What Every Moment is a Choice Means to Me: Why I Started this Podcast

1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:07,600 Hello, and welcome to Every Moment is a Choice. 2 00:00:07,600 --> 00:00:12,560 I'm your host, Erica Behl, and I invite you to join me on a transformative journey to 3 00:00:12,560 --> 00:00:17,720 uncover the extraordinary potential that lies within every single moment of our lives. 4 00:00:17,720 --> 00:00:23,360 From the choices we make in our relationships, careers, and personal growth, to the mindset 5 00:00:23,360 --> 00:00:28,600 we embrace in the face of adversity, this podcast will empower you to embrace the notion 6 00:00:28,600 --> 00:00:33,640 that every moment holds a choice, and it's up to us to seize it. 7 00:00:33,640 --> 00:00:38,080 Join me as we engage in insightful conversations with thought leaders, experts, and everyday 8 00:00:38,080 --> 00:00:43,640 people who have harnessed the power of choice to achieve greatness, overcome obstacles, 9 00:00:43,640 --> 00:00:46,280 and create extraordinary lives. 10 00:00:46,280 --> 00:00:50,880 If you feel inspired by this episode, please read it and consider subscribing. 11 00:00:50,880 --> 00:00:53,080 I'm keen to know how it's impacted you. 12 00:00:53,080 --> 00:00:55,120 Hi, this is Erica. 13 00:00:55,120 --> 00:00:57,440 Thank you for joining me today. 14 00:00:57,440 --> 00:00:58,440 It's just me today. 15 00:00:58,440 --> 00:01:04,400 I don't have a guest, but I thought I would share with you, the listener, why I started 16 00:01:04,400 --> 00:01:10,000 this podcast and what I hope people can get out of it. 17 00:01:10,000 --> 00:01:13,140 So I'll start with my own story. 18 00:01:13,140 --> 00:01:18,000 On December 27, 2017, a bombshell hit me. 19 00:01:18,000 --> 00:01:24,480 I was in India on holiday with my then husband and our two kids. 20 00:01:24,480 --> 00:01:30,440 I checked my phone and I'd gotten an email from my breast surgeon. 21 00:01:30,440 --> 00:01:37,040 She had biopsied a lump I felt in my breast a few days prior to going on holiday. 22 00:01:37,040 --> 00:01:44,080 And most of the words in the email didn't make a lot of sense at the time, but one did, 23 00:01:44,080 --> 00:01:46,720 and that was malignant. 24 00:01:46,720 --> 00:01:51,800 My immediate reaction was to be full of questions. 25 00:01:51,800 --> 00:01:57,760 The main one being, should we cut the trip short and rush back to Singapore? 26 00:01:57,760 --> 00:02:05,400 But the surgeon assured me that in her professional opinion, nothing was going to progress in 27 00:02:05,400 --> 00:02:08,240 just over a week. 28 00:02:08,240 --> 00:02:13,040 And what she would do, what her office would do, is start the process of lining up appointments, 29 00:02:13,040 --> 00:02:19,460 including a staging scan to learn how far the cancer had spread. 30 00:02:19,460 --> 00:02:26,040 So there's a photo from that trip of me sitting in the back of an open top Jeep next to my 31 00:02:26,040 --> 00:02:30,840 four-year-old son and with my 18-month-old baby in my lap. 32 00:02:30,840 --> 00:02:36,720 We were on a tiger safari at a protected reserve for tigers where you can, if you're 33 00:02:36,720 --> 00:02:40,120 lucky, catch a glimpse of a tiger in the wild. 34 00:02:40,120 --> 00:02:46,320 And in this photo, I'm staring straight at the camera, holding my baby and wearing these 35 00:02:46,320 --> 00:02:48,480 big dark sunglasses. 36 00:02:48,480 --> 00:02:52,440 I wasn't hiding my eyes because I'd been crying. 37 00:02:52,440 --> 00:02:59,560 It was almost too early or too fresh for me to actually cry. 38 00:02:59,560 --> 00:03:05,520 What I was thinking behind those glasses, what my eyes would have said was, everything 39 00:03:05,520 --> 00:03:11,600 I thought was going to happen in the rest of my life may no longer happen. 