Work-Life Wellness After Stroke: Presence, Purpose, and What Matters with Roderick Jefferson

Welcome to Brain Health and Healing. I'm Sandra

Lee. This show is for people living with head injuries and

the families and supporters who love them. If you are ready to

reclaim your life, identity, and dreams for the future, you are

in the right place. Welcome to Brain Health and Healing:

Receiving Adversity's Gifts. This guest today is the person

who inspired me to have the podcast be structured the way it

is, not just recovering from brain injury because he

certainly did that in a very powerful way, but the part about

receiving adversity's gifts, taking these things that happen

to us and turning them into part of the message, part of the

teaching, part of the contribution we make to others

in the world, and so my dear friend Roderick Jefferson is the

person who inspired that particular aspect of this

podcast. So he is a keynote speaker of note and has such a

powerful story to share about what happened that pulled him

from that into this journey of recovery that has then fueled

the work that he does now? So, Roderick, welcome to Brain

Health and Healing. Share a little bit more about your

journey with us,

Sandra. First of all, thank you so much.

I am truly honored and humbled and grateful to be a part of

your show, and to know that even in the smallest of amounts, I

was a part of the genesis of it beginning is completely humbling

to me. And especially knowing you're the way that I do, it

really means a lot coming from you. So thank you, and thanks

for the opportunity to kind of share my story, my best

practices. Mine started about 30 years ago, and I was starting

out in corporate America. I was dialing for dollars, as we used

to say, right? I started out in sales and did really well, and

got promoted to sales leader and got promoted from there up to

sales trainer, and from there it just took off. I've been blessed

to be a part of some of the best companies on the planet: Siebel,

Oracle, AT&T, eBay, etc. Now let's fast forward. I'm out

there, and I've now reached what I thought was the pinnacle. I

was a senior vice president. I had come up the ladder. I had

paid my dues. I'm now flying around in corporate helicopters,

corporate jets, enjoying times with folks like President Obama

and Queen of England. I have arrived, is what I thought, and

I had, but I also realized that. Let me step two steps back. When

I was the senior director, I felt like I was the most

empathetic and happiest that I'd ever been, and then I became an

executive, a true executive. Now it was long hours, long days. It

was emails at 10 o'clock. It was working on the weekends. It was

being in rooms with my family, but not really being present. It

meant, you know, in 18 months I was in London, Paris, Geneva,

Sao Paulo, Rio, Toronto, etc. And I remember I had been on the

road for about two weeks, and I came home, and I was talking to

my wife, and I said, "Babe, I have been in hotels for the last

two weeks. I just want a greasy taco, and my son comes over, and

he looked at me. He said, "Dad, no, Thursday shake and bake

night, and that was the moment that it realized that I had lost

and forgotten my why, which was always to provide and protect.

Now, what some may have heard was, "Okay, so it's shaking, big

night, big deal. What I heard was, "They have an entire life

without me that they've created an entire routine that I had

nothing to do with. I was a guy that was providing great salary,

lived in the right neighborhood, drove the right cars. Wife was a

stay-at-home mom. The kids went to school in the right

districts. All those things, but I was an absentee piece of my

own family, and I felt like I wasn't even a part of the

family. I was just a guy that was, you know. Direct deposit

every two weeks. That came home and got his dry cleaning and

flew out again. So fast forward again. I am down in LA getting

ready for a sales kickoff event. I'm out with my dinner, out to

dinner with my team. We're having a great time, but I felt

really tired and and and off. I was a high level athlete, not

the kind of tired where you've done double days or you've been

in the gym and now you're just worn out. This was a level of

tired I had never felt, but because I was so used to being

on that hamster wheel, I just kind of went, "Oh, it's no big

deal. I'm gonna go back to my room. I'm gonna get some sleep.

