Running My Consulting Business After Brain Surgery 2.5 Years Ago – What I Learned

Today I am going to talk about running my consulting business after having my brain surgery.

Now, typically I talk about business content to help entrepreneurs have ideas of what to think about.

My other videos and content are about that.

Today is more of my personal story and letting people in.

One of the reasons for doing this is I have two segments in my life.

1. Those people that know me on a personal level who are aware I had brain surgery, or are asking about how things are going for me and want to have some updates.
2. And those people that I’ve met who have no idea I ever had brain surgery.

And so this unites those worlds and gets everyone on the same page.

What I’ll Be Talking About

My goal today is to share my story in an authentic way in hopes that it helps others.

• Background: What happened that led to me having brain surgery in order to give some context.
• Lessons I Learned: What it meant for me to have brain surgery and be an entrepreneur and juggle those demands.
• Takeaways: Then I’ll talk about some takeaways that may be helpful for you if you’re someone who’s an entrepreneur thinking about how to make your business as sustainable as possible.

So that’s my goal.

Background

My Gifts

As far as some background, one of the things I value about myself is that I have an extraordinary gift of being able to see complex pieces of information and break them down into more simple steps.

I can consume books, podcasts, and information, and take all of that in and reassemble it into a very easy-to-digest manner. I also solve puzzles rather quickly typically.

These are the gifts that I brought to my consulting practice.

Symptom Onset

What happened was, a few years ago, I started having some seizures randomly.

I talked to my doctor right away after the first one that I had, (that I remembered having) and he didn’t really know what was going on.

He had sent me to a couple of specialists. They weren’t really figuring things out. They thought maybe it was a panic attack. I didn’t feel like that was the case and I was a bit in this weird Limbo zone.

Eventually, I had one that was bad enough that sent me to the ER. In the ER they did a brain scan and they found a brain tumor was causing my seizures.

What If I Lost My Gifts? – Dealing With Fear

So for me, this was a pretty terrifying experience.

I mentioned earlier that I viewed one of the gifts that I could bring to the world as my ability to think essentially, and here it was – the thing that to me was most precious about myself was possibly at risk.

What would happen to me with this tumor?

What was going to happen if and when it was removed? If it could be removed?

I didn’t really know.

So I was very terrified.

On top of that my entire business was based around this idea of me thinking and helping clients solve problems.

So I was feeling a danger of losing myself. My business. Everything that I thought was known could be gone.

Plus, I thought I was a pretty healthy individual.

I’ve been training in Brazilian jujitsu for a very long time. I love to be athletic and love to be active.

And to go from that spot to all of a sudden feeling like “Wow, this could all be taken away” was really a surprising moment.

Maybe if it hadn’t been such a blur of back-to-back things I might have actually gotten a lot more worried about it. But essentially there was just action step after action step that had to be taken.

Luckily I had the love of my life, Lisa, to help me out with that. She helped guide some of the conversations. We had an agreement that I wouldn’t Google anything because it would be terrifying and so she would be the “designated Googler” to look things up.

She also found out who the best doctors in the nation were to help out with my brain surgery. For my type of brain cancer, we figured out that Duke in North Carolina was going to be the best place to get support.

It gave me some peace of mind that I was going to the very best place.

The Surgery

I went to Duke and had the surgery. I had a GoFundMe to help cover some of the costs to get out there and back, pay my deductibles and premiums, go back for a later follow-up, and give me some time to heal afterward which really gave me some peace and reminded me to show myself some grace to not try to just get back into grinding.

During my surgery, I was actually awake for that procedure which is a whole other interesting facet.

People oftentimes ask me, “Hey, you were awake? Wasn’t that crazy? Wouldn’t that be hard?”

And from the outside, I would think the same thing, but for me personally, I’m a go-getter. I want to be in there doing things and me being awake, and able to talk to the team while they were operating gave me some encouragement that I was part of that process.

They had me awake because everyone’s brain is a bit different and they were trying to remove as much of the cancer as possible. But they can’t ever get it all with my type of cancer. They wanted to make sure they were removing as much as possible. They wanted to make sure they weren’t getting into the brain material that I was using as much as possible while still taking as much of the cancer.

For me, it was close to my movement center. So they had me moving my arm and certain patterns, and then they would zap me with an electrode in my brain and if that made it so I couldn’t move my arm anymore they would know if they cut that part out then I would not have movement. So they knew not to cut that part out.