40 00:03:11,600 --> 00:03:12,600 Simple as that. 41 00:03:12,600 --> 00:03:23,480 I spent the next week or so living in a state partially dread, partially stoic, trying to 42 00:03:23,480 --> 00:03:25,920 be very present with my kids. 43 00:03:25,920 --> 00:03:27,080 We saw a tiger. 44 00:03:27,080 --> 00:03:29,160 We got lucky. 45 00:03:29,160 --> 00:03:32,660 And my cancer turned out to be stage two. 46 00:03:32,660 --> 00:03:40,760 So serious enough that I had to have a couple of surgeries, three months of chemo, and radiation. 47 00:03:40,760 --> 00:03:45,000 I had to take my ovaries, so I went into menopause at 41. 48 00:03:45,000 --> 00:03:51,480 And I'm still on medication and I'm monitored by an oncologist, although I'm now five years 49 00:03:51,480 --> 00:03:52,480 out. 50 00:03:52,480 --> 00:03:57,800 But the biggest changes in my life are related to what I was thinking while that photo is 51 00:03:57,800 --> 00:03:58,800 being taken. 52 00:03:58,800 --> 00:04:05,000 And when I look back, it wasn't a feeling of shock, really. 53 00:04:05,000 --> 00:04:08,000 It was more like grief. 54 00:04:08,000 --> 00:04:14,200 Grief for the life I thought I was going to live before that was taken away by something 55 00:04:14,200 --> 00:04:17,080 I couldn't control. 56 00:04:17,080 --> 00:04:20,160 So I did a lot of reading. 57 00:04:20,160 --> 00:04:27,160 And one book that I picked up and has had a really profound influence on me and is almost 58 00:04:27,160 --> 00:04:33,780 the reason for this podcast was Man's Search for Meaning, written by Victor Frankel. 59 00:04:33,780 --> 00:04:40,640 So for anyone not familiar with it, Frankel was a Holocaust survivor who became a distinguished 60 00:04:40,640 --> 00:04:44,160 psychotherapist and academic after World War II. 61 00:04:44,160 --> 00:04:49,880 But during the war, he was imprisoned in four different concentration camps where he lost 62 00:04:49,880 --> 00:04:56,760 his wife, his father, his mother, and other family members who all perished in various 63 00:04:56,760 --> 00:04:57,880 camps. 64 00:04:57,880 --> 00:05:06,520 He witnessed unspeakable horror and the worst version of humanity. 65 00:05:06,520 --> 00:05:12,400 But after the war, he responded to this by writing what has become probably one of the 66 00:05:12,400 --> 00:05:14,840 most influential books of all time. 67 00:05:14,840 --> 00:05:21,280 And he asserted that in spite of everything that someone else could take away from you, 68 00:05:21,280 --> 00:05:29,040 your freedom, your family, your job, your house, your possessions, even your ability 69 00:05:29,040 --> 00:05:35,820 to speak freely, the one thing that no one could take away was your ability to choose 70 00:05:35,820 --> 00:05:38,600 how you respond. 71 00:05:38,600 --> 00:05:46,660 He said, everything can be taken from a man, but one thing, the last of the human freedoms, 72 00:05:46,660 --> 00:05:53,440 to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. 73 00:05:53,440 --> 00:05:59,680 Almost everyone at some point is going to have to reckon with something that kind of 74 00:05:59,680 --> 00:06:07,760 upends your life, losing your job, getting divorced, losing a loved one. 75 00:06:07,760 --> 00:06:14,320 And I think especially since COVID, we are collectively more aware of the fact that everything 76 00:06:14,320 --> 00:06:17,660 is constantly changing around us. 77 00:06:17,660 --> 00:06:22,640 We seek stability, but change is constantly occurring. 78 00:06:22,640 --> 00:06:28,680 And it's our reaction to change or the things that we cannot control that really defines 79 00:06:28,680 --> 00:06:29,680 us. 80 00:06:29,680 --> 00:06:34,720 It can either break us or strengthen us. 81 00:06:34,720 --> 00:06:40,920 So this podcast, Every Moment is a Choice, exists not only because it's become my own 82 00:06:40,920 --> 00:06:46,760 mantra that I've adopted since realizing that the only thing we can control is how we respond 83 00:06:46,760 --> 00:06:49,840 to life and to change. 