The Secret To Starting Over
[Music]
[Applause]
i was the first in my family
to graduate from college and i did what
any college graduate would do
i ran off and joined the circus
i was the kid who liked to climb to the
top of a tree and put on a grocery bag
over my shoulder and jump out i wanted
to fly
so becoming an acrobat at sea world
was a dream come true cirque
de lemare circus of the sea
i was an acrobat that would climb these
poles chinese poles and i would get
launched off a giant swing set 30 feet
in the air before i landed in the water
it was amazing
adrenaline rush every day i lived in san
diego the
sun beach beautiful and i was living my
dream
i was getting paid to fly
so everything was going wonderfully
until one morning i got out of bed and
fell
i felt like my legs were like how your
foot falls asleep that tingly feeling
and soon it became excruciating and i
wasn’t able to move
so i was taken to the hospital and after
three days in the icu
a doctor came in and said um danny
you’re not going to perform again we’re
not sure you’re gonna walk again
and you’re lucky to be alive
i found out that i had three
gram-negative bacterial infection
in my bloodstream and it lodged into my
sacroiliac joint
and made me paralyzed and these were all
bacteria
you would typically find in sewage
that came from the water at my shell
so i had really wished honestly
that if i couldn’t perform anymore that
the bacteria had just killed me
i was able to slightly move my right leg
before i left the hospital
also i could use a walker and
i can kind of scoot along and honestly i
spent most of the time lying on my
parents couch taking
tons of pain pills i was in pain but
mostly
just to sleep the day away i felt like
everything was taken from me
my apartment at san diego was gone my
job was gone
my degree was in physical education like
what was the point i wish this stupid
bacteria had just
killed me i felt so useless
but a year prior a dear friend of mine
kelly
was diagnosed with terminal stage four
colon cancer
she came to see me at the show and
a month after i got out of the hospital
she came to see me at my house
i was bent over i opened the door with
my walker
and she stood there and was like danny
i can’t believe this happened to you
it’s so unfair
my friend who had a death sentence was
telling me that it was unfair that i
couldn’t walk
i felt like such a jerk
i realized that while my situation
wasn’t ideal at least i had a chance to
do something
to do something different to have a
do-over at my life
so i decided to get moving i asked my
mom to drive me to the gym every day
with my walker i’d sit on the recumbent
bikes and i would just push my legs
around and within a year
i had the strength to walk again and two
years later i ran my first
and probably last marathon
i officially made the most of my do-over
so i’d like to know how many of you have
ever had to start over
moving to a new state a job breakup
and how many maybe more than once
according to my scientific poll which i
did on instagram
65 65 of people who responded said
they’ve had to start over
three or more times and i know there’s
not a whole lot of guarantees in life
but i know that there are these three
death taxes
and starting over
life is a lot like the game of shoots
and ladders remember this game
you spin the wheel leave it all the
chance and you land on a square and if
you’re lucky you get to take a ladder up
to the top
and if you’re not so lucky you got to
take one of those slides all the way
back down
now have you ever played a game with a
kid not just this game any game
if they land like on the bad one they’re
like let me get a do-over let me get a
do-over
they don’t want to go back to the
beginning they know that starting over
feels like a punishment it sucks you
have to go back to the beginning you’re
at the start
everyone’s getting so far ahead you’ll
never catch up but if you
get a do-over then you have a chance
to maybe get something better now we all
have things that don’t go according to
plan in life a teenage pregnancy
a bacterial infection that leaves you
paralyzed a bankruptcy
moving to a new state a breakup with
your business partner
your husband having an affair moving to
a state again
going through another bankruptcy going
through a divorce
having your dogs die two of them eight
months apart
pets with their heads falling off and
everything in 2020 being cancelled and
then
your mom having a brain tumor and you
becoming her caretaker
just one of those things could be a
setback for any one of us
you put that all together you have my
life
i’ve had to start over so many times my
friends started to call me do over danny
everyone loves a good comeback story
except when you’re the one in it
but i’ve had many people tell me that
i’m one of the most resilient people
they know
and i appreciate that but i know it’s
not resilience
i just see setbacks as a secret gift
to get a do-over
and i know it might be the kind of gift
that feels like it’s in a brown paper
bag that someone left on your doorstep
that’s about to burn your house down
but it’s a different kind of gift so
i’ve come up with
a framework to help me overcome
life’s shoots and ladders because i know
that none of us are immune to what life
has to throw at us
and we need to be prepared so the first
step
in the gift of a do-over is to grieve
now i know we all know about grief when
we lose someone and there’s the five
stages of grief
but sometimes the loss of a dream can
actually cut deeper
than the loss of a person and these
things my friend christina rasmussen
calls invisible losses these are things
like dreams
miscarriages losing a business the
10-year anniversary that you never had
and it is important to move on to grieve
in order to move on the next is
insight with insight this is where you
look for clarity you’re looking for the
lessons and the pain and the lessons and
what happened so this is where you can
ask yourself questions like
who do i want to be now where do i want
to go
maybe if you lost a job or you’re
looking at like what skills i have so i
can move forward and do something
different
and then it’s forgiveness often people
