SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome to the Askful Skinny Podcast with a guest. I'm proud to present John Ulsch. John, welcome to the show. Please tell us more about yourself. What is your story?

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Thank you, Peter. So for your audience, I will try to get my background story in place because I know what I know the theme of your of your podcast is to help people in in midlife crisis. So a quick version of my story is I'm I'm here in Pennsylvania in the United States, close to Harrisburg, which is our capital, close to Philadelphia. 19 years ago, on December 1st, my family, my eight-year-old daughter, my four-year-old son, and my wife at the time were leaving uh a swim meet down, like you know, again, indoor swim meet in in December in Pennsylvania. Um, and so our our eight-year-old Katie was the one who had the swim meet, and we brought the four-year-old uh along. So, doing what would be considered very typical here in the United States, if you have kids, you're going to soccer football, you're going to swim meets, ballet, music practice, you know, normal things if you have children on a Saturday afternoon. So we left the swim meet at uh at around lunchtime, noon. And instead of turning left and going home exactly the same way we came, which was about an hour drive, we we we turned right and decided to take a more scenic route home. Um, we were driving on a 55-mile uh undivided highway, so very rural country roads, you know, most of very few houses, a lot of fields for farmers uh where we were. So we were in a pretty rural area. Um, a car coming the other direction uh at the very last second cross the center line. Um no skin marks on the road. So I didn't see the other driver. The other driver didn't see me. And uh the police report would estimate the impact speed at 125 miles an hour. Two objects in opposite directions. We were going 55 miles an hour. The other driver was doing 70. So I was told recently that that's about 202 kilometers per hour for those listeners who work in kilometers. Um, so other driver died instantly. Um my whole family was injured. Uh, my wife was in the front seat unconscious, broken hand, broken foot, broken ribs, broken collarbone from her from her seatbelt, uh severed uh abdominal from the seatbelt. Um my four-year-old son was sitting behind me in a in a booster seat. Um my chair came back into him, snapping his fibia and tibia in his left leg, and then breaking his collarbone. And then his lap belt never cut his skin, but it severed his small intestine. So he was going septic. Um, my eight-year-old daughter, the one who had the swim meat, was in the back passenger seat. She was the only one who stayed conscious. And when first responders would eventually show up, they found her crawling between the front seat, crying, Daddy, don't die. Um, I was the most injured. Um, I would be given less than a 3% chance to survive. Um, in the first 12 hours, I took 38 units of blood. So a guy my size, a guy your size, Peter, would hold about eight units of blood in their body. So that's how many times I was bleeding out. Um the energy from the collision um came up my my left leg, shattered my pelvis seven inches apart, and then proceeded to fracture my tailbone and then my L1 through L4 vertebrae, which are four lowest vertebrae, all fractured into each other. Um, that was not going to kill me. My spleen ruptured, my diaphragm ruptured, my left lung completely collapsed, my right lung partially collapsed, and my heart was damaged. Um, I spent 18 days in a coma. My my son spent the second most amount of time in the hospital. He spent 15 days in the in the hospital. So when I came out of the coma, my family was home recuperating from their injuries. So so I knew pretty quickly my family survived. Um, the police report was was finished from the from the accident. I I knew it wasn't my fault. The other driver was a distracted driver, no drugs, no alcohol, um, but but distracted. And at the very last second, crossed the line. Um, I would quickly figure out that I was paralyzed from the waist down. So I had big blue sutures from being cut open. I had all these tubes and everything going through me, but it took me a day or two to even realize I couldn't move my own legs. Um ultimately, because of my back and my pelvis being put together with titanium, I was non-weight bearing. So what that meant was I couldn't even go to physical therapy or or to a rehab center to learn to use a wheelchair or learn how to sit up or or feed myself or or do anything because of this shattered back and shattered pelvis needing needing to heal. So um, right at Christmas time, I moved into a nursing home. So uh, you know, for for your US listeners, they might under it's an elderly care home, is is what it was. Um, so I moved in there to spend eight more weeks waiting for my back and my pelvis to heal. So laying flat on my back, uh not being able to raise more than 15 degrees, not being able to feed myself, not being able to bathe myself or do basically any normal function other than lay there. Um, I would later get to go to physical therapy, where eventually I was able to use my right leg. Um, as the swelling on my spine went away, use of my right leg started to