84 00:06:49,840 --> 00:06:56,280 Cancer taught me that we can't control the number of moments that we have, but we do 85 00:06:56,280 --> 00:07:03,240 have an opportunity in every single moment that we do have to make a choice, no matter 86 00:07:03,240 --> 00:07:09,560 what the constraints or frustrations or things that aren't going our way are. 87 00:07:09,560 --> 00:07:11,680 That's our power. 88 00:07:11,680 --> 00:07:18,440 I think it's probably no surprise that certain people who have experienced extreme tragedy 89 00:07:18,440 --> 00:07:25,080 or brushes with death may choose to live the rest of their lives differently. 90 00:07:25,080 --> 00:07:32,020 Realizing your own mortality is usually enough to snap you into a higher sense of purpose. 91 00:07:32,020 --> 00:07:34,360 But what about the rest of us as well? 92 00:07:34,360 --> 00:07:40,720 It's very poignant sometimes to hear the type of advice that people who are at the end of 93 00:07:40,720 --> 00:07:45,920 their lives give, people who are dying or in hospice. 94 00:07:45,920 --> 00:07:51,800 And when they speak, they usually say things like, I wish I'd cherished my friends more 95 00:07:51,800 --> 00:07:55,640 or spent more time with my kids. 96 00:07:55,640 --> 00:08:01,020 And from my own perspective as a cancer survivor, I wish everyone could have the same sense 97 00:08:01,020 --> 00:08:09,640 of purpose in life rather than life just happening to you or being set back by changes that are 98 00:08:09,640 --> 00:08:12,520 inevitably going to happen. 99 00:08:12,520 --> 00:08:18,000 So I don't like to see people who are stuck and not living the type of life that they 100 00:08:18,000 --> 00:08:22,160 could look back on and just say, no regrets. 101 00:08:22,160 --> 00:08:27,300 So it's hard to think about your own mortality. 102 00:08:27,300 --> 00:08:31,680 If you've been through a life changing event, you may have thought about it, but for those 103 00:08:31,680 --> 00:08:36,960 who haven't, you have to kind of shake this inertia that you can sometimes find yourself 104 00:08:36,960 --> 00:08:38,880 in. 105 00:08:38,880 --> 00:08:44,880 And there was one blogger who I found and I read his posts and I kind of started to 106 00:08:44,880 --> 00:08:51,120 think this is a way for people who have not been through kind of a near death experience 107 00:08:51,120 --> 00:08:57,680 almost to contemplate the finiteness of our lives. 108 00:08:57,680 --> 00:09:03,200 So this blogger is named Tim Urban and he really influenced me because what he started 109 00:09:03,200 --> 00:09:08,640 to do was to quantify the amount of time an average person has. 110 00:09:08,640 --> 00:09:14,200 It's a quite simple method and he broke it down to your life in weeks. 111 00:09:14,200 --> 00:09:20,860 And there's actually a poster that you can buy or you could even print out that captures 112 00:09:20,860 --> 00:09:27,080 an entire lifespan on one sheet of paper from the time you're born until I think he took 113 00:09:27,080 --> 00:09:29,520 it up to 90 year old person. 114 00:09:29,520 --> 00:09:33,720 And each little box represents one week of that life. 115 00:09:33,720 --> 00:09:41,640 And if you are in your 40s, in your 50s, you start to look at it and you say, wow, there's 116 00:09:41,640 --> 00:09:47,240 less time left than what I've already spent. 