Our guest today is Kelsi Shean. Kelsi is the founder and CEO of Brass and Unity, as well as the author of Brass and Unity, one Woman’s Journey through the hell of Afghanistan and back. Following our time in the. her own battles with PTSD and TBI, finding solace in art therapy and eventually launching Brass in Unity, a notable jewelry and eyewear brand, which donates 20 percent of its profits to aid those grappling with mental health challenges.
Kelsi’s impactful journey led to the creation of the Brass in Unity podcast, where she explores mental health and resilience. with renowned guests. Additionally, she is a prominent keynote speaker known as a force for positive change. Kelsi, it’s an honor. Welcome to the RUNGPG podcast. Thank you so much for having me.
I’m glad to see you’re feeling better. Yes, I was sick the last time we talked. When I got over it, it was the heat. I think the heat, had something to do with getting over. Thanks for thinking of me. Listen, Kelsi, we were talking about this. You know, you have such an interesting story and background, and I think a lot of value and insight to share with our listeners and subscribers about, you know, you know, your personal journey and your entrepreneurial journey.
So where do we start? That was the question, you know, that was going through my mind. Where do we start? But we do have to get some context and background here. So I was thinking maybe you could share with us, you know, the journey from your time in the military to becoming a CEO of Brass and Unity. Yeah, absolutely.
I’ll, I’ll just say to preface, if you guys want to know the deep, the depths of this, instead of the over skate, go read the book or listen to Peterson’s podcast. We went uncomfortably deep. So I, I served in Canada. I was a Canadian artillery gunner. If people don’t know what artillery is, think of the World War II movies that you hear the Oh, that I did that.
That was my job. It’s a simplistic way of putting it. And then I was borrowed. I worked with the British. I got injured in Afghanistan. I got medically released out in 2011. I then was kind of told very early. I was, you know, I got medically released when I was 21 years old. I was told that I would never work again and that that was going to be the path for me, that I was going to be a liability to society and a non functioning member.
That to me became Completely unacceptable. I was a fighter most of my life. So to be told that I cannot do something was kerosene essentially. And at that point, I went through a bout of I would call pretty significant post traumatic stress. I don’t attach to those labels anymore because I understand you are the stories you tell yourself.
But at that time I was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder and an undiagnosed traumatic brain injury due to the deployment. But really what it was for me was, you know, unhealed trauma. It was leaning into that suicidality. I was very sick for a very long time, highly overmedicated, and didn’t know which direction to go in my life because I didn’t want to be here anymore.
So at that point, I was highly suicidal. And in about 2015, My treatment doctor was like, Hey, why don’t we try art therapy? There’s a lot of research around it now. We can get the brain to focus on something else and we can start putting the energy into something positive. It sounded absolutely ridiculous to me.
That seems completely outside of my wheelhouse. But this man I truly respected and understood that he knew what he was doing better than I did. So I started art therapy. I grabbed, you know, my husband got me a little pipe gutter from Home Depot. Or lows for those Americans. And I got some casings, some old, leftover brass casings from friends of mine that were in the service.
And I just started building jewelry on the kitchen table. And I mean, like, hammering pieces. I would take the casing, grab it with a piece of pliers, cut the end off, pop out that firing pin, hammer smooth, do the whole process. And then I would string it on a, on a row of beads and make a bracelet out of it.
And at the time I called those the warrior bracelet. But that’s not the important part of the story at all. The piece of the jewelry was just the thing I was doing. The, the biggest takeaway from it was the first day I sat down, I didn’t move, but I also didn’t want to kill myself, which meant that I had hit on something that my brain was attaching to and saying, okay, this is important enough to deviate thought and energy away from the suicidality and into something else.
So it was working. And that’s what was really beautiful is I started to see that I didn’t have to die, that there could be something else I could do. And really at the time, it was more for me about how do I help others heal? And how do I help those organizations? Because I didn’t want to want to run a non profit.
I don’t want to ask people for money. I’m not great at it. I’m terrible at it actually. And so I knew that that wasn’t going to work for me. But I also had a lot of friends that were killing themselves constantly. This was before the 22 a day. This was before the 44 a day. This was, we were just seeing the impact of the wars.
And we didn’t know how to handle it. So what I decided is I was going to take this product. I was going to learn the entire business practice. I mean, I barely graduated high school here, people. I had to learn line sheets, buying times, sourcing, you name it. I had to learn it all. And I had to learn it on the fly.
So I went to my first retailer, I knocked on the door with a row of samples and I said, Hey, I want to sell this here. And they said, give us the backstory. So we did, and they loved it. They said, give us your margins. And I went, Oh, like now show us your line sheet for the next six months. And I went, Oh, and I was like, okay, but okay, hear me out.
I said, I will give you that answer tomorrow. Give me 24 hours, like absolutely no problem. And I did that. And from that moment on, I was hooked. I realized right then and there, I could be the vehicle that put the money in the hands of these organizations that were doing the hard boots on the groundwork.
I could impact change. Just by sitting at my kitchen table if I decided to show up. And what I realized, and what most people realize once they get far enough down that entrepreneurial path is that when you help others and you approach the world with a servant’s hand, how can I help you? The world will start to help you back.
You will start to heal while you help others. And so selfishly, the more I helped, the more I healed. And that’s really what brass immunity started. We started on the kitchen table and, you know, cut to from 2016 when we incorporated under brass immunity. Originally we were her wearables that came from a, you know, people say coincidences is happened.
They don’t synchronicities happen. And I was meant to be in that room. But what had happened was. My mother was a truck driver for Kevin Hart on his what now tour. My parents are long haul truck drivers. So mom went out, she’s like, I’m not driving with your father this summer. And she’s like, she went and got a job driving for tours and she drove for Kevin.
And my mother being very much like me, talk that man there off. You need to meet my daughter. You need to talk to her about her business, all of this stuff. Sure enough, Kevin met with me in Vancouver and it was just my husband, my mom and I. And he said, tell me what you got. And so it was just us and we’re chatting and I said, look man, I know I’m intimidating cause I’m taller than you, but here’s the kicker.