think forgiveness
means you’re letting someone off the
hook or what they did was okay
forgiveness doesn’t mean like what
someone did was okay it simply means
that you’re no longer letting it control
you anymore and forgiveness also
includes yourself
to have compassion for yourself
and last is truth tony robbins says
to see reality as it is but not worse
than it is
we tend to catastrophize as humans you
like lose your job and suddenly you’re
going i’m going to be homeless
yes i’m going to have to live out of my
car my kids aren’t going to no
just you lost your job you might have to
cut back on your starbucks you can
figure it out
you have friends they can help you
well it sounds really easy now but it
wasn’t always that way
when i was 15 years old i was suicidal
and i ended up in a mental institution
and they do regular labs and my
psychiatrist called me back into his
office and he said
your pregnancy test came back positive
and i immediately blurted out well i’m
gonna have an abortion
i mean i was gonna kill myself anyway so
what did it matter
and the day before my scheduled abortion
i had a change of heart
i met a woman who shared with me her
desire to have children
and her inability due to an eating
disorder
and without even thinking i said i want
you to have my baby and she said what
and my brain went what and i said i want
you to have my baby
and for whatever reason i stuck to that
and i went forward with the pregnancy
and four months in i found out i was
having a little girl
and the woman called me crying saying
she couldn’t come up with the fifty
thousand dollars
to do a private adoption so i was left
with trying to figure out what to do but
i still had this plan to end my life
after she was born
so i found another way to do an adoption
i read through hundreds and hundreds of
profiles until i found the perfect one
for her
and then just a wednesday in the summer
she was born
i was told not to hold her not to look
at her they wanted to whisk her away but
i needed to
and i remember holding her
and thinking she was so perfect
and i thought what if she grows up and
asks what happened to her birth mother
and she finds out i killed myself and
thinks it was her fault
i could not put that on someone
so i made the decision right then that i
was going to live and not only was i
going to live but i was going to live in
a way that would make her proud if she
ever looked for me
and that was my first real
second chance my first real do-over
so for 18 years every year on her
birthday i wondered
if i made the right decision i wondered
if she’d hate me i wondered if she’d
look for me
and because of the rules of the adoption
after she was 18 she would be able to if
she wanted to
right before her 19th birthday i was
going to be in her city
and i decided to reach out or i said hey
maybe we should meet
and she said sure
so we decided to meet an ihop in the
middle of the day nothing at all like
the fantasies i had my whole life of
like the airport and the balloons
and i was so nervous i didn’t want to
get out of the car i asked my husband
do i hug her and he’s like yeah just
don’t make it a creepy hug
what is a creepy hug oh my gosh so so
i went to the ihop i sat on the corner
and i waited i was looking down at my
phone
and i heard hey there and i looked up
i had seen pictures of her but i had
never heard her voice
i stood up and i hugged her really
careful not to make it creepy
and she hugged me back it was the best
feeling in the world
and i felt so good
and she told me that she had an amazing
life that she was so grateful
and that she was with the exact parents
that she needed to be with
and i realized too in that moment that
as much as i wanted her to be proud of
me
i was proud of me so how i used
the gift framework in this situation
the first was grieve
interestingly enough
this was one where i was not allowed to
grieve i was told when i had her it was
my decision
my consequence i needed to suck it up so
anything that made it look like made me
look like i was sad
i was told to knock it off and i
realized that our bodies need that time
degree a couple of years
ago i went to the jungle to experience
ayahuasca
and if you don’t know what that is it’s
a plant medicine used in traditional
ceremonies
and they use it a lot for ptsd and
trauma
and i experienced this moment of seeing
my 16 year old self in the hospital
delivery room
and being able to hold my younger self
and let her cry
and grieve for having to give up that
baby
and grief is so important and i think
sometimes we think that we can skip that
part but it’s so important to
get through it with insight my social
worker at the time made me read the book
man search for meaning by viktor frankl
he’s a holocaust survivor
and he said everything can be taken from
a man but one thing
the last of the human freedoms to choose
one’s attitude in any given set of
circumstances
to choose one’s own way
and this was such a lesson for me
because i realized at that time
i had a choice in my attitude of what
was happening
and i had a choice to see instead of my
daughter’s life being the end of the
world
it was a new life for me as well
and then forgiveness this one was tough
i was angry at my parents angry at the
church angry at people at school
and i had to let that go but the person
that was hardest to forgive was myself
i had to have compassion for myself for
just being young and not knowing better
and doing my best and then truth
truth was teen pregnancy is not the end
of the world
sometimes we have hard choices i had
become a teen mom have an abortion
give your baby away it kind of felt like
do you want us to stab you in the foot
punch you in the stomach or kick you in
the face
but you have to make the best of the
decisions you have and you make your
choice
and hopefully you’re able to get a
do-over out of it
so sometimes we’re forced to start over
and sometimes we choose to and some
people
don’t get a do-over like my friend kelly
so i hope you remember
that should you ever get the chance to
start over
that you remember that there’s a gift
and a do-over
should you choose to take it thank you
[Music]
you