come back. My left leg um had very little use. And to this day, you know, 19 years later, it feels like it's asleep. So the pins and needles of like when you put your foot down, you've like I can't feel anything, or if you were to put cold or heat or little needles, I I can't feel it. If you squeezed it really hard, I could feel it. But the only reason that I would eventually learn to walk was because of all this nerve damage that went through my left leg, I can feel my big toe. And so for those people who who know either family members who have who have diabetes or somebody who has gotten frostbite, they they always try to save that big toe because that is your balance. Um, and you know, if you if we stood up right now, if you you know, you would realize how quickly, if I said it, how much pressure you keep on that big toe to to hold your balance. So very much a miracle that of all this nerve damage, that my big toe was uh able to to send feel and therefore ultimately learn to be able to walk. Um, about two and a half years after the accident, uh, I'm able to use a walker to get around. If I had to go, you know uh 100 yards, 110 you know meters, I would have to get in a wheelchair. Um and so I'm sitting at home, and I'm now my daughter, who's who's eight or ten years old, uh, is a big soccer player, big European football, soccer, pick your pick your name. Um and she's out front juggling a soccer ball, and and I look up and she's not there, and she comes into my office and she's crying, and I just assume that she she hurt herself, and and she says to me, I I miss my old daddy. I miss the dad who would come out and train with me in in in the yard. And you know, I believe that I survived a 3% chance so that my kids would have a father. And now my 10-year-old daughter was basically calling me out and saying, like, like you're I wish I had the dad who would be able to come outside and do things with me and not just sit inside. And so the next day I go to physical therapy and I quit. And I it's you know 9 45 a.m. and I just go down the street to my local YMCA, which you know of has a gymnasium uh fitness center. And I just happen to walk in at 10 a.m. at the exact same time that there's a program for teenagers with Down syndrome. And if you've had the opportunity to spend any time around adults or teenagers with Down syndrome, they are the most positive human beings on the face of the earth. Um, and it was the perfect place for me to be because at 7 a.m. or 8 a.m., I would have been around my peers. And, you know, at this point, little skinny me at 150 some pounds. I mean, it was a 185-pound marathon runner when the accident happened. It actually saved my life because my left lung collapsed and I had very little body fat. So when they had to cut me open to try to stop the internal bleeding, I didn't carry all this extra visceral fat. So that you know, that part of my life before the accident ultimately played a role in my survival. But now I'm two years removed and 150 some pounds of skin and bone, and I knew I had to build back my body. I thought I was rebuilding back my old life. I mean, I'll be honest with you, my goal was I was going to run again, I can beat all this, I'm just going to push myself. What I learned over the next year and a half by working out with this young man named Danny who had who had Down syndrome was that I could just be happy to rebuild a new life. Instead of trying to get something that was gone and that I couldn't get back, I just reframed it into I have an opportunity to rebuild. And that rebuilding could be based off of things like I'm in chronic pain all the time. I'm taking a lot of narcotics to deal with pain. Like at that period of time, two years after, I was taking 90 milligrams of morphine twice a day. If you were to give that much to a full-size cow, it would, its heart would explode. But that's the tolerance that that I had built up. And so um I started to understand that I could go into this gym and work out with a bunch of kids with special needs who are always super positive, weren't there for any goal other than the experience of being there, that I could push myself really hard to the point where I was tearing muscle fibers and getting very, very sore. But it was good kind of pain. Pain that I could associate with recovery, pain I could associate with getting stronger versus the pain I had no control over, which was this chronic pain of having a shattered back and shattered pelvis and all this nerve damage. Um and I kept having surgeries through all of this. As soon as I would make some progress, we would find another problem. So to to till this point today, I've had 45 surgeries from the car accident. I've had 18 of them, the last 18, solely related to the fact that I didn't die. These were all complications from all the injuries that I sustained. And I would have doctors tell me, well, we have to fix this vein in your leg now, or we have to fix this part of your stomach or this part of your heart, because you should have died from something else, but you didn't. So now we're fixing the complications from you know blood clots going through your veins, all the damage done to your pelvis and your circulatory problems. And so, so I would just keep pushing and pushing, um, just simply