117 00:09:47,240 --> 00:09:54,400 And it's a very interesting concept, I think, because instead of being almost a morbid exercise 118 00:09:54,400 --> 00:10:00,560 that makes you depressed, I think there's so much opportunity there to look at it and 119 00:10:00,560 --> 00:10:08,560 say, wow, so if I have this number of Christmases left or this number of summers left, what 120 00:10:08,560 --> 00:10:13,620 am I going to choose to do with all those moments? 121 00:10:13,620 --> 00:10:24,420 And I think the part that is particularly moving to me about his writing and his thinking 122 00:10:24,420 --> 00:10:28,200 about this is our relationships. 123 00:10:28,200 --> 00:10:35,120 And in particular, the relationships you have with people like your parents or your own 124 00:10:35,120 --> 00:10:42,080 kids, because they're of a different generation, there's not a consistent pattern to these 125 00:10:42,080 --> 00:10:43,080 relationships. 126 00:10:43,080 --> 00:10:47,800 You see more of people at certain points of your life. 127 00:10:47,800 --> 00:10:55,040 And there was one fact he put in there that I found, it made me think very deeply of if 128 00:10:55,040 --> 00:11:02,200 you have a child who is around 10 years old, and assuming that that child moves out when 129 00:11:02,200 --> 00:11:08,640 they turn 18 or 19 years old, anything about the face to face time that you have with someone 130 00:11:08,640 --> 00:11:15,360 like your child, that by the time they're 10 years old, you will have already spent 131 00:11:15,360 --> 00:11:24,040 around 50% of the face to face time that you will ever spend with your child. 132 00:11:24,040 --> 00:11:34,600 And something as profound as that, if it inspires you to be a bit more present with your kids 133 00:11:34,600 --> 00:11:41,920 if you have them, but also to think about your relationships in a way that you aren't 134 00:11:41,920 --> 00:11:45,520 going to have all the time in the world to spend with people. 135 00:11:45,520 --> 00:11:53,280 And being more present or embracing people around you who contribute to your life. 136 00:11:53,280 --> 00:11:59,720 I personally made some decisions around who I wanted in my life after my own bout with 137 00:11:59,720 --> 00:12:01,640 cancer. 138 00:12:01,640 --> 00:12:08,680 And it has had a immensely profound effect on my own happiness and the impact I'm able 139 00:12:08,680 --> 00:12:12,000 to create for other people. 140 00:12:12,000 --> 00:12:16,960 So that's my story of every moment is a choice. 141 00:12:16,960 --> 00:12:25,040 And when I started this podcast, I originally thought of who do I know from my own life 142 00:12:25,040 --> 00:12:32,320 who may come from different types of professions, different industries. 143 00:12:32,320 --> 00:12:35,520 Some of my guests are kind of creatives. 144 00:12:35,520 --> 00:12:38,400 Some are corporate people. 145 00:12:38,400 --> 00:12:41,200 Some are researchers. 146 00:12:41,200 --> 00:12:48,600 But each of them in a way lives a very purposeful life by the type of choices they make. 147 00:12:48,600 --> 00:12:57,240 And I really hope that as you listen to these episodes, you are able to, through their stories, 148 00:12:57,240 --> 00:13:04,400 identify some ways, maybe some things resonate with you about how you can seek to make every 149 00:13:04,400 --> 00:13:08,320 moment a choice for you as well. 150 00:13:08,320 --> 00:13:14,480 So thank you for listening and I will be making more episodes to come. 151 00:13:14,480 --> 00:13:18,720 So do reach out and give me any feedback that you have. 152 00:13:18,720 --> 00:13:20,600 Thank you. 153 00:13:20,600 --> 00:13:22,400 Thank you for listening today. 154 00:13:22,400 --> 00:13:25,680 I hope this has been a useful investment of your time. 155 00:13:25,680 --> 00:13:30,360 If you feel inspired by this episode, please read it and consider subscribing. 156 00:13:30,360 --> 00:13:33,160 I'm keen to know how it's impacted you. 157 00:13:33,160 --> 00:13:48,520 Now go out there and seize those moments.