This works. This will change people’s lives. Will you take a look? He did. He held it up and he goes, this is really cool. And I said, don’t lie to me. He goes, no, this is actually, this is different. This is cool. But here’s the thing. You’ve named it her wearables. How do you want men to wear this? And I just like light bulb explode.
He goes, you’ve got to change the name. If you want this to be successful, we got in the car after he yelled over to his home and he’s like, yo, we got to tweak this out tonight. And I was like, cool, Kevin, not thinking he would do it. Oh, he did it. 20 minutes later, he did it. And he tweeted about her wearables and 2000, the very beginning of 2016.
And I’m still making this on the kitchen table and we went home and we said, we got to incorporate under something else. So we did, we chose, you know, my husband’s brilliant at design and names and he, we came up with brass and unity and we incorporated. And within one year of that, we were on Ellen, on Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Whitney Cummings, Kat Dennings, you name it, people were wearing it.
And I had some couple really, you know, life changing meetings just by being in the right room, sitting down at the right table at Carbone, just accidental smash ups. And I knew that’s why this business was going to work because you don’t get these kind of meetings. You don’t sit down at a plane airport and just that person walks in every time you’re in the airport.
It just doesn’t happen that way. But I was literally having that happen every week. First, it was Kevin Hart. Then it was Jesse Taylor Ferguson. Then it was Whitney Cummings. Then it was Beth Behrs. And it was just constant. So the world was screaming at me, pay attention, you have something here. Grab it, run with it.
And I did. And, you know, up until 2019, I hand signed 200 retailers in North America. We have donated over half a million dollars. We are known all over the globe. I’m known as the bullet bracelet girl. I don’t care what I’m known as. I know that I’m impacting the world and that’s all that I ever wanted to do.
And that’s how we got started. That’s really interesting. What a background and a story there. I mean, you can’t get a, can’t get any bigger third party endorsements, right? Timing and opportunity. Fantastic. And I just, it was really powerful what you said earlier. The more you, the more you help, the more you heal.
What a powerful statement, right? If people realize that and you hear these stories, right? You know, a sense of gratitude, thankfulness, you know, helping others. allows you to grow and heal and become successful. Ultimately. I do want to unpack, the art therapy a little bit in your healing journey, because I think that’s, I think that’s really interesting.
What was it about, you know, you mentioned that you, you, you fixated on it. You didn’t move for hours, right? It was like, what was it about art therapy that helped, play a role in your healing journey? And how does creativity play a role in other people’s possibly, you know, healing journeys? I think that, for me, I was in a place where I didn’t give a f k, you know?
I didn’t care if I lived or died. It didn’t matter to me. But what I realized in that moment when I, it literally, I went eight hours. I didn’t get up. I didn’t move. It was unbelievable. But I didn’t have a suicidal thought. And what I realized in the moment was that when you do something that you love and you enjoy, It’s kind of like how people say that, you know, children have ADD or ADHD, they can’t, they can’t do this, they can’t do that.
No, they can. It’s a superpower if you learn how to use it. It’s no different with our therapy. I had this superpower. I had to learn to give myself over and not, and not worry about what others were going to think about the thing I was creating. It wasn’t for others yet. It was for me. And when I learned to move out of my own way, And I learned to enjoy what I was doing, meaning once I kind of figured out how to make a bracelet, because I literally had to teach myself how to build jewelry.
Like I, I am a tomboy as tomboy gets. I never wore jewelry a day in my life. Okay. I had to learn. And that was exciting to me, the opportunity to learn and to not to be told, but to explore. And so I trusted enough in myself that what did I have to lose? I already wanted to die. What else did I have to lose?
And I also didn’t care about other people’s opinions. because I didn’t really have anything yet. So I was in this really amazing spot where I could be busy tactically, like with my hands, meaning when you’re in the army or you’re in, and you’re in jobs, depending on the job, if you’re a hands on person, you know, you need to switch to something that’s also hands on in my opinion, because that’s just how you create.
Like I’m an author, don’t get me wrong. I can write, but I can talk better than I can write. So, you know, we have our specialties. And for me, it was like just learning my boundaries. The ability to push myself, the ability to know that no one was going to do this for me, and no one was coming to save me, that was evidently clear.
If I wanted to be on this earth, I had to figure it out. Full stop. And I think that most people, when it comes to creativity, they have it. They suppress it. Because creativity to most people has to look like this box, or this box, or this box. When really, if we gave ourselves The massive opportunity, because all of these things, right, this life is happening for you, not to you mentality, you can realize in that moment, very simply, that if you choose to see life that way, you don’t have to sit in the box and create the way people have told you.
You can innovate, you can create something that has never been seen before, and you can convince somebody very seriously, If you believe it so strongly, they’ll believe it as well. So I had to learn how to convince people that a bullet could be sexy, that a bullet could be beautiful, that a bullet casing didn’t have to signify war and death and violence.
It could signify rebirth. and creation and hope. And so for me, it was not so much about the exercise of even building. I knew I had, I had Mount Everest standing in front of me. And if I didn’t want to become a statistic, And I didn’t want the rest of my friends to continue to be statistics. I had to start climbing that mountain with no ropes and no help and no equipment.
And just know that if I kept going, I will get to that top. And the top to me, isn’t a financial number, you know, the top is not paying myself and being financially free. Cause I’ll tell you right now, I still haven’t paid myself from this business and we’re going at 2024. So what it had to look like was, what was I doing this for?
Okay. I was doing this for other people so that they could not only feel like they had a community that cared, but I gave them something tangible to wear that wasn’t a t shirt, but something tangible that could be on their body every waking minute and every time they looked down, they knew they had somebody that cared about them more than they cared about themselves in that moment.
And so I think anyone can be creative. I think that we suppress creation because we have told creators for a very long time that you can’t profit from that. You can’t live a life worth dying for or even living for through art. You have to work a nine to five. You have to run a, you know, if you’re going to run a business, it has to be in manufacturing.
It has to be in automotive. It cannot be art or it cannot be artistic, but it can, and it absolutely should be. You can be an artist. You just have to find your people. People will find you if they love what you do, and the world will tell you if it works or it doesn’t. But to me, the definition has never been, what is the dollar amount that we sell?
