Life's what you make it...you can do and BE anything you want, Queen.
Dr. Neeta Bhushan is the prime example of what it looks like to dream and achieve. As a cosmetic dentist turned best-selling author, transformational speaker, advocate of emotional health AND podcast host...she has flipped her life upside down to transform smiles from the inside out, rather than the other way around.
Neeta is the founder of the Global GRIT Institute, co-founder of The Dharma Coaching Institute, and a three-time international best-selling author of multiple books including her newest release, That Sucked, Now What? (I'll link it below, too.) She left her large-scale dental practice to embark on a journey that led her across 45 countries as she researched blending the intersection of human behavior, ancient wisdom, Eastern philosophy, and therapeutic psychology.
Sparked by her own life experience of overcoming multiple adversities, which includes being orphaned at a young age, surviving an abusive marriage of domestic violence, and extensive loss, the power of Neeta's coaching and her message continues to transform the lives of thousands across the globe, from organizations to everyday people looking to step into their greatness.
I have had the unique privilege of getting to know Neeta personally, and let me tell you...she is just as wonderful of a friend, peer, and mother as she is an entrepreneurial force.
It is an honor to share our conversation with you, as we discuss how to build your audacious resilience after human “life” moments.
Enjoy!
Listen to the episode:
WAIT...there's more! ✨✨ Tune into our episode on Neeta's show The Brave Table Podcast:
"How to Stop Playing Small with Your Potential and Leverage Your Personal Brand To Achieve Success" ⭐️⭐️
That Sucked, Now What?: How to Embrace the Joy in Chaos and Find Magic in the Mess
AVAILABLE JANUARY 31st, 2023
Want to read the transcript? We've got you, Queen:
Neeta Bhushan 00:00
How can we increase our bounce factors so that when life happenings do happen, that we're not so overwhelmed, and there's four, you know, criteria to that.
Allison Walsh 00:15
Hello and welcome to the She Believed She Could podcast. I'm your host Allison Walsh. I'm a corporate executive, entrepreneur, coach, professional speaker and mom of three who is obsessed with mindset, confidence, brand building and helping you create the life and career that you can't stop thinking about. If you're a queen who's chasing your dreams, you are in the right place. I love nothing more than empowering you and equipping you with inspiration, motivation, and the resources you need to make your goals a reality. This show is designed with your dreams in mind. And I am so excited for you to soak up the knowledge and wisdom that my incredible network of guests will share with you. Their successful leaders, impact makers and world changers and they're coming in hot with words of wisdom to help you go farther, faster, and make epic things happen for your future. Remember that I believe in you 1,000% And my goal is that you do too. Never forget that you are a queen and you deserve to have it all. So sit back, relax and get your favorite note taking device because you're about to receive positive vibes and advice that will help you level up in business and in life. Now let's get to work.
I am so excited to introduce you to Dr. Neeta Bhushan. She's a cosmetic dentist turned best selling author, transformational speaker, advocate of emotional health and the host of the Brave Table podcast, which is absolutely phenomenal. She is the founder of the global GRIT Institute and cofounder of the Dharma Coaching Institute, and an International Best Selling Author of multiple books, her fourth book "That Sucked: Now What?" is available in January 2023, but you can pre-order it right now. We're gonna get into all of this information today. Long story short, she left her very successful dental practice to transform people inside and out across 45 countries as she researched blending the intersection of human behavior, ancient wisdom, Eastern philosophy and therapeutic psychology. Sparked by her own life experience of overcoming multiple adversities which includes being orphaned at a young age, surviving an abusive marriage of domestic violence, and extensive loss. The power of her coaching and her message continues to transform the lives of 1000s across the globe, from organizations to everyday people looking to step into their greatness. She's a mother of two and currently lives in Austin, Texas. For more information about her book go to thatsucksnowwhat.com. We're going to talk all about this today and I am so excited for you to get to meet this powerhouse, this kind soul, this amazing person. So let's jump right in. I am so excited to have you on the show today. Would you mind introducing yourself to our audience?
Neeta Bhushan 03:07
Yes, thank you, Allison. I'm Dr. Neeta Bhushan, and I am the host of the Brave Table Podcast. I'm also a mother of two, I'm an entrepreneur and my passions lie in emotional health and mental well being. So here we are.
Allison Walsh 03:26
I love this, we're gonna have a great conversation. Would you mind just like sharing a little bit more of your background and how you got to this place? Because this wasn't the initial career path. Right?