because I I like the the process, which is you know one of the main takeaways that I've learned is that you know nobody really learns at the finish line, right? So I was a marathon runner, I was a college athlete. No one wins at the end. At the end, you reflect on everything that you learned in the process, in the journey, right? And in that journey are setbacks and wins, in that journey are re-evaluations and refocusing. Um the the losses and the setbacks generally teach you more than the wins. Um in a lot of cases, those setbacks become the fuel that actually propels you forward faster. Uh when you can when you can look at those setbacks, right? So so during you know my journey of of 19 years, you know, to look at me today, I can walk across the room. I'm gonna be 55 in in in two weeks. Um this morning um at the gym, um, I bench pressed 300 pounds three times. That's a lot of weight for anybody at any age. It was never my goal. My goal was to always push, push, push, push. Don't fall in love with reaching the goal, fall in love and getting getting you know something every day. And so so I ended up becoming very strong. I ended up being able to squat a lot of weight, even though I have a leg that I can't feel, um, just through process, right? And so, you know, that journey has put me in magazines, fitness magazines, as well as like people magazine here in the United States. It's put me on Good Morning America, demonstrating how to do obstacle races because I was never going to be able to run again, but I got strong enough. So the new motivation was me like, oh, let's go out and do these races where you go, you know, seven, eight kilometers up a mountain while carrying a 50-pound bag of sand, crawling under barbed wire, you know, climbing up ropes. And and so, you know, I started doing those with people with either their first time doing that, with a disability. Uh, you know, the idea was look, if I can do this, then just about anybody else can figure out a way to do it. Let's do it together. So let's go tackle this obstacle race as a as a symbol of being able to tackle anything, right? Um and so today, um, you know, I I coach, I wrote a book that for those who can watching the video can see the back cycle, The Upside and Down. It really is a book about you know my my journey for the first 30,000 words. And the next 20,000 are really about these eight pillars that you know we want to talk about today, a little bit about how to deal with setbacks, adversity, midlife crisis. There are the you know, and and how to come up with a plan to go forward from it. Um ultimately, you know, I I think you know the single greatest accomplishment that that I can take credit for was that I stayed committed. You know, I it's common, I have this common conversation a lot about motivation versus commitment, right? Motivation is a great tool to get you started, but commitment is literally the thing you can lean against when you don't have motivation. And to me and to my clients, commitment looks a lot like you know, being ready when you're not ready. Um, you know, being realistic about your situation. Um I feel like a lot of times people want to perceive their life the way they want it to be, not the way it is. And that doesn't mean you have to accept the way it is, but if you can't, if you can't identify where you're sitting right now, where you are, um how can you really start to move forward? So a lot of times it's like, all right, am I there? Where am I? You're gonna have, you know, you're gonna evaluate your situation and and then you're gonna see if you're in alignment. Like, am I am I in alignment with right now with where I want to be? And who do I have around me or what what do I have in in my corner to support it, right? And then ultimately the big step that I think your clients would say, my clients would say, is this decision part, right? Um, you know, we all suffer from decision fatigue in the in the world, too many decisions. And sometimes you just you we have a saying, paralysis by analysis, you're paralyzed by overanalyzing, right? Um, I like to tell people all the time there's there's not a perfect time. There, if you wait for perfect, then you'll wait forever. I would rather have you be purposeful than perfect every single time. Take the step and then figure it out. Everyone thinks that you have to have the perfect plan in place before you take the step, but it doesn't work that way. And you know that it's the commitment of taking the first step is the hard part, and then it's just more first steps. But the you know, the final part of that commitment for me is this concept of of yielding. Um in business, in life, in family, there's so much things that we can't control, right? So being able to yield, being able to say, you know what, I can all I can only show up for me today. I can't control what the world's going to do. I can't control a war that runs the place of gases up, I can't control a crash of the stock market. Um, I couldn't control a car coming the other direction and crossing the center line at the last second. Like I couldn't protect my family from that. Right? So we have to yield, we have to be okay with that and and understand that there are going to be crises that will come that we have no control over.