It is the impact that we can have with something as silly. And little has a rope bracelet. You can be impactful, but you have to take the chance of being creative and know that people are going to judge it and people are going to have something to say about your life. But the best part is you don’t have to live their life.
You could live yours. Yeah, what an interesting breakdown. I really appreciate you being open about, you know, the issues because being open about it and talking about it, you know, especially on a show like this, it helps others, you know, because sometimes, you know, people, a lot of the times people suffer in silence, right?
They don’t want to talk about it. So to hear somebody talk about it openly about the issues they had, It really helps. It really does. You know, so, you’re very well spoken about it. I, I do appreciate you, breaking that down, but you do other things like you, you, you know, your keynote speaker, right? like what message do you try to convey when you’re, you know, speaking on stages, especially regarding mental health and resilience?
I mean, you’ve been talking a lot about it, but you know, when you have a keynote, what are you trying to, what are you trying to get through to the audience? Yeah, so it depends on what the keynote, what they’re asking of me, right? Like, I’ll give you a little example. When I did my TED, I spoke on behalf of an organization, the very first organization I ever donated to from the kitchen table.
And they said, can you do a talk about us and then put in some of your life? So I hit him with the 44 a day, and I came at that hard in the pain, and with the reality of what that number looks like, and who that represents in your society. Now, Ted is not publishing that. So, I understand why. It’s too real.
It’s too honest. So when I’m doing talks for other people, like I’ve got a, the Paramedics Association of Canada coming up, or I did Harvard, I used, cause the best way to get someone to understand and pay attention is to tell them a story. I use my life. What better example of an up and down and all the way through from the darkness to the light than my example of my life that I’ve walked for 15 years.
So I talk about my journey in my life. I talk about the suicidality and then I talk about the art therapy and I go from there because you have to use what has happened to you and stop reverberating everyone else’s talking points. Nobody resonates with that if it’s not yours. You have to use what you have.
I may not be, you know, a David Goggins, where I will get up there and rob, but I’m telling you, I’m going to do it in my way, and the way that I do it is talking to you so unapologetically ruthless and honest about the depths of where I lived for 10 years in hell and the darkness that exists. But the thing that you have to remember is that when you’re in the dark, and a lot of us are right now.
So please, when I say this, I mean this. If you are in the dark and there is not a single light around you to pull you through, the thing you have to remember in that moment is that you are that light. And you are that light post for everyone else. So what you have to do is keep going. Because when you get to the end of that, and you are so bright, and you are so So game changing, you now have an obligation to walk backwards and start pulling people out of the dark.
Mm-Hmm, . So when people say they understand hell and they understand oppression, I’m like, no, no. You don’t know the depths I swim in. You don’t know the sharks I’ve had to fight. You don’t know. So I show you what that’s like so that when you walk through my keynotes, by the end of it. You not only leave with an understanding that if this 5 foot, 110 pound female can live there and thrive there and find a way out there, you can too.
And by the end of it, I leave you with so many damn tools and applicable tools for you to walk away in life because most people don’t even realize this, man. They don’t realize that they have a superpower in them and it’s your breath. No one gets it. You know, they, they attach this to the woo woo life of a breastwork.
No, no, no. You have a superpower if you use it effectively. And I show them how to do it. And not only do I show them, I make everyone in that audience do it with me. Because you need to be able to walk away with something applicable. You need to be not only inspired, but you need to be moved to tears. You need to come to hell with me.
Let me show you what hell really looks like. So when you complain to Starbucks that your coffee’s not hot enough, or somebody cuts you off in traffic, maybe you stop for a second, and you go, Hey, maybe that person’s just having a hard day. Maybe that person’s going through it. Maybe that person’s learning to drive for the first time.
And you realize that life is not that bad once you regulate that nervous system. So that’s one of the things I help people do. Again, I really appreciate you breaking down that. I want to go to one. I want to go to one because I feel like I’ll walk away with some motivation just hearing you talk there.
But entrepreneurship, this is really interesting. What do you wish you knew about entrepreneurship before you started the journey? I always ask that question. Everything. I wish I knew everything I wish I knew that I’d be playing nine different roles on an ongoing basis that I’d be packing orders and I’d be sourcing and I’d be building and I’d be marketing and I’d be out there.
I wish I understood that kinda, but I also glad I didn’t because if I knew the mountain I would have to climb. Oh, my goodness. What a deterrent. What a deterrent. I never did, you know, rounds of funding. This all came from me. I never went to anybody else for help. This came from me. I had so much support because, you know, I come from, two long haul truck drivers and they’re owner operators.
They run their own business, but I also married into a family that understood business very well. You know, my father in law was a professional supercross, racer. And then he, he had mechanics wear gloves in Canada. He understood how to scale. And then my husband, after he was done racing professionally, started Atlas and Matrix, which are two very large motocross companies and safety equipment companies.
But he started it on his own. He taught himself everything, literally everything. And it’s the safest neck brace in the world now because of it. So I realized that if I just looked around me, And went, I don’t need some PhD or, you know, MBA or any of those things. I just needed to look at the tools I had at my disposal and realize that sometimes you need hammers and sometimes you need screwdrivers.
And they’re both applicable. And if I just started getting inquisitive and asking questions, everyone around me I became a sponge for. I know I talk a lot, but I really shut up and listen when it’s important. And I had access to these people because I started putting myself in positions that made me radically uncomfortable.
Putting yourself in uncomfortable positions is what allows for the growth, right? And the ignorance, right? Like, you know, starting a company or, you know, not knowing some things. If you hadn’t known, you might not have gotten to where you are. You wouldn’t have. Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. And like nobody, nobody knew.
Well, maybe some people knew, but nobody knew a global pandemic was coming. So I was a retail business. So talk about, we 2200 square foot building with multiple employees and mortgages under, you know, under me. And all of this responsibility in my 20s going, okay, I did this. Now, how do I sustain this? And when we, you know, when COVID hit, I had one of two choices, like many people.
