Rebecca Johnson, President and CEO of Golden Heart Indy, shares how she overcame personal struggles and the important lessons to apply in your own life.
Here is the transcript:
Ryan
Next up, we have our five minute speaker this evening, Rebecca Johnson, who is a former teacher and the owner of Golden Heart senior care, and she is going to share. With us her story.
Rebecca
Hello, can you hear me alright? Like Ryan said, my name is Rebecca Johnson and I own Golden Heart senior care. Growing up, I was a pretty determined person. For example, I knew I wanted to go to college and knew that my family couldn’t afford it. So I worked really hard, volunteered for things, applied for scholarships, and ended up getting to go to college on scholarship. The part time job in high school, I was a track athlete. I threw discus and I had a pretty good affinity for it. But. That there was a girl that was better than me and that wasn’t going to stand. So I practiced, worked hard, worked on my form and my senior year, I won my league for discus. We adopted three children from foster care and due to the trauma, they’ve got a lot of things that we’ve had to navigate. We’ve had to navigate mental health issues. We’ve had to navigate school issues and many more. Things. If you’ve ever met my children, though, you can say that they’re turning out to be pretty fantastic humans. So Despite that, and knowing that I’m very tenacious and determined, the last couple of years have thrown me a ton of curveballs. Not only COVID, but starting a business, navigating a house fire, having a major crisis with my oldest daughter, my my husband unexpectedly losing his job. But the final straw? Well, was that I started to get very tired and when I say tired, I mean intensely tired, falling asleep, sitting up, feeling like I was going to pass out my heart racing could not figure out what it was. We ran all the tests I thought, well, I’m just stressed, right. But it kept getting worse to the point where. Towards the end I was able to function for about an hour and then I would have to sleep for three or four hours. So because of this, and thankfully my doctors and I figured it out. Three abdominal surgeries later, lots of scares and I’m on my way back. To healing. But in the midst of this, I was trying to run a business. My clients weren’t able to get a hold of me because I was sleeping. I couldn’t be responsive to caregivers, so I was losing. Good people, the ones that I could get ahold of, weren’t reliable, so I had to let. Them go and. My ship was seriously taking on water. I wasn’t sure how I was going to be able to. Write it so this could have been the end of my story as a business owner, but I’m tenacious and I’m determined. And I wasn’t gonna let that stop me. So first I prayed a lot. But then I next reached out to my amazing husband. I’m not going to look at him because I’ll cry. He helped me make some really brave decisions to let people know that I was struggling. He started to visit businesses. He started to help me hire people and just really helped me to support me. To get through that. I also approached we also approached our franchise and asked for some help. They gave us some financial assistance which was helpful and I got really brave and I started sharing with some trusted people like Polly and like Jennifer that I was really struggling, that I needed referral champions and boy did they really help me. But they didn’t just rely on those things. I started packing my schedule with one on ones and networking meetings. I reached out to people I had previously just been saying hello to and got honest and specific with the asks that I had, and I renewed acquaintances with people that I had met before but hadn’t really heard my story. I looked at the market and I got creative with solutions that I had so that I could be set apart from other agencies and I worked with people to give back. We just did a fundraiser for the Alzheimer’s Foundation and raised $15,000 because it’s more than just that. So I didn’t give up as of this week, I have 16. Valid employee. I have 21 happy clients and I got to pay myself this. Week So what can I take away from this one and speak up? Don’t suffer in silence. Find people that can be your champions. Your brain. Help your accountability partners and let them lift you up too. Create an action plan that is manageable and achievable. Steps so that you can consistently work on those and don’t give up. And three, remember why you do what you do. Use that to drive your work. Keep it in. In front of you, if you have to talk to someone that you haven’t talked to in the past that you helped do that have a picture of them. Find ways to remember what you do because talking to people and keeping that passion is crucial. In the end, don’t give up. We’re here for you and you can do it with just a little bit of determination. Thank you.
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