Neeta Bhushan 03:36
No, yeah, Oh, my gosh, well, if we had to go back, wow, that would that would be a really long episode. But we Yeah, so I was born and raised in Chicago and to immigrant parents, my dad was from India, my mom was from the Philippines. And my, you know, very first career was it was like, what every brown person should become right? Doctor, dentist, lawyer, engineer. And so that's literally what I did. Not all of those things. Although that would probably be, you know, that would check their boxes for sure. But I was a cosmetic dentist. And I had a huge practice in the suburbs of Chicago if you're familiar. And yeah, and I mean, I grew it to the I mean, very big, very fast. I was not even 30 was over seven figures. I had an entire team I really knew. And that was kind of one of the skill sets that I learned so easy and fast. Just growing up early. I mean, at 10 years old, I was a caretaker to my mother and kind of she, you know, endured the slow battle with with breast cancer and so from 10 to 16. That was literally You know, my, my childhood was spent in and out of hospitals, not for me but for caretaking of my mother. And then a year after my mom died, my brother suddenly collapsed in front of his high school. And he was 15 years old. And I was a senior in high school. And so there I am, like wanting to go away to college so bad, you know, and got into all of my dream schools and couldn't because I had to take care of the family. And then two years later, we would get another, like traumatic blow. And it was my father who was diagnosed with stage four, cancer. And so it's a lot. So at 19, I lost my mother, my brother and my father. And so that would definitely inform me being really good at negotiating and business and, and a lot of external things, studies, etc. Because I buried a lot of my own grief, my own sadness, my own trauma for pretty much two decades. And so, my biggest rock bottom, really hit after, you know, I had my first seven figures, but I'm barely 29 years old, but I'm in a marriage that I knew was toxic. And I knew I was, you know, it wasn't that happy, you know, fairytale ending, and I knew I had to get out. And I knew I was stuck. So I needed to really come to terms with getting clear on saying yes to myself, and, you know, defying everyone around me, and you know, all of my traditional family members who wanted something different for me, and really claiming my voice. And so that's when I regained my voice at at 30. Leaving that, that toxic marriage that really gave birth to everything that I would be doing now. Which is, you know, healing and, you know, emotional health and really leading from the feminine and really honoring your, the way that, you know, our truest essence of who we are, and what makes us come alive and in through the kind of crumbling and the falling. And for anybody who's been through a divorce or any sort of loss or any sort of trauma. You know, those are big life happenings. And for me, it was it was a coming back to myself, and a rebirth. It was painful, it was dark, it was all of the things that we know, but you know, being able for me to say yes, and to remove this facade of I have to be strong, I have to be strong, because I had to be strong I when I was 10, and 15, and 17, and 19. And just to let it all fall apart, because in the falling apart, was when I was able to regain the strength and the love back to myself that really, you know, I so desperately needed to release all of that, you know, pent up grief, sadness, anger, frustration, for two decades.
Allison Walsh 08:28
Your story is so powerful. And I'm sure that for those listening, there's pieces of it, you've gone through so much, right. And there's so many pieces that others can say, I've went through that too, or I feel really stuck, or, you know, I feel like my life has crumbled, or things are so different. And I'm not where I want to be and but you provide so much hope for those listening, and you teach people really how to bounce back and to find themselves again. So can we talk a little bit about that I'd love to kind of stay here and share more about what you do to help people kind of emerge right after difficulties and really find themselves and connect and live their authentic lives and everything. So can you share more about that?