Am I going to roll over and take it? Or am I going to say, you’ve already taken my life from me once. You’re not taking it again. And that’s what I did. I locked my doors and I told everybody in there, If you want to work, you are welcome to work. If you don’t feel safe working, there’s the door. And not a single person left.
And so we went from 200 retailers and we lost all of them overnight. And you think about that on average, just say like a 5, order a month per store. Think about that. And so, We went from everything to nothing and I realized really quickly that this couldn’t sustain. So I had to move. I had to pivot. I had to think bigger and greater.
And what could I do? So I went, okay, we’re going to get our medical license, everybody. And everyone kind of looked at me and went, what? And I said, no, no, no, no, no, no. Do you want to, you want to keep paying your bills? I’m like, yeah, I’m like, I’m going to need your help with this. So we got our medical license.
We pivoted one of our factories and we started making masks for the government. And we started making medical masks for, ironically, end up 200, 000 of them going to my, where I grew up in the local town hospitals. Oh wow. So like, it was amazing. And then that got us to a point where we did one big order and then we walked away from that because then I started reading and, you know, educating myself.
And, after that, I just said to everyone, look, we’re going to have to downsize here. And, We can do this one of two ways. We can downsize, or we can try something new. So we started trying things new. I started a podcast. I started the podcast in 2020, and I had no idea how. I didn’t really know how to talk to people, I didn’t think.
And I was like, who would even come on this show? You know, cut to almost 250 episodes now, and people ask me to come on the show now. And it’s like the coolest thing ever, because what I realized in that moment was it was not ever about that I couldn’t do the thing. Most people can do the thing, but they allow the four letter word to It’s the same, you know, fear is really amazing because it’s what we need as human beings to exist.
Like we need to have some sort of boundary in the human biology, but fear is very simple. It’s false evidence appearing real period, full stop. And I had. enough evidence around me and receipts to prove that it literally, literally didn’t matter what I did. If I just showed up day after day and I put myself in uncomfortable positions, people would start to see me and my people will find me and I can do whatever the hell I want to the extent in which I wanted to.
This girl right here that wrote this book was told I would never ever do anything. The only thing it said in my high school yearbook is that I would be famous one day and I’d be on the side of a milk carton. So we got one of them right, right? And the thing is, I, I can’t do math, I can’t multiply or divide.
That’s what calculators are for. And I have the worst grammar in all of time. Always. That’s what editors are for. But I took the risk. Cause you gotta take the risk, you gotta be in with two feet, you gotta say f it, I’m doing it! And it doesn’t matter what it takes to get there. I’m just going to get there.
And so anything I do, I approach with that. I don’t care about the financial component and maybe that’s a terrible business mindset, but I’m telling you, if you do things for the right reasons, the world will keep showing up for you. So that’s all that I do with everything I do. Resilience, reinvention, all of these.
I’m glad you wrote the book. I’m glad you wrote the book, which I’ll ask you about specifically in a minute here. just thoughts. I mean, you’re, you’re, you know, years in now and you have a successful company. What’s the biggest mistake you see entrepreneurs making? The biggest mistake I see most entrepreneurs make is that they think that they need to have massive teams to do it all.
And then they overextend by hiring too many people and too many resources. And then you put too many cooks in the kitchen. That’s my personal opinion. I think you need teams and I think you need people to bounce ideas off of. I think that’s incredibly important because you need sounding boards.
Otherwise you’re just going to believe your own, you know, yada and that’s probably not always a great idea depending on the day or what you’ve read on the news you saw that day. So, I think that we also make mistakes by hiring friends. I think that we need to think, bigger. We need to be a little more ruthless and honest about what’s needed.
To be successful. And more importantly, we need to realize that our time is worth so much more and stop giving it away for free. Yes. Good point. Yeah, that’s fantastic. Moving to
like, you know, just getting back to the. Personal development side of things. You mentioned breathwork. I want to talk about breathwork for a minute here. We do have a superpower. It’s wild to me. Like I only recently discovered how powerful breath can be, breathwork, and what it does for you. So tell me about what you do with breathwork specifically.
How long have you been doing it? What are your thoughts and what can you say to somebody who’s, you know, said, I’ve never tried breathwork. I don’t know what it does. Like what, what is breathwork? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, I’ve been doing breathwork for quite a few years now, but I became a teacher, not, you know, not too crazy, a couple, you know, a year, year and a bit, but I’ve always used it and I’ve always taught it before I was certified, right?
Because I think the thing is I used it and learned about it from my sports. you know, breathwork is one of these really magical tools we have in our toolbox that most people overlook because they think it’s some hippy dippy thing or, you know, The only reason it kind of got cool is because of Wim Hof, right?
So, you know, you’ve got to have somebody that breaks that mold. Then Wim Hof was for sure that. So breathwork is just a way to regulate your nervous system. We have these amazing nervous systems, but they get hijacked by so many things around you on a regular, ongoing basis, whether that’s media, your family, your friends, your job, traffic, you name it.
We don’t know how to control our own nervous system, which means we don’t know how to control our own emotions. And that is how you become a human that can be manipulated. So I encourage people to look into breathwork because it’s very simple. You don’t need anything for it. And you are the superpower.
It’s really about understanding what are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to upregulate your nervous system, which means take you into that sympathetic mind and that kind of like fight or flight, like let’s go kind of vibe before you get into the cold or before you go do something really hard.
Yeah. Or are you trying to wind down from the day? Are you trying to get ready for sleep? Are you trying to come out of a really stressful situation and come back into your body and out of your mind? And bring you into the parasympathetic, which is that rest and recovery state. And it’s really, really simple.
I teach somatic breath work. So somatic breath work is, you know, the soma, which is the body. And it’s about coming out of the manic mind and into the body. And when you work with things like somatic breath work, you’re working with the energy and people are like, Oh, here we go. But just, just roll with me on this for a second.
Okay. We as human beings understand that we hold trauma in our bodies. If any of you have ever read the book, the body keeps the score. It’ll lay it out for you real simple. The fascia, which is that nice piece of white thin on top of a good piece of meat, that’s the fascia. We have them in our bodies as well.