That’s why I was awake during the procedure.

A really important thing to note is that if I wasn’t as healthy as I was, that wouldn’t have been a choice. I would have had to have a brain surgery where I was asleep and they would just cut whatever they thought was right. The results would have been that either maybe they left in more cancer than they could have or removed some areas of my brain that affected movement.

So my baseline health going into that was a huge factor in my successful outcome.

A second part was the hard grind of entrepreneurship and of Brazilian jujitsu and doing competitions and that mindset really helped me stay focused on positive outcomes during this process and visualizing what that would look like – not in some mystical woo-woo way, but mostly on putting all of my energy towards healing and what would that look like and what type of a state would I have to be in?

So all that was really positive.

Again, having Lisa by my side was really important for all of that. I came out the other end great.

The Recovery

The procedure went well, I actually walked that night.

I ended up taking a couple of months off of work from the time of diagnosis until after my surgery, and I went from being someone who could work 60-90 hours a week and had since I started my business in 2016 to someone who after a one-hour consultation with a client and the notes would have to lay down and take a nap for a couple hours before I can do my next one.

So it was a really big shift to figure that out.

But the support and the grace of my clients was really helpful in that process.

That’s the background to my story.

Being Vulnerable

Now, I think it’s interesting that I haven’t talked about this openly very much on purpose.

I think as entrepreneurs there’s a lot of pressure to sort of be perfect to say we have no flaws.

We’re afraid that if we’re three-dimensional people that can scare others away from us.

I was definitely worried about that for me.

I wondered, would someone hire me to help them if they knew I’d had brain surgery? Would they think I was somehow compromised?

Or even if I did a good job would they think well “he could die soon and that would be a problem in this process of trusting him and letting him into my operations?”

So I’ve really held back on that.

The Follow Up

One of the reasons I’m making this video that’s fresh on my mind is that I just got back from my two-year follow-up.

I have felt 100% back for almost two years now.

Every three months and then later adjusting to every six months I have had regular scans that can monitor how things are going.

Mine is going great.

The scan came back as wonderful as expected. It’s expected all of my scans will keep going great.

I have a very long-term slow-growing type of brain cancer. It will probably be decades before it starts to grow to a level that might matter.

On this visit, I learned other good news.

Not only my scan was good, but there are really good treatments coming down the pipeline right now that are finishing phase four trials that show promise for my exact type of brain cancer. There are hundreds of types of brain cancer mine was a pretty lucky fortunate one. Again, these treatments are looking very good.

Also, I asked a question that I had been afraid to ask before and that was a big lesson to remind myself that oftentimes there are things that we, me personally, I am too afraid to even think about asking. I’m too afraid to face it seems too terrifying. But if I can face it, it usually goes away.

So the question I asked that I was afraid to ask was “What about the cancer spreading to somewhere else?”

I knew what was going on with the cancer itself in my brain but what if it popped up somewhere else in my body?

That was probably the most terrifying thing for me. Before I’d had the brain cancer process and gone through all that, if I banged up my shin or my rib felt a little bit weird from training jujitsu, I would just say “This is just normal. I’ll just walk it off and in a week I’ll probably feel better.”

But I was in this hyper-alert mode afterward because I knew people who had had cancer that they thought was controlled in one area of their body, but it jumped somewhere else and popped up as a surprise. I was really worried about that.

So I asked my doctor about that. And apparently, cancer cells in the brain are so different than those in the body, they almost never move from the brain to the body. She said it’s like a one-in-a-billion chance or less.

It’s very rare to move from the brain to the body, (not impossible, but super rare) versus moving from the body to the brain is something that does happen more frequently. (Sorry to others with cancer that started in their body for this news.)

This is all just to give you some backstory.

Hopefully, it also helps put some people’s minds at ease who are worried about me in general. You don’t have to ask how I’m doing. Typically, I’m doing really, really well and I’m expected to keep doing really, really well.

You don’t have to be anxious about my well-being long term.

I just need to take care of myself on a daily basis and things are going really really good. Most days I forget I ever had a brain surgery, except when I have to take my medicine a few times a day. And also when I go back for my scans periodically or see my doctor’s visits.

So that’s all great news.

That’s the background.

Lessons I Learned

Now what was the fallout like?