I'll probably check in on my presentation before tomorrow,

but it didn't feel like any day I'd ever felt. I was walking

back, and and my room was not very far from where we were

having dinner. I'm walking back, and I felt like I was stepping

in quicksand. I had to remind myself: lift your left leg, lift

your right leg, lift your left leg, and I knew something was

wrong, but I couldn't put my finger on it. So I went to

sleep, just like you know, every normal night.

The next morning, so my wife and I always connect over the phone

of you know what's happening at home, what's my day look like,

what's my agenda? What's going on with the kids? Kind of thing.

But today, what I heard sounded like what you hear right now.

What she heard sounded like gibberish, and I've been with

her for 30 plus years, so I could hear fear in her voice.

And I said, "What's wrong? She said, "I need you to say your

ABCs. I'm like, "Babe, I'm not going to say my ABCs. I think I

know that by now. She said, "Say your ABCs. I said, "Fine, ABL

XTQI. And now at this point, my mind is slowing down. She says,

"Count to 10: 1-220-775-9614, three. And she said, "Go on

FaceTime. I need to see your face. I said, "For what? She

said, "Because I think you've had a stroke, and I need to see

if your face is drooping. And at that time, now I got really

scared because, like with most people, you hear stroke. Oof,

that's the worst of worst. So fast forward, turns out I had

had a stroke while I was asleep. According to American Stroke

Society, 98% of sleep stroke victims never wake up. That's

miracle number one. I was awake. My team, my wife called one of

the directors on my team. He got me, rushed me off to the

emergency room. I'm in there. They're doing a whole bunch of

different tests. I'm completely out of it. They thought that I

was high and I was in there trying to get meds. Other than

the fact that I stuttered so bad I couldn't speak, but that's a

whole other story. 90 minutes later, they released me from the

hospital. I've been to the hospital where it's taken longer

than that to get to the triage nurse. More or less, something

as serious is what I was dealing with. But on top of that, that

was the day I was scheduled to fly back home. I go to the

airport. I fly home. I land in Oakland. I was in Los Angeles. I

land in Oakland. She rushes me off to the emergency room. They

push me in right away. First thing that the cardiologist and

the neurologist said to my wife, who normally, as we know,

doctors with their God complex, this was the opposite. She said

there was fear in their eyes, and the first thing they said to

her is, "Your husband is an absolute miracle, because

medically there's no reason he should be alive. He's gone

through a massive stroke, altitude, cabin pressure, and

then the drive here. Fast forward. I've been there now for

about 12 days. Suddenly, I'm and I'm getting worse now. At this

point, I'm for those that in in your audience that are skiers, I

went snow blind, so it wasn't dark; it was bright all the

time. So now I have no concept of days and nights. So my sleep

pattern's completely messed up. I can't swallow because the

muscles in my throat are atrophied because I'm not

talking because I can't speak now, and my entire left side is

paralyzed. Fast forward, and to mention, this was all five years

ago. So what was going on? You're right, COVID. So now

that's the last place that I want to be is in. Hospital with

a bunch of really really sick people, and I was in the IC with

the sick of the sickest. I know it was bad because I actually

lost two roommates. How did I tell? The voices on the other

side started to change, but those people didn't go home.

They never went home. You fill in the blank from there. So one

night, my wife is there, and she's leaving, and she's holding

my hand, squeezing it, and I could tell something's wrong.

She said, "I don't want to go home because I don't think I'll

ever see you alive again. Because at that point, they were

giving me a 2% chance to live. She went home that night, and

little did she know how prophetic she was. I'm laying in

the room, lights are flashing, machines are going crazy, and I

hear code blue. Code blue. It's my room. In comes the nurses and

doctors, and at that point, I went beep, and I'm flatlined.

I'm legally dead.

I feel my soul fly up out of my body, and I'm up in the corner

of the room. For those people that have this fascination with

near-death experiences, I did not see a white light, but I saw

the most vibrant blues and oranges and purples and yellows

that I've ever seen, and I wish I could say that was the only

thing I saw at that moment. But the next thing made me smile.

I'm floating up in the corner of the room. I'm looking down.