They hold trauma. They hold energy. And when you repress energy and anger and frustration, they build in our bodies. Okay. And that’s why I like, people say, you know, men are like, I don’t cry. I’m like, Oh, but the damage that’s in you though, that’s screaming. It’s not even crying, it’s screaming. So what we do is we run you through an hour long session with, you know, up regulation and down regulation, meaning different types of breath with breath holds.
And we dictate music around it to try to get to move that emotion within you. And you are your own superpower, meaning as you go, you’re only going to go as hard as you want, meaning you control the gas pedal. You breathe harder, you go deeper. You back off, the breath backs off. But every time you do a session, you’re learning something about your body.
And guess what? You’re telling your body it’s okay to move through the emotions that you’ve left stagnant in you. I have seen people literally change their life with breath. I have changed my life with breath. I had the most dysregulated nervous system you would ever see in anybody in all time. And because I’ve been in the public since 2015 16, you can see the progression if you watch old interviews.
to these interviews. The difference is really simple. Before I do a show, I sit down and I do a breath and I come out of the crazy manic mind and into my body. And you guys can do that too. But you have to decide, do you want to actually take control of your life, or do you just want to pretend that you take control of your life?
And the breath is the best way to do it. Yeah, it’s interesting, you know, like there’s, there’s all these like, you know, modern term biohacking, there’s all these simple things we can do that just, to make the biggest difference because we’ve been, we’re so distracted, we’re so busy with everyday life that we don’t think about just stopping and breathing.
You know, how powerful is the breath, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, It’s unreal. You know, when I, you know, if I’ve done breath work, it, it tends to like give you a sense of peace and, you know, hit a dopamine for a few hours. It’s wild. It’s just breath. We don’t have grounding, you know, standing on the earth with your bare feet.
We don’t do that anymore. If you live in an apartment, you go years without grounding, you know, it’s, it’s so terrible for you to not to cut you off, but it’s grounding is one of the most available tools at our disposal. In my coaching practice, I make people do the most ridiculous things and the first two weeks, they fight me tooth and nail and then I do it and I go.
Damn it. Damn it. And I go, amazing. Can you imagine if you just kept your shoes off more? What would that look like for you? How would you feel after that? Because there’s this really great example, okay, of how animals work versus humans. And I’ll give you just a quick overview of what it looks like. You guys can Google it.
It’s, I’m sure it’s on nature is metal somewhere, which, so it’s really simple. Animals have a way of regulating their nervous systems when something bad happens. They shake like this. Go shake, okay? Humans, when we shake, it’s because we’re having a negative cortisol spike, which affects your hor it’s a hormone, right?
And so, there’s an example of a cheetah attacking an impala. Grabs the cheetah, the cheetah grabs its neck, and the animal just goes and freezes. Because it’s just so terrified. A bunch of other animals come off and chase it off. And for the next ten minutes, that impala sits there and just shakes. And removes it, and gets up, and runs away and goes back to eating grass, like, nothing even happened.
We as humans have told ourselves, when something hard happens, get up and get going. But we’ve given you no tool to get rid of it. So then it sits in our bodies, and I’ve been in interviews where you can watch me and I’m just shaking. Like this, because I’m not in my body and I haven’t disposed of the energy yet.
When if you use a breath technique, you can do that yourself. So we have to remember that grounding, I mean, close to earth, and we have examples of this. It literally is like your body is a battery and it brings you back into balance. That’s why you always feel better when you’re outside and your shoes are off on the beach.
It’s not the beach. It’s the fact that you’re grounding. You’re regulating. And you’re calmer because you’re out of the stimulus. So all that you have to do is literally, I said, it’s my clients, 10 minutes every day, and you can use that 10 minutes, not on your phone. You can pray, you can breathe, you can connect, but it’s the stillness.
with the grounding component and the connecting to something greater, getting off of the stimulus. This stuff isn’t rocket science. We’ve just literally moved away from what it means to be a successful human being. Yeah. And it’s, it’s interesting because I feel like science is now catching up, right? To all these, like just now, because you know, I think I mean, you’re younger than me, but, you know, I never heard about this stuff, you know, in the 80s and the 90s and like, you know, I think science is catching up to the benefits of just these natural things we have in us or the way we were made, right?
Like that’s, to me, I find that fascinating. I think people are catching on that just being outside in the stillness, you know, away from the distractions, the grounding, the breath, all these things, the way we were made in a really interesting way, you know, you know, going through the entrepreneurship.
Journey and all of that and your recovery that led to the book, I believe. So tell us about the book. What’s in it? What can we expect if we read it? Yeah, absolutely. So I started the book, about five, six years ago now. I remember writing the last, you know, the last installment on my 30th birthday and the book is really simple.
It’s a memoir. You know, it’s, it’s this journey. I was, like I said, I went through a very interesting life, very young, very early. I’d lived a couple of careers before I was 21 years old. I was a high level Taekwondo fighter. I was a national champion and international fighter. I was a secondary black belt by the time I was 12.
so we walked through that journey and what that means to be a fighter. And then I had a bunch of really nasty situations happen throughout that. I played international rugby. I was a national motocross racer, then I joined the army. And so I take you through what it means to be a female in a male job, which I know most people say, well, you joined it.
You should know better. Yeah, I did. And I chose it. I’m happy I did. I don’t regret it at all. And I did that job. I went on deployment. I got injured over there. We talk about all of that. You know, there’s about a chapter and a half around Afghanistan. It’s not like, you know, a lot of these other like Navy SEAL books, where it’s like the whole book is their military career.
This is just my life. It’s just a piece of my life. Then we go through what that looks like afterward, though. And I introduce you to The Voice. So this is a voice that you have and your listeners have that might not want to admit they have. It’s that nasty little voice that tells you you’re not good enough, that you should die, that maybe you would be better off not here, or that the things you’re doing aren’t good enough, that you’re never good enough.
And I walk you through that intrusive thought process through every other page you get to meet that voice and what it says and how it says it. And then I take you through my recovery. I take you through what it looks like to join and be an entrepreneur, to walk down that path, to have a child, to get married, to then find psychedelics and community and all of this amazing other things I’ve done.