Neeta Bhushan 09:12
Yeah. And so, you know, throughout my research after I realized that, you know, we all have stories, and we all have setbacks, we all have challenges, we all have adversities, and it gives rise to a better version of us, right? In the moment, it sucks, and it sucks really bad. And for most of my early life, I did not want to embrace the suck, or the sucky moments that were happening and until I really allowed myself to really sit in the suck of my divorce that didn't go well of you know, the relationship that I suppress my own feelings, you know, and then to walk a different path I started to then research and I work with 1000s of different people from, you know, Shaman, psychedelics, to therapists, different modalities of healing to really come to terms and really understand how we all make decisions. And it took me, you know, going to different, 45 Different countries, interviewing over 500 people, coming up with my first book, Emotional Grit. And then kind of segwaying it to this term that I've now started talking about just in all different ways. But this term that we have called the bounce factor, and there's four different ways that we actually can increase our bounce factor, if you are stuck, if you are feeling that, oh, man, I can't I can't deal with another thing happening. I just talked to a girlfriend yesterday. And she's like, you know, my, you know, this thing's out of whack my kids screaming and crying, I have an elderly parent that's not doing well. And we're all we're in this stage of our lives where we have smaller children, and we might have aging parents. And then we stop, you know, our own businesses, because it's like, I have to take care of everybody else. But can we increase our bounce factors so that when life happenings do happen, that we're not so overwhelmed, and there's four, you know, criteria to that the first one is to really understand your upbringing. And, you know, how you were raised? Was, were you in an area? Or, you know, in your family? Did they even voice your opinion? Were your opinions even valid? Were you forced to become a doctor, dentist lawyer? Or was that like the norm? And that, you know, that was really all you had, so that you couldn't really express yourself? Number two, number three, you know, were you, you know, were you raised by helicopter parents or, or were you raised kind of like, you know, street cred and, and doing things on your own. So it's, you can't change your upbringing, but what you can do is make peace with it. And most of us, either we shy away from it, or we distract ourselves, because it's too, it's too hard to start reconciling or healing the past. So that's the first. The second is good stress. And what I mean by that is, how often are you exposing yourself to new things in your environment? And so for anybody who is afraid to speak, you know, the Speak Up in a crowd or at the boardroom? or speak up your boundaries and share when something is off or wrong? How can you increase that every single day so that you are exposed to good stress? And some examples of this could be? Do you like taking cold showers like that's a physical response to positive stress, because we know all the good stuff from cold water, right, we know, we know that it ,you know, it activates endorphins it like, you know, fat loss, all of the things it wakes us up energizes us, but most of us like even myself, I'm like, there's no way I'm gonna sit in that water for like, you know, a minute, but maybe I'll take a 10 second cold shower. And maybe tomorrow, it could be 15 seconds. And I'm using an out an analogy of, you know, cold water as something that could be as easy as maybe getting your hands dirty and playing in the dirt with your kids. Another example of good stress that you can expose yourself to, or even maybe if you're, you know, you have your business, you can go live on Instagram, or on Facebook, right. And without any prepared notes, just go live and really tune in. And some of you probably are listening to this and like, Oh, my God, I would never ever do that. But that is an example of good stress. Right? And so, so that's, so that's number two, exposing yourself to good stress. Number three is your emotional capacity. What is that capacity for you to feel? Because like I said before, during tough times, and I did it too early, or in my life where I would avoid, I would distract, I would numb and we have our very cute little device that we could numb ourselves with. And that's like the dopamine advice right? device, which is our phones, right? All we need to do is swipe and swipe and swipe and we activate our brains in a different way. And we can forget all of the shitty things that happened in the day. But what if we did allow ourselves to stretch where it was uncomfortable to really feel when it was really discomforting, because that's when we grow the most. And then finally, the awareness piece. So the last piece of this bounce factor is your own awareness. I was not aware, before that I had a lot of this healing to do even though I've seen therapists and I grew up with therapists my whole life. But it was, it was not until I actually took personal responsibility throughout a lot of the things that I invited in my life. And so for you, if you are feeling stuck, if you are attracting the same kinds of patterns, or bad employees, or bad team members or bad situations or thing just doesn't seem like anything's working at this point. Where are you neglecting yourself, right? Where are you having the gaps in the blind spots where you can't really see or you're not paying attention to? Or you're still avoiding? How can we actually have more awareness? And it starts with just as simple as our body? Right? Have you ever wondered what it feels like? And you can tune into your body and take 10 seconds for this? But can you focus on your right toe right now? Does it feel weird? or achy? Or maybe it feels like oh, my gosh, I've been wearing those high heels? And that does feel kind of hurts? And how does it feel in relation to your left big toe. And you can do this with every single part. Now you can move that up. And you can pay attention to your right ankle versus your left ankle. And you can just take a breath there. And so it starts with that body awareness of ourselves. Where do we feel tension? Is that Is it your right shoulder versus your left shoulder, maybe it's your right hip that has a lot more pain than your left hip. Or maybe your right side of your head is having more tension than your left side of your head. It starts with just tiny little awareness practices like that to see, hey, then we can make those bigger decisions like, Hmm, I was gonna hire this person today. But there's something off with that person. And I'm going to trust it this time. Because usually, I don't trust it. And I see everything on paper. And I'm like, man, they're great. And they can solve all the problems for me. But I didn't check in with my gut. And we have way more neurons in our gut than we do in our brain. Yet we avoid that. So if we can fine tune that, that's really increasing our bounce factor that we can have every single day. So that when tough moments, then whether it's getting a parking ticket, or getting stopped by a police officer, because they thought you were speeding, to, your right hand person quitting on you to, you know, a big relationship ending. That's how we can actually move forward and even fly forward.