They're working on my body, pulling out fluids. They're

doing chest compression, and I look to my left, and it's my

mama. My mama died in 1999. I knew it wasn't a mirage. I know

my mom, and the first thing she said, I said, "Okay, mama, I've

done everything I can. Good and faithful servant. Let's go home,

she said. "No, baby, got two things to tell you. First and

foremost, if you would have listened to me, you wouldn't be

in this situation. You'd have to know my mom to understand. Even

at 55, it was not beyond her to chastise me because I'm still

her little boy in her mind. And the other thing she said is,

"They're going to figure out what's going on, and you're

going to be okay. But you're never going to have what you

consider to be normal again. And finally, she said, "My job, and

I have a whole new life on on on my existence and why I'm still

here. And I'll give you a teaser. You got to read the read

the book to understand the rest of it. She said, "Get to know

the invisible people. I said, "Invisible people? You mean like

go? She said, "No, like the people that check you in in the

hotel, the waiters and waitresses, the people in

everyday life in the grocery store that just looks like they

could use a smile. So it's my job to walk away to walk around

with an extra smile in my pocket every day, and hand out at least

one every single day.

Every time I hear that story, I love that part.

So, talk to us about what recovery was like.

Rough because losing

losing the ability to speak and how you got it all

back.

Yeah, I didn't just lose my ability to

speak. First of all, I realized that God has a sense of humor

because I'm a professional keynote speaker. I get paid to

talk. My stroke was in the middle of my speech center. I

was also-I wouldn't say I was fluid, but I was certainly

conversational in Spanish. No longer, it's gone. So now I've

got to figure out how to put all of these natural movements. I'll

say whether it was how to walk, how to tie my shoe, how to do a

button, how to use a regular spoon. The interesting thing for

me is, although I had aphasia, which was stuttering really,

really bad, and my singing is even worse. I'll tell you that

first. If I sang, I didn't have a stutter, so that let me know

that it's in there. It's just locked in. The way that my

neurologist explains it, I love his analogy of rerouting the

brain. He said, "Imagine you've got a bunch of tabs open on the

internet, and one of them is playing music, but you can't

figure out which tab it is. So you got to go." Through all

these different tabs, and that's what I was doing with speech

therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy. I had a

love-hate relationship with the alphabet. Yes, the the the the

regular alphabet, because I had to say them over and over all

day. Then I progressed from there to word games. You know,

flip the cards over. One is a turtle. One is an elephant.

You've got to remember what these are. As much as I hated

it, it certainly helped me because now what I'm doing is

I'm re-setting and find a new recircuit and a new path inside

of my brain. And the more that I started, it's like any other

muscle-you don't use it, you lose it. It atrophies, and with

the brain, it's different. It's not the go to the gym, and we've

all heard no pain, no gain. No, no, you don't do that with your

brain. What I realized was I tired a lot easier. I became a

lot more frustrating to be around and to be frustrated.

Also, because the speech center sits next to the emotional

center and my brain was swelling, it overlapped. I would

say I had a stroke and I would just break out into tears for

absolutely no reason at all. So I went back to being that four

year four year old kid again, and I kept asking the same

question over and over. But why? But why? But why? Not but why to

God of why I had it, but why can't I find what I know is

still in my brain? And again, my neurologist in, and I absolutely

love him. His answer was this: It's still in there. You just

have to take a different path to get there. Says, remember when

you were a kid and you would walk home from school and you

knew that path, and you probably dredged a ditch back and forth

between your your house and your school. Now I had to go all the

way around the block, a different angle, down the

street, round the corner, to get back to what was easier. But I

also realized a couple of things. One, I had an amazing

support group around me in my family, in my friends. They

would get me out. They would walk with me. They would talk to

me. Friends like Tim Carlson, and I say this every time. Thank

you, Tim. I'm alive today because of you. Thank you for

rushing me to the emergency. To John Barrows, who called me

without fail every single day for a year, even when I couldn't

talk and all I could do was grunt? He talked to me.