So I had this brain surgery and I was recovering and I was grateful that I left that surgery and my biggest fear of losing what I felt was my strong gift of being a good thinker hadn’t been taken from me.

My Value As A Human Isn’t Tied To My Ability To Think Thoughts Well

But I also recognized through this entire process, that that’s one of my gifts but I have other gifts as well and I’d put too much pressure and too much weight on the tool of thinking.

I’m also an empathetic, caring person and that’s a really big piece of who I am.

So I had redeveloped a bit of what it meant to be me and not put so much weight on one thing. That helped me broaden my horizons and understand better what was important to me.

Pause To Check If I’m On Course

Moving now from the background into what I learned from this, it really gave me some perspective.

For me, I’m the type of person who can just really put my head down, get to work, and focus on the steps right in front of me. But it’s really important for me to stop and get some outside perspective and see if I’m heading in the right direction.

It reminds me of a story my uncle told me when he was getting ready for a triathlon and he was practicing the swimming portion.

He hadn’t done a lot of open-water swimming before. He hopped in the lake and just started swimming and all of a sudden realized that he was way off course of where he was supposed to be.

And he realized that with the drifts and the movement of open water, that’s not like a pool where you just go right where you’re planning to.

He realized he needed to paddle for a bit, then get his head up and look to make sure he was on target and then could paddle again.

That metaphor really applies to me in my life.

In the past, I have not done as good of a job of stopping and taking stock of what’s going on to make sure I’m in the right direction before going back into swimming.

Enjoy Taking Breaks In Between Working Hard

The other thing that I think of a lot is that I previously thought of myself as the hare from the Tortoise and the Hare story but as the hare that never stopped.

In the Tortoise and the Hare, the tortoise slowly and steadily keeps plodding forward and the hare is really fast, but he’s kind of made up to be someone kind of silly rabbit who stops and goofs off and doesn’t take the race very seriously.

I thought of myself as a fast and steady person just running full sprint nonstop keep going and going and going.

But I realized that’s not actually sustainable.

So I thought about the fact that you know in the tortoise and the hare, the hare actually takes breaks.

And that’s important.

If you expand that story out, and as opposed to the distance it was, if it was 4 or 5 or 10 times the distance, that turtle might get tired, even going slow, and steady.

Those breaks are actually really important. The hare would win over a longer distance.

So that’s a lesson I picked up – that it’s important to go full speed but also to stop get perspective on where I’m going and also take those breaks to find those enjoying pieces in life.

Takeaways

What Is The Actual Goal?

Something that I’ve seen with myself and other entrepreneurs it’s very common is that we started our business typically to have

1. more time,
2. more money,
3. and more freedom of expression.

But sometimes we don’t think of the next step because even getting those three things achieved is such a monumental task.

We rarely think about

“More time for what?”

“More money for what?”

“More freedom for what?”

The bare minimum answers help at first but don’t stand up once those needs are met.

More time – to not be working so much so I can actually, get a good night’s sleep or see my kids a bit is one thing

More money – to pay off my bills so I’m not in debt and I can get a nicer house that feels like I’m living in a place I’m happy with is another thing

But those are sort of baseline paths those are the baseline

What else do we want our time for?

So for me, I realized that I had become very one-dimensional.

I’d put so much energy into just business.

I put another segment into Brazilian jujitsu.

And I was starting to put some more into focusing on growing a healthy relationship.

But I only had those few areas in my life.

One thing I learned was that there’s a lot more I wanted to do in life and it was just passing me by sometimes.

It was important to do my heavy work and to get all the important stuff done and then also to make sure I had some boundaries and set aside time for activities – trying out things like mountain biking, learning how to dance, or reading books (they gave me a lot of pleasure and not just books about how to get better at business!)

And so it really gave me some perspective that was very, very important.

That is probably most of what I learned in the process.

Health MUST Be A Focus

The next was also that health is incredibly important.

Again, if I hadn’t been as healthy as I was going into surgery, the outcome would have been much different.

Being healthy on a day-to-day basis helps but it also helps offer some buffer of protection in the case of catastrophe.

My level of health going into the surgery meant that even though I lost some of that coming out of surgery, I was coming from a much better place. I didn’t fall as far the lower my health was, the longer the recovery would have been.

I was able to have some reduced functioning and the fatigue that followed having my brain worked on and recovering much, much quicker being at 100% in about 6 to 8 months.