So this, this book is my memoir. It goes up until 2021. And the last part. which I find to be the most impactful and was one of the biggest game changers in my life, was I talk about the family we rescued from Afghanistan in 2021. I had no business being involved in that pullout, yet somehow I got involved in that pullout.
Shocker. And Canada decided we weren’t going to bring anyone. And I decided that wasn’t okay. And so we had one of the highest ranking female units, females in her entire family from the Afghan government. And without any help, of anybody in Canada. We used all of the Americans and we used the British and I had some awesome ex operators somehow weaseled my way to find me the right contacts and they did some really crazy things for me.
And now that family is living in Canada and living in America and having babies over here and in PhD programs and guest lecture spots. And so we end with that. And I tell you about how you can heal and I take you on that journey and I plan on writing a part two. Oh, wow. Okay. Um Are you, are you currently writing it?
I’m just starting. I’ve, with my coaching program, I’m also writing massive, like six and 12 week programs. So, my next part is going to be from 2021 and on, I’m just not sure where I want it to finish. Got it. Okay. The podcast. podcast. Yeah. So your fellow podcaster. That’s crazy. Yeah. Yeah. It’s weird. So, I decided I wanted to start a podcast and I started it in 2020.
And my whole goal was to have conversations with people that weren’t being had in a different way because I find that I’m able to disarm a lot of different really hard men because I’m a woman and I will get a different story out of them honestly than a lot of other podcasters will. And it’s because I pride myself on being able to hold space and to show people that they don’t have to Fold it in and that they can be completely authentic with it and give me the nitty gritty.
I can handle it. Let’s talk about it How has that impacted your life? What was like the first time you killed someone? How did that feel and You know Tell me what the repercussions were on your family from that and how you view the world and your perspective and so Very quickly, the show kind of took off and we started interviewing.
We started with, you know, special operators. Then we moved into, you know, actors and politicians. Then we moved into professional athletes. And, you know, by episode 100, we had every major name I could think of at the time on the show. And, you know, Travis Pastrana, you know, Matt Best, like you, you name these people.
And it was just this crazy experience of realizing that I was worth talking to. And it also helped me realize that. I’m actually good at this. Yeah. And I know at the time everyone started wanting COVID, but what did we understand? We understood that only a certain percentage got to episode three, then to episode 10, then to episode 20, and now I’m top 2%.
Because I do this four days a week and I release them once and twice a week and I have not missed a week in four years and I don’t plan on it. So the show is going to grow whether people want it to it or not. I’m not going anywhere, ever. I love it. I love it. That’s a good way of looking at it. Yeah. You definitely hold space.
You definitely hold space and you’re very, you know, well spoken on these subjects, which I think is nice. You know, there’s not a lot of people that are like, you You know, can speak with authority and have lived through it and then are very, you know, outspoken about it and then have the platform to be able to talk about it other than being a guest.
You have your own show, you have the book, coaching program, whatever it might be. Here’s a question. What can you say to, you know, people who are suffering from PTSD or mental health issues to not only help them deal with what they’re going through, but maybe give them some inspiration to understand that they can start a business and be successful, you know, regardless of what’s holding them back?
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for that. We’re going to start with a really uncomfortable one though. So I’m sorry if this, here’s the thing I’m going to tell you. Number one, what I’m about to say, if it affects you and it makes you feel something in here, it’s not me. It’s you. I’m just the mirror. Okay. So stop identifying with your labels.
Stop it. There is, in my opinion, no such thing as post traumatic stress disorder. It’s not a disorder. It’s an injury. It’s an injury that you can heal from. It’s an injury that you can fix. You will never be who you were before that. And guess what, that’s okay. Because you’re not designed to stay the same, you are designed to grow.
I wouldn’t want to be who I was before my injury. Not my disorder, my injury. So stop identifying to the labels. Because every single cell, every single part of you is eavesdropping on your voice and on your subconscious. Don’t feed it. See it, acknowledge it, feel it, move through it. Trauma happens. But it doesn’t have to become who you are.
It’s just something that happened to you. So how do you use it? How do you take the thing that you had no control over and grab control? You sit down and you realize that it happens and that the only way to move forward is to move forward. But the longer you sit in it, the longer you plant in it, the longer you’re allowing your neural pathways to create a feedback loop of negativity.
And ultimately, none of us want to live that life. We all want to be healthy and well and thriving, but you have to take accountability and go, guess what? It happened. It sucked. It happened though. So now how do I move forward? But the sooner you realize you are not the labels that you are given, the sooner you’re able to step out of that and start to become the person that you’re supposed to be.
So I always say, stop saying I have cancer. I am injured. I got hurt. I am, I am. You’re spelling that into existence and all of the feelings that go with it. You can acknowledge it. Bad things happen. I didn’t have that control, but I have control now. How do I move forward? So start with that. And then also realize and question yourself.
What sets my soul on fire? When I think about the perfect life, what can I imagine myself doing? What makes me happy? Not makes me money. What makes me happy? Truly in the depths. What do you love? And then build something from that. Because the more you look for money, more than likely, you’re not going to find it.
Because you’re looking for the results. You’re not looking for the task. You need to find the thing that you love. And when you love it enough, it will make you money. But you can’t be looking for money. You have to be looking for the thing that sets your soul on fire. Because guess what? Being an entrepreneur is, if anyone told me, I’m telling you probably wouldn’t have done it.
It is one of the hardest things you will ever do in your entire life except for pushing a child out of your body. I’m telling you, it is so painful. It’s like birthing something every day. And it’s in the work that no one else sees. So if you can’t be self accountable, if you can’t get up and do it on the days you don’t want to do it, it’s not for you.
And that’s okay. It’s not for everybody. But know that. Don’t, don’t lie to yourself. Be honest. On the days no one’s watching, am I going to get up and do the accounting? On the days nobody’s watching, am I going to get up and pack the orders? Because if you’re not, it’s not for you. So don’t waste your time.
But also, approaching the world with a servant’s hand. Why are you doing what you’re doing? Are you harming the world? Or are you helping the world? Because ultimately, whatever you do, you need to try and leave this world better. And I know that’s hard for people who are looking around the world and going, how is that possible?