He held both sides of the conversation until I started to

talk to him, Keith Wolerich, for checking on me every single day,

and Tager Hartswatner for not only checking on me, but sending

meals out to help out my family as well, so my wife could just

focus on taking care of me and getting me back. The other thing

I noticed and learned, Sandra, was just how far my bathroom is

from the couch when I couldn't walk. But it's in the into the

refrigerator, it's all the small things that matter, and we we

take them for granted. I take no breath that I take throughout a

day for granted anymore.

As a keynote speaker, you listened to

yourself, your recordings.

That I did talk about. I had that

advantage, right? Because I had so many things on YouTube and

out there in the ethos. I used to listen to me talk over and

over and over because what I was doing was resetting my brain,

but I was also figuring out my pace, my speech pattern, my

intonation, and I would listen to the same things over and over

and over. My wife's like, "You probably have 60 of these. Can

you listen to something different than these two? And I

did. I spread it out. Before you know it, I started to get the

vibrato, to get the bass back to my voice, I started to get the

intonation. I started to get my own speech pattern back again,

and I remember the time I went in to see my speech therapist,

and she had only heard me stutter now for months, and I

walked in, and she said, "How are you feeling today? And I

would normally just nod, and I said, "I actually feel pretty

good. I thought she was gonna fall off of her chair. She

literally burst into tears because I think a part of it was

first a lot of prayers, a lot of hard work, but at the same time,

I'm an old athlete. I refuse. To let this win, and I was not

going to lose to it, and I had too many people counting on me

to get back. I never once Sandra asked God why me. I always asked

two things, and two things only. One, please allow me to wake up

tomorrow, because it wasn't guaranteed. We all say tomorrow

is not promised. I'm a guy that didn't have it tomorrow, and the

other thing I would ask over and over is, is this a lesson for

me, or is this a testimony for others to figure out how to go

through what may be the worst part of your life and keep

fighting?

Ah, what a powerful story about what it takes to to

get it back, to build it again, and there are a lot of practical

tips within that. I like to leave the audience with

practical things that they can apply to their life. So you kind

of went into some there at the end. What do you want the

audience to take away to remember, so that they can have

it make a difference in their life?

I've got three things. First and

foremost, I want you to start focusing on no longer thinking

about work-life balance, it's a fallacy. I want you to focus on

work-life wellness every single day. What does that actually

mean? What I do now is I actually put blocks into my

calendar so that I can get a brain reset. I go outside. I get

fresh air. I move around. I don't sit in this office all

day. The other thing is, every single morning, I've got a

whiteboard right here in front of me. After I do my morning

routine, my my stretch, my prayer, etc. I come and I write

four things on my whiteboard every single day. Three things

professionally that I'm going to do today before I walk away from

my laptop, and one thing just for me. Some days it's go sit

out in the backyard and enjoy nature and listen to the birds

and watch the hummingbirds fly around. Some days it's you know

what I'm gonna take the dog for a long walk because I just want

some fresh air. Some days it's barbecue and bask of robins, but

it's just for me. The other thing is, never ever ever forget

your why. Look, I'm still a plus plus ish, probably more ADD HD

now these days. But what I am focused on right now is being

present. You can be in the same room with people and still not

be present. There's nothing wrong with being successful.

Strive for it, push for it. But as you're doing it, I wish

someone would have told me and asked me this one question I'm

about to ask you and your audience: At what cost? What are

you willing to give up? For some, that push for success has

cost them their family, their relationships, significant

others. In my case, it cost me my life. So there has to be

balance in all things. Let's go the old adage of too much of

anything is a bad thing. Look, I love apple pie. I don't want it

every day, and the same goes in life. Life is about balance, and

it's about work, life, wellness. Ah, thank

you for that. So this is like in the beginning,

you had everything,

had

all the success that you wanted-that so many people

are going for that-that big business success, the position,

you know, being well known-and then it was all gone. And part

of what you now realize is what was more important is being with

the people, being with yourself, and having that quality of life.