Allison Walsh 17:56
Neeta, this was so powerful, thank you, because you really shared so many valuable pieces of wisdom to of really how to check in with yourself, right, and then what to do. And I think ultimately, when hard things happen to our body's natural tendency is to fight, flight or freeze. And you know, in addition to numbing, and distracting, and, you know, avoiding and all of these things, we have to just be so mindful of what's happening around us and giving us ourselves, the grace and the space. And the support and allowing ourselves to receive the support to is so important. Because we don't have to do this alone. We don't have to figure it all out by ourselves. But we do need to be mindful. And we do need to look for solutions and guidance along the way. And you just have so many wonderful things to share with the world. And you've written books, you got another one in the works, you've got to share with everybody more about what you have. Yes, the world in addition to the beautiful children that you have already?
Neeta Bhushan 18:59
Absolutely, absolutely, yes, my next book "That sucked, now what?: How to Embrace the Joys and Chaos and find Magic in the Mess" that is coming out in early 2023. So January of 2023. I'll share with you all where you can pre order the book and get some really exciting bonuses. So that is really my life's work and kind of all of the things that I have even integrated from my very first book, Emotional Grit in 2016. And now putting it all together because now as a mom of two and several different businesses, where I either co-teach or Co-facilitate. There's a lot on our plates and how can we actually embrace the chaos there and I talk about brave moments on you know, the Brave Table podcast and so yeah, you can find me on Instagram as well @Neetabhushan.
Allison Walsh 19:59
Excellent, well, and you know, we are readers here. So I'm sure everybody's going to pick up a copy of your books. But who else do you recommend for the audience to either listen to or read?
Neeta Bhushan 20:09
Oh, gosh, you know, there is this book that just came across my desk. And it is called "Us" by Terence my getting his name Terrence Real. Yes. And it is, it's amazing when you are navigating through relationships, and interpersonal relationships, and even love relationships. And so my husband and I have committed to like one book, you know, a month that we are both actually diving into together because we're, we're in the thickness of it. I just told Allison before I got on the podcast that our kids are one and three. And so you know, it's so important to kind of have that container for ourselves. And so for anybody who is in the thickness of it, too, or just wants to rekindle that either for themselves. The book, it's called "Us" by Terrence Real, I think it, yeah, Terrence Real, R E A L.
Allison Walsh 21:07
Love that, well, I'm gonna add that to the show notes, too. We love good books. And it is important to take care of those relationships, right? Like, it's so important to have that time with your spouse, your partner, a special person in your life, and to be able to read something like that together is fabulous. One more question for you. Before we go, though, what does that mean to you?
Neeta Bhushan 21:26
Oh, confidence, it means that you are brave enough to know that there may be fear around the things that you're doing, but you're going to be unapologetic. And do it anyway.
Allison Walsh 21:47
I love that we can end it right there. That was perfect. Thank you so much for being on the show today. Grateful for you. Thank you for all you do for others. And it's just been a real pleasure.
Neeta Bhushan 21:59
Amazing. Thank you so much, Allison, I love this.
Allison Walsh 22:05
I hope you've loved the show. If you did, please head on over to Apple podcasts and leave us a five star review. It makes a big difference and helps a lot more queens who are chasing their dreams to find the show too. We work really hard on creating a quality production and I want to make sure as many people that need to listen to it can so we appreciate your help in advance. And of course check out the show notes we always include lots of great information in there as well as links so that you can continue the conversation or access additional support or resources or the book recommendations from our guests. So please check that out. We would love for you to continue to stay engaged with our beautiful community. You can also access this She Believed She Could Facebook community from the link in the show notes as well. And you know, we'll be continuing the conversation at Allison Walsh on Instagram. So please join us there. And remember, I believe in you 1,000% And my goal is that you do too, so please stay connected. Let me know how I can support you as you chase and accomplish your goals. I'm always happy to make a connection or maybe it's just to fill up your cup and tell you that you're an awesome queen that can accomplish anything that you set your mind to so whatever you need, I'm here for you. I'm so excited for you. Stay focused, beautiful, it is all within reach, and you deserve abundant success. Talk to you soon. Bye.