit all. And I tried to follow, especially with writing. Oh my god, I tried to follow all these people. You go to these conferences and they'd say, just do this, just do that, just do this. And what I found out later was that person had a skill set that I don't, it's not just things they learned, but their brain is wired differently than mine. So yeah, one size doesn't fit all. That's probably what I should have said. One size doesn't fit all. I completely agree. I think that's true with fitness too. I think it's actually true of everything. My experience has been with writing, because it took me so long to get published. I mean, it's just you know we have all these another.

SPEAKER_03:

What is the worst advice you've heard or received?

SPEAKER_00:

You don't want it bad enough. Why is that the worst? Because often somebody's trying to tell me something that worked for them, and their brain is wired differently than mine. And they mean well. I've never had anybody say that to me. It's more a resignation of, well, I guess, yeah, I guess you don't want it bad enough. You know, it's like it's actually, I think you may have said it, I'm sorry, but I didn't, I just picked that up, sorry. But what they meant was me doing it, they wanted me to do it the way they had because it worked for them and it was like magic for them. But that doesn't mean I don't want it. And especially if you're somebody with mental illness, especially like if you're in a depressive episode, yeah, you want to take a shower, but it might have been seven days because you can't get yourself going. It's not that you don't want to take a shower, you'd think about taking a shower seven times a day, but you just can't do it. So it's just, you know, it mostly it's anything that's all or nothing. That's my tweak, little tweak, maybe let's say.

SPEAKER_03:

But I get that. And I think I did say that, but I said it to myself.

SPEAKER_00:

You know and like it wasn't the way you said it didn't have that tone. These people are like found the thing that that and it worked for them. It really works, and it may have been life-changing for them.

SPEAKER_03:

So yeah, yeah, but like I had said it to myself, like, because I was trying to find reasons that I didn't have two percent or 30 minutes to walk. And I'm like, Amanda, is your health not that valuable that you have so much other stuff that you can't walk?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, see, that's different, and I think too, sometimes we have to reparent ourselves, and so I definitely will bring on the authoritarian father every once in a while. Be will say, All right, just do the hard thing. Come on, you can do it, just do it, just do it. You really can do it, you know. And it's kind of it's half cheerleader, but it's definitely some taskmaster in there, and yeah, it's just reparenting myself. That's a perspective on that.

SPEAKER_03:

Completely agree. What is something that you used to value that you no longer value?

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, probably fancy things, maybe fancy houses, fancy cars. I still like nice things, but you know, I drive a 12-year-old car. We live in a small house, very nice neighborhood, but it I don't have a giant house, I don't have a lot of the external stuff. I'm wearing my pearls, but whatever. I don't have to acquire things so that the rest of the world thinks I'm something. It's what's going on inside me is much more important.

SPEAKER_03:

I love that. If you could describe what you would want your legacy to be, as if someone was reading it, what would you want it to say?

SPEAKER_00:

When I talked to her, I felt seen and heard.

SPEAKER_03:

I love that. That is beautiful. If you could create one law in the world that everyone had to follow, what would it be? And I want to know why.

SPEAKER_00:

One law. Oh. Be kind but take no shit.

SPEAKER_03:

Why would that be the law?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I think it's important to be kind. I mean, I think we need to be, I think we just need a lot more kindness in the world. But I also spent a lot of time being a doormat where I was just, oh, just you know, whatever you want, I don't matter, I'm not important. And so boundaries are really good. And boundaries may seem that you are kind to someone from a long distance, you know, and that there's like a little space between you and that other person. And sometimes that's the biggest kindness you can do is to just stay the heck away from somebody, but with an open heart, you know. I mean, there are people that I really don't care if I ever see again, kind of hope maybe I don't, and yet I wish them well. I don't want them in my life, but I don't want bad things to happen to them. There have been times where I've been, and there's plenty of times where I can be spiteful and where I can just be so angry that I wish horrible things would happen, but that doesn't last very long because that's not what I'm here for. That's not what I'm here for. So it's more about choosing to be with the people that feed me, that I feed, that, you know, that our interests overlap in a positive way. And the other people, they can go on their way, they can find their own way. I'm not for them, and they're not for me. I get that.

SPEAKER_03:

Thank you so much, Nita.

SPEAKER_00:

I love this. Thank you. This has been great conversation. I love, I love when you ask you, you're I'm curious. I'm curious. You are curious. That's the if somebody says a word about you, she's curious in a good way. She's curious.

SPEAKER_03:

Thank you. I do like to just give it back to the guests. Any final words of wisdom, no pressure, that you want to leave the listeners with.

SPEAKER_00:

I usually always say the same thing, and especially to people who are struggling, and you could be struggling emotionally, you could be struggling in a relationship, at work, at fitness. Stay. That's what I say. Stay because things will change. Now, maybe you need to leave your job, but stay on the planet. You know, things may seem really tough right now, but the thing that is certain is that it will change. And you don't have all the information right now. So hang around. If you need help, there's lots of help there. I can help too. And I have a website, mexwinny.com, and I have books there, but just stay because that's the chance. If you're here, you've got a chance. So stay, please.

SPEAKER_03:

Thank you so much, Nita. And I will link Nita's website and her contact in the show notes for you guys to connect with her directly. Thank you, Nita. I really appreciate it. I loved this conversation.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you so much. And thank you for the work you do. You're just really shining some light on some great things. So thank you.

SPEAKER_03:

Thank you. I really appreciate that. And thank you guys for tuning in to another episode of Mando's Mindset.

SPEAKER_02:

In case no one told you today, I'm proud of you. I'm voting for you. And you got this. As always, if you enjoyed the show, I would really appreciate it if you would leave me a five-star rating, leave a review, and share with anyone you think would benefit from that. And don't forget, you are only one nine step just away from shifting your light. Thanks guys, until next time.

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