I’m telling you, it’s possible! Turn the news off! Go stand in some goddamn grass! Drink some water! Put the alcohol down! Turn the social media off! Look around your community and go, I’m starting here. I’m making change here right now, because if I make change here, that has a ripple effect because you don’t understand.
And that’s what people don’t get. All that you need to be is a tiny pebble this big, barely existing in 8 billion people that ripple effect. You have no idea how big that can get and how, when you drop it here on the other side of the world, by the time it gets there, it’s a tsunami. So you have to decide.
Am I going to do the hard thing or am I going to do the easy thing and wake up in 50 years and go, damn it, I didn’t live to my truth. I didn’t say or do what I know I could have. You have to make the choice. Am I willing to work for it? Because here’s the difference, and this is where other people will never line up with me and others don’t like this, but this is the hard truth.
Everything I do, Everything I have my hands in, whether I own it or I’m a part of it or whatever, I will f ing die for it. I have had more people call me and get help because of this show. Kelsi, it’s a book. Relax, everyone writes books. Do you know how many people? Have called me about their husbands and their spouses because they’re like, oh my god, I have secondary pts I was with my husband who deployed 25 times and I didn’t realize that I could hurt too.
Okay, Kelsi It’s a jewelry brand relax. There’s a million jewelry brands out there for sure Do you know how many times people have called me and told me that I did not kill myself because I had this rope bracelet On that my buddy gave me and said now i’m your responsibility. You call me when you want to die You don’t put the gun in your mouth So it doesn’t matter how small it is.
You can reach out and touch anyone. You just have to decide what are you willing to sacrifice in order to do that. That’s like some of the most powerful advice I think we’ve, we’ve heard on the show. maybe ever, honestly. thank you. Thank you so much for breaking that down. in the wrap up here, in the wrap up here, I think it would be really good.
I mean, you’ve got a lot on the go. I mean, you got the books, you’ve got the, the, the podcast, the coaching program, you know, you, you’re doing all this stuff. I think it’d be good for, I think our listeners would love to know what your daily routine looks like. If you have one, you must have some sort of regimented or some non negotiables daily.
Like how do you stay up on everything you’re doing? Yeah, I know. And you want to hear the crazy thing? I’ve got four people on my team. That’s it. And me, and that’s four, four, including me. so when anybody’s like, Oh, you need this? No, you don’t. You just need to be regimented. So, it’s really simple. I’m not one of those people who was up at four 30.
I got sleep. I need to sleep. I have, you know, the TBI thing is for real. I need to sleep. I get up between five 30 and six by then. My husband’s already worked out. He’s got his breakfast on. So you said, I don’t get up at 4. 30, like, you know, relax everybody. And then you just said I get up at 5. 30, which is kind of in the, it’s 4.
30 adjacent. It’s in the same. It’s not though. And I’ll tell you why. Cause I don’t get up and go work out. I get up. I roll around. I feel my body out. I say my gratitude. Then I go downstairs and guess what I do? I get my kid ready for school. I get him dressed. I pack his lunch. Sometimes I have a meeting if I need to.
And then my husband does it. And then I take him to school. And then I start. Right? So, I do a cold plunge. I don’t have a cold plunge real one. I don’t have a sponsor and I don’t have a cold plunge. So I have a Rubbermaid from Walmart and it costs me 30 bucks and I keep that thing in the backyard and I am five foot tall, so I fit in that thing.
No problem. And I make it and I make it happen. so I do that. That’s non negotiable. That’s a big one for me. and then in the day at some point, Around my schedule, there’s a workout. Whether that’s a minimum of a 30 minute walk, but I always do it with a weight vest. So between 25 and 40 pounds, depending on.
But there’s a minimum of a walk. Being outside. Grounding. my gratitude is a non negotiable, you know, taking my kids to school is a non negotiable, eating three times a day is a non negotiable, making sure I have high protein in the morning, non negotiable, and making sure I drink two liters of water every day, non negotiable.
Then to be completely honest with you, I probably stop between three and five o’clock. That’s it. I stop working. It’s family time. Those are non negotiables, right? Having dinner with my family around the table. It has to happen. We don’t do separate dinners. We don’t do any of that. Because I’m a big believer that you are the sum of those around you.
And the thing that I always want my son to see that I didn’t have was that mommy can be a present mother, a badass hard worker, someone that travels the world and does what she does. But mommy is also here. Mommy cares, mommy shows up. So I’m not the person who’s like, I get up, I work out and I do. No, I don’t.
Because guess what? I have a child and I have a real life and I am a mother and I am a wife and I still have those things that I love to do. And so as long as I get a workout in at some point in that timeframe in that day, whether it’s get on the road, bike. People give me s all the time because my road bike a lot of times is on the trainer right now, because I have a kid and I can’t leave my eight year old in the house.
So it doesn’t matter. I get on the bike or I make sure I’m moving. I’ve got a gym in the house. I’ve got the cold plunge. I love to do red light therapy. I’m a big believer in orange glasses three hours before bed. That’s a non negotiable. My cell phone’s off an hour, hour and a half before bed. I don’t, you know, that’s like these things are easy for me because this is just what I know works.
So it’s not fully regimented, but what it is during the day is very structured. Meaning I have time blocks and I time block my entire existence. And so if it’s not in the calendar, it doesn’t happen. And there’s no room for it. It has to be in the calendar. That’s how I manage, right? I manage by being ruthless about my time.
And when people say, oh, can I grab 15 minutes from you? You know what? I used to spend days a week giving people my time. And I’d love to, and I’m happy to do it if I can do it. But I’m at a point right now where I can’t. You know, if somebody needs help, that takes priority. I will then call the person that needs to get to that person, and then I’ll hand them off.
But I can no longer sit there and just make phone call after phone call for you. And it’s not because I don’t want to. And that I’ve gotten, I’m not who I was. No, I’m not who I was. I’m a very different person. People value me now. And you know why they value me? Because I am of value. If you want to be valued by the world, you better start being of value to them too.