SPEAKER_01 19:06

Yeah, amazing story. Um, and thank you for for this story. It uh it shows to our listeners that uh even uh real crises that go far beyond societal induced goals and uh being bit overweight or stuff like that, that is uh what uh average American or average person in midlife is dealing with. Um there you you you can still find success and uh new meaning in life. And I would like to know more about your uh eight-pillar system that you propose in your book.

SPEAKER_00 19:44

Yeah, so obviously the first one is is is commitment, what we just talked about. Um the second pillar is is the source of your problems, right? Um in my experience and and and then other you know really good coaching programs. Uh, the reality for most people is there is one thing that if you took care of that one thing every day first, a lot of your other issues would go away. Uh I I like to use uh an example um of asking why five times. Um, I kind of develop it, but I know it's out there in the world. And and if somebody said to me, for instance, um I can't exercise, I would say, why? Because I don't have any time in my schedule. Um, I stay up too late and I want to do it at nighttime, and and I can't find a schedule. I said, why? Because I have my work is constant and and I'm taking on all these projects at work and I'm constantly being, you know, being bringing work home and going into work out early. And I would say, why? Well, because I'm the one that everything comes to, and everybody wants to give me the projects and I'm the one who gets it done. And I'd say, why? Because and they would say, because I find real value in being important to other people. So your problem isn't you don't work out, your problem is you you have a hard time saying no, right? Or, you know, we go through this and we find out the problem is you're terrible at time blocking, that you have a hard time staying to your time blocks, and therefore you your day goes away from you. So your problem isn't that you can't work out. So I would ask anybody like write down your problems, start to look at them, and every one of them ask yourself why five times. Get to the, you know, it's peel back the onion and get to the the the real source of your problems. And when you when you have that source of a problem, now you can create a written plan. I um, you know, I'm not a as you and I were talking before we we we went to start to record. I I'm I am Very much about not falling in love with the finish line or falling in love with the goal itself. But I will say that I am also very much about putting things in in writing and putting a plan together that you can execute. And so, you know, a written plan is is super valuable, you know, whether you're creating, I mean, you yourself, you're using in in manual books to this day. I still very much use manual books to write. I like to, I, you know, I have all my workout books for 19 years, handwritten. Even though we all have great apps and things on our phones that can do that, that's my that's my structure. Um, the reason I like written plans is because you need to keep score. You know, not because you you, if you're not keeping score, how do you know if you're winning? And if you're not winning, how can you make adjustments? Right? So, so that's my fourth pillar. Um, you know, the fifth is always the the setbacks that come from execution, right? They're going to come and they're going to come from any point, um, some within your control, some without your control. Um, but when you recognize them, which again, you're going to recognize them by your written plan and by your by your execution, right? When you recognize that that little blip, the things that aren't working, the setback, the the crisis, um, you're more inclined to see it coming when you are documenting your journey, whether that's even journaling or whether that's on a corporate side, that's a proper profit and loss report that comes out monthly. But but it's the the that setback is is is in there for you to see easier than to just go off a feeling, right? At which point you you reevaluate. How do we how do we change? And and my point is that I've always learned more from those setbacks. It doesn't always feel good, right? In every single one of those setbacks, I would always say uh it doesn't feel great, it sucks, you know, I don't want to deal with it. But in every single one of those circumstances, I can always say the outcome was better. You know, talking through it, working through it, every one of those those setbacks, when you address them, will almost always show you a weakness or an improvement that you can then accept again, recommit, right? Recommitting now to to the same, because now we know some more parts of the puzzle, right? Um and then you know the the final two of those pillars, the seventh pillar is is to me the most important of all of them. And it is I call it falling in love with the process. Um and when the process is the thing that you look the most forward to and not the goal, like there'll be a shift in in every person who's trying to move from a hard thing forward every single time. At some point, for true success and true change to happen, you've got to like the process, right? Um, I've been fortunate to talk to professional and collegiate athletes here in the United States, but it works for athletes everywhere. You never meet a professional athlete who hates practice that doesn't exist. They they nobody wins a championship on day one, right? It is a process, it is it is something that in the offseason they work harder at. Like it is they fall in you know in love with the process. When when when you hear an athlete who a professional