What I realized, what was really

important, and things that money couldn't buy: faith, family,

friends, and fun. That's my four Fs.

I love that. So, you and the audience, write that

down. These are gems, right? These are the practical things

that make life matter that you take away from this talk today.

So, you took the things that you learned through this whole

experience, and then you turned that into part of the

contribution. You make to the world

that I did. I actually wrote a book, and I'm

blessed to say that my book is now become a bestseller. Xander,

yay!

And the book is called Stroke of Success. And so, I want to do

something just for your audience and for your listeners. I'm

going to share a free chapter that kind of leads up to the

story that I'm telling now. And by the way, that's one of

multiple stories in the book, right? But this is one of the

stories that leads up to how I wound up having the stroke that

day-not just a stroke, but the stroke that day. And I say not

just a because this was actually my second stroke. I didn't even

realize I had a first one. According to American Stroke

Society, one out of every four people over the age of 25 will

incur some form of a stroke. It may have felt like you were

tired. It may have felt like you were a little dizzy or off

balance. Don't negate those things. Go and get yourself

checked. Because had I and I was the the quintessential

executive, hard headed, thought I knew it all. Had I not

actually gone to the doctor that to the emergency that room?

Excuse me, emergency room that day. I would have never been

here. People think that self care is selfish. Yes, it is, and

it should be. Synonymous. Focus on self care and be selfish

about it.

Thank you for that powerful message. So there will

be a link in the show notes for how to get that chapter, and

then tell people how they can connect with you.

Absolutely. So if you are trying to connect

with me, I always say that if you can't find me on social

media, you're not really looking, right? And I'll give

you all of my links. But all you have to remember is my name,

Roderick Jefferson. If you want to go get the book,

it@roderickjefferson.com's. My YouTube is Roderick Jefferson.

My Instagram is Roderick Jefferson. My LinkedIn is

Roderick Jefferson. Remember, I had a stroke. I gotta have

something that I can remember and make it easy and simple for

myself.

So, think about the future that you imagine, like

the the ideal future for the world. What will you see

yourself doing in that future?

I see myself doing what I'm starting to do

right now, which is getting the word out about this situation,

helping people to find that work life wellness, enjoying time

with my amazing family and my cute little two and a half year

old granddaughter, and I'm still gonna be out there, handing out

a smile to somebody every day.

I love that last message. I'm going to have that

be the last thing you that people leave with. Thank you so

much, Roderick, for being here for our brain health and

healing. It has been an honor and a pleasure being with you.

Thank you, audience, for being here with us for this story, and

look forward to seeing you again next time.

Thank you.

Oh, I love that conversation with Roderick. To

be able to get through all of that to rebuild everything that

he had, because it was gone, and to start over, and giving that

that model of what happens when you lose these fundamental

functions and how you have to relearn them again, like one

synapse, one nerve connection at a time. So have him tell that

story, and to give him lots of practical strategies for us to

do every day to remember what really matters: the

relationships and the quality time to just be yourself, to

spend that time. So write those gems down, and remember to put

them into your life. If you want to go to the Brain Health and

Healing Facebook group, then say what you got out of this

episode. If you or someone you know has experienced a head

injury yourself, accidents, strokes, falls, or focus issues

or memory clarity issues, and you want to talk? Tell me your

story. I invite you to a 10-minute free share your story

call. This isn't a sales call. It's an opportunity. To just

like share your experience with me, I know a common experience

that people have when they have brain injuries is they don't

feel like people see them, they don't feel like people

understand them. So you get to have that experience of being

heard. And if you decide you want to talk with me about

working together, then we can schedule a time after that. So

go to sharewithsandra.com forward slash brain story. There

is a link in the show notes, and if you want to understand about

the messages that the body is trying to give you through your

symptoms, then get the Imagine What's Possible audio gift. Go

to sharewithsandra.com forward slash imagine. Your brain heals

itself every day of your life. Imagine what's possible.