I focused on health a lot more in the post-analysis of all of this, and just how to live a life that makes me happy.

So flipping this now what advice I might give someone – first of all, I took my health for granted. I took it for granted that I would basically be able to shoulder the burden of moving forward in my business no matter what. That I could just be relentless.

I was sort of like the really busy mom who says, “I can’t get sick, I don’t have time for that and they don’t get sick.” I kind of thought that in my head if I just kept pushing forward there was not really much space for a bad thing to happen. I would just keep driving forward, it would all be okay.

But there can be lightning-strike-type events out of my control that happened to me. They’re like, “Oh, wow, I don’t have a choice but to pay attention to this right now.”

So one thing is to acknowledge that surprises can happen.

Focus On Sustainability

The second is to make sure that you’re setting up as many sustainable systems as possible.

The goal isn’t to win today or tomorrow it’s to win long-term.

That means not doing things that are going to get you burned out.

The number one reason that business fails is that the owner gets too burnt out and too exhausted to keep trying new things. A second part of that could be that their health deteriorates.

So take care of yourself.

It is soooo important.

You are the most important employee in the business.

Protect the asset. The asset is you. You are the only bodyguard for yourself.

Protect yourself because even if you do have a surprise like what I had happen to me, there’s a good chance that the better your self-care is going into it, the faster you’ll recover and get back into action if you need to.

Self-care is a really good buffer plus, it’s just so important.

Again, why did we start these businesses?

So that we can have more money, more freedom, and more time?

Use that freedom, that time that money to take care of yourself!

Don’t do it to deteriorate yourself! You could do that working a regular job working for somebody else.

Focus on the ways to take care of yourself.

What Else To Do If Not Focus 24/7 On Business?

Finally, some of the times I work with clients and they get to a spot where they’ve sort of made it out of the clearing.

They were in the pain of “I have to survive. I have to make enough money to pay rent this month.” Then they get out to the clearing and everything is kind of good behind them and now they can do ANYTHING they want.

They have money, they have time.

They don’t really have any major pain points.

The business mostly takes care of itself.

Now there’s an infinite vista of places they can go it’s too hard to choose.

It reminds me of going to college. “Wait I’m supposed to pick out one thing I want to do and this is my plan for the rest of my life?!?! I needed some limitations!!”

Something to say “In this space do this.” But there are too many choices and it’s kind of paralyzing.

With other entrepreneurs, I’ve seen this and also with myself, when there are too many choices it’s so hard to know where to go.

It’s very important before you get to that level to start finding out what passions and interests you have to make this journey worthwhile.

That makes this struggle of entrepreneurship much more sustainable.

Otherwise, you get there and NOW you start the process of figuring out what you want to do with your time, money, and freedom.

For me, it’s taken years and months and so much time to figure out: What fills me up? What gives me joy? What new things do I want to try? What new places do I want to go to? Starting that at the end would feel exhausting.

Getting more up to speed on it upfront would be helpful

Try Being More Primitive

If you’re already in that stage one kind of principle I’ve been playing with – I’m not sure how true this is yet – the more the activity is primitive, the more overall satisfaction it brings.

What I mean by that is playing video games can bring a certain amount of enjoyment.

But camping in the woods and building a fire from scratch is a different, deeper level.

And I don’t really know how to describe it better than that.

But things like growing your own food, cooking your own meals, sending up positive friend networks and social interactions or family – those types of activities are at this basic level of things that humans have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years.

And they tend to be, in my experience, wired for a much higher level of pleasure than newer things such as getting a lot of likes on social media, which our brain isn’t geared to get long-term pleasure out of.

I have found for a lot of other people, myself included, the more primitive an activity, the more enjoyable it is.

So as we get time back, going back to some of these basic types of principles, which you would think are natural tends to be very satisfying.

That’s been true for me.

Conclusion

This was a bit of my personal story, not as much direct takeaway business advice, but I hope it gives you some perspective and reminds you to be grateful for what you have.

Take some time to look up, have some perspective on where you want to go and to be thinking about what makes your life worthwhile.

What is actually the most important thing?

Don’t get lost in the compulsive actions of running your business but instead, embrace what it is you really want to do.

That’s what I try to do every day.

Thank You

These videos are as much a reminder for me to follow my own advice as they are actual outward-pointed advice.

Thank you so much for your support.

I really appreciate you.

Have a wonderful rest of your day.