football player in in Europe and they're kind of riding out the end of their career, it's not the championships that they don't know what to do with. It's the fact that since they were small children, they lived in a process that they love. And now they're in their 40s, if they're lucky, sometimes in their 30s, and they have to give it up. And so I use that example all the time of why it's so important to love the process. Because when you love the process, you just want the finish line to move, right? So when you look at like a corporate executive or somebody who you know has an annual goal for sales, okay? Salespeople are great because salespeople generally have this goal and it usually ends on December 31st, right? Follow the calendar year. If they have a great year, you know what the first thing they think about in January is how do I repeat it? How do I redo it again, right? If they had a down year, their first thing they think about is how do I get it up for next year? I encourage people all the time, stay in these three month, four-month periods of time and just keep improving. Don't don't look at this finish line, because the other part is when you do talk to people who have done fantastic things where they've achieved a significant goal, almost 100% of the time, there's this big letdown that comes from something you worked at very hard, say six months, a year, 10 years. And when you get to that pinnacle, you almost always feel like let down because it was the grind, the process that ultimately became your support system and your identity, not the achievement. Um and then my last pillar is is taking wins, which again, small wins are huge valuable things for for people to identify. The I showed up this week three times out of uh, you know, the fact that I read you know four hours this week of a book. Like those are small wins, but they're valuable. Um, I'm also a a I call it trophy guy, but put it surrounding yourself with symbols of wins or or reminders is is very valuable for for human nature. Um, you know, for you to look at a book that you got published on a shelf doesn't remind you of whatever it did after it was sold. It reminds you of the work that you put in, right? Uh to get to it, right? Everyone who runs a marathon and finishes the the race gets a metal put around their neck when they when they cross the finish line. Those metals sit in people's offices or sit in their living rooms, and they look at that not as they I did I won the race, they look at it at the work that they put in to run 26 miles. It's a symbol of of work. So for me, sometimes, you know, the the helicopter that that saved my life. Um, I was taken to to Penn State University Medical Center, which is outside of Hershey, Pennsylvania. So Hershey Chocolate for the world and Penn State. Um, it's not where the university is, it's a separate, it's two hours from the university. But they have these helicopters called Lifeline because they're the Penn State Knitly Lion. So they're helicopters or uh rescue helicopters. I have one of those sitting in my office as as a model. And when I look at that, it doesn't remind me that their helicopter saved my life. It reminds me that they're a high-efficiency operation, five departments, all operating as seamlessly as possible so that people like me survive. So every time I look at that, or they gave me a flight suit because I went and spoke to their entire organization. So they wear flight suits like pilots, and they gave me one, and it hangs up in the corner of my office. And every time I look at it, it just reminds me of their commitment to their systems. Like they're they're a business, but they're a business who saved my life, and they saved my life because they operated at a very high efficiency and very much executionable. Their wins are people like me who survive, and they also go home every night with people like me who don't make it. Um, and so like I think about that in the medical profession all the time. Like in an emergency room where I was, I came in at one o'clock in the afternoon. The shift over was at five o'clock. All those emergency doctors and nurses stayed for me, and the second group came in. So I got two groups of ER emergency doctors and nurses working on me to save my life. And again, you just think about those are wins. Like I'm a I'm a when I stand in front of them and speak, I'm a win for them. I'm I'm a trophy.

SPEAKER_01 32:04

I'm I'm amazing. And I really like it how you have uh divided that into eight pillars. And uh before we wrap up, uh please let us know where we can uh get in touch with you and uh where we can buy your book.

SPEAKER_00 32:20

So the books, the books are available for Amazon, um, all the normal places. It's uh we have European sales. So if you have some European clients that uh they're there as well. Um, the easiest way to connect to me is just my website, which is johnolsch.com, so j-o-h nulsh.com. From there, you can find my social media links. We are where I'm constantly posting uh on social just short little positive videos on how to deal with with setback and diversity. Um from my website, you can also find my my individual and group coaching programs. Uh, you can find me to speak at at an event. So my my website is is pretty much the landing for anything, uh including you can get a link there directly to Amazon or Barnes and Noble for for books as well. Um but but yeah, johnholsch.com is the best place to start, and from there, you know, follow me on social for sure.

SPEAKER_01 33:19

John, thank you for all these amazing insights and thank you for being my guest tonight.

SPEAKER_00 33:24

Well, thank you, Peter. I appreciate it.