So I show up and I put myself first and I know that’s crazy, but it’s simple. We have three people in my home, my husband, my son, and myself, my husband and I are number one. And then our child, because if we are not good, nothing that family unit’s good. And right above that is myself. Because if I’m not healthy and I am not well, and I’m not doing the things I need to do as a human being, then I’m not good with my husband.
And I’ve seen that, right? I’ve bitten that person who was so sick on 11 different drugs and could not get out of bed. How do you think that impacts the family, man? Right. That’s, wow. Well, that’s a daily routine. I mean, you do make time for the more important things for sure. Interesting that you, the cold plunge, I just want to ask you about this because I’m a fan too.
I mean, I, I, I do. either cold shower, ice bath, cold plunge every day. how has it changed? I know how it’s affected me. How has it changed your life or how has it been impactful in your healing journey? Yeah. I mean, I don’t get sick very often anymore. You know, I used to be chronically sick. So like the fact that I don’t is beautiful.
And the fact that my sticky little crazy haired kid doesn’t get me sick is also like, whoa, something’s here. My brain turns on. I’m really clear cognitively, I already have a lot of energy, but it’s like a different level of energy. I really love to do hard things regardless of a reason. I really love to torture myself, whether that’s, you know, road biking or running or cold or doing just hard things.
I just feel like people need to do more of it because I find out more about myself. So the cold has been a nice daily challenge. And it has also been something that I have seen immense impact on, my symptoms of a traumatic brain injury and all my energy levels that day. And also the perception of how I feel about the world that day.
It just removes it all, man. It just, cause you know what it does? Just like breathing, just like grounding, it gives you the moment of pause to focus in on one thing and one thing only and to be there and to be present and to be right in that moment. And that’s what it takes to be successful at cold clenching at least.
Yeah, no, thanks for your breakdown. I had to ask you about that. It comes up sometimes. okay, here’s a couple of fun ones, to wrap it up. These are, these are fun. These make you think though. These make you think. I’m excited. Okay. If you could have dinner with any three people in history, past or present, who would they be and why?
Oh my God, I wish I knew that before. Elon Musk. That’s a good one. Yeah. Yeah. He’s, he’s on my list. I really want to talk to that man one day. you were mentioning, you know, how hard entrepreneurship is. I always come back to the quote from Elon. Entrepreneurship is like chewing on glass and staring into the abyss.
My favorite quote about entrepreneurship. Oh, no. So my last studio, I had the photo of him on Joe Rogan smoking a joint. Oh, yeah, yeah. And I was like, that man can do it. So can I, so Elon Musk, Joe Rogan for sure. but ultimately I would probably pick Tesla. Oh, okay. That’s it. What a dinner table that would be.
Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Nikola Tesla. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. He’s, interesting. We might’ve had Tesla before, but I don’t remember. you know, we usually get like, well, we get some interesting ones. You know, some people pick family members or, you know, Jesus. We’ve had Hitler a few times, believe it or not.
You know, people want to. Oh, I believe that. Yeah. Had Elon Musk for sure, but what, yeah, what a dinner table. I’ll tell you, I’ll pick, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, and Kelsi Sharon. That’s all I’ll pick. Thanks, darling. Final question. You’re opening a bottle of champagne one year from now celebrating something you’ve accomplished.
What would that be? It’s going to be cheesy though. People are going to laugh at me. No, no one’s laughing at you. This is, it’s a safe space and, and, there’s no wrong. It’s a safe space. Okay. Thank you. but can I tell you why I’m picking the thing I’m picking? Yeah. Okay. Of course. Cause there’s a, there’s a reason for it.
I want to sit down and go on Joe’s show and I’ll tell you why. I’ve lived 15 years with phone calls almost on a daily of friends and wives. They’re kids. And I know what the platform like that I can get through to these other veterans. Who are alone. And feel like there’s nothing to live for. We have a lot of, you know, special operators that get the chance to go on those shows.
But the biggest thing that we’ve done since the war is we’ve told conventional fighting forces that they’re not important enough to have books about them and lives and people don’t feel like they have a community and they don’t feel seen. I have done one of the craziest things post deployment and I’ve been able to put myself at every single possible table of every single special operator and major podcaster in the world other than Joe, and I’ve been able to tell my story.
And the thing I’ll tell you right now is the amount of people that I’ve called and said that if somebody like you, who’s a woman and five foot tall can do it and climb your way up, I can do that too. And the amount of men in particular. that we’re losing right now bothers me a lot. I am somebody going, we have a problem and it needs to be addressed differently.
And the things that I work on, and I’m not going to go down this political route, but I’m going to tell you the, the things that I stand for and the things I fight against and the things that I do each and every day has nothing to do with me. I don’t care what happens to me. I’m just the conduit in which it’s speaking through on a good day.
Best. So I want that opportunity because I want those people around the world to know that this doesn’t have to be a zero sum game, and that you don’t have to f ing kill yourself, and that your child deserves for you to walk down the aisle with, and your wife deserves you to be by her side, and that you can actually do so much more because of what you did, not in spite of it.
That you can be as great as you want to be. Doesn’t matter who you are and where you come from, because I come from the smallest town in the middle of nowhere and nothing. So I want that opportunity and I’m going to fight for it until he says yes. And when that time comes and I open that champagne, even though I don’t drink, you will be my first phone call, my friend.
We’ll do sparkling cider. I like it. Wow. What a goal that would be. fantastic. Kelsi, listen, I can’t thank you enough. Just super powerful. I get, you know, getting to know you better your story in a little bit more detail, very powerful, some fantastic takeaways. And, and I think, you know, especially, you know, with people dealing with mental health and issues like that, you know, having someone like you.
You know, you’re very motivational, right? You know, you got something in, you got a passion in your voice and it comes through in the answers to the questions and I think it can help a lot of people. So I can’t thank you enough for being here today. It was fantastic to spend the last hour with you and get to know you.
Really powerful stuff. Like really, really powerful. So thank you so much. Thank you, man. Thanks for asking. Thanks for the invite. That’s more important than anything else. It’s, you reached out. Yeah, of course. I can’t thank you for that, man.
