Although life can be challenging, embracing self-leadership empowers us to overcome obstacles, turn hardships into chances, and create a brighter future through our own efforts. Today, our guest is the remarkable Dr. Andrea Renee Rivera, a renowned jewelry designer turned acupuncturist. She shares her inspiring journey of resilience, personal growth, and self-leadership. Dr. Rivera dives deep into the rabbit hole of acupuncture, exploring the profound benefits it can bring to our physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. She also shares practical strategies for navigating adversity and embracing change with grace and determination. Tune in and discover the power within you to overcome any obstacle that comes your way.
LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE
Navigating Life’s Detours: The Roadmap To Acupuncture And Self-Leadership With Dr. Andrea Renee Rivera
Welcome to the show. Thank you for taking the time to spend it with us. With me, as always, is your other co-host, Andy McDowell. Andy, it is great to talk to you.
It is great to talk to you as well. Our season is running down. We only got three left. It’s been a heck of a ride. We crossed 10,000 downloads in almost 3 years. We’re excited about that. We’re hoping that means that the message is getting out to people. I remind everybody that value doesn’t get generated unless you share it with others and give them the opportunity to read and get some value out of the conversation. Otherwise, it sits out in the internetverse, twitterverse, universe or whatever term you want to use. The value doesn’t get generated unless people have the opportunity to know about it and read it.
We want to compound that generation of value we have so far.
We always want to. I don’t know if people understand that concept in the financial world but as you and I talk about all the time, value comes in different colors, flavors and everything. I always want to be compounding value no matter what kind of form it shows up in. We’re going to move on. I’m here to tell you, Zach, that you and I have a challenge. That challenge is to extract all the wisdom and value our guest is going to bring to us. In that 50 to 55-minute range, we typically go in. To give our audience a clue, my first initial phone call with our guest went for 2 hours before we realized it was 2 hours. We went, “We got to get on with our day,” because we probably could have gone for another two hours. It’s a dynamic person.
Our guest is Dr. Andrea Renee Rivera. She’s out in California. She wasn’t in California the whole time. She was on the East Coast for a number of years. She enjoyed fifteen years of international claim in the jewelry business. She made custom innovative jewelry designs based out of the SoHo District in New York City. It got attention very rapidly, particularly from celebrities, from what she had offered. Let me read you some of the celebrities here. They are Drew Barrymore, Johnny Depp and Julianne Moore, to name a few that recognized her creative abilities in the area of jewelry design.
She then had a major life event, which we’ll allow her to talk about, that changed her whole focus in her life. She moved out to California and got into the world of wellness because of the issues she faced from her life event. She got into the world of acupuncture. She is a doctor in the world of acupuncture and the benefits that it brings. We’re going to dive down that rabbit hole as well as to all about acupuncture and what it can bring. Let’s bring her in.
Dr. Andrea, welcome to the show. We can’t thank you enough for taking your early morning time, being here in California and on the other side of the country.
It’s my pleasure to contribute. I feel it’s an honor and privilege to be here. My goal is to contribute from what I know, my life experience, what I studied and what I practiced to benefit people’s lives. Making a lasting positive impact is what I’ve been committed to for quite some time. For me, it’s a trial by fire, a cautionary tale my life has been. I would hope that by sharing my story on how I became a doctor of acupuncture and Chinese medicine and the miracles that I get to be a part of as I practice this medicine and live this medicine and embody it that I can transform lives.
The greatest invitation I can make is to invite everyone to become their own medicine, which is something I’ve been working on since 2007 myself. I’m a living example of what’s possible when this medicine is applied to your life on a regular basis and how it can turn health conditions around and also create an incredible state of a rich life experience and peak performance. It’s quite wonderful.
I like to say I went to Hogwarts to become a wizard, going to acupuncture college. My goal is to go full Jedi and have less hustle. I’ve had the great honor and privilege of being able to have mentorship from actual real-life Jedi wizards for real. When we look at this as a complete holistic healing system and what’s possible over the 8,000 years of wisdom that it’s been practiced, taught and passed for a reason, people died to pass this on to us because it’s quite effective and quite an experience. To become a living mind and body master is quite something. I love the opportunity to share that in a practical way that’s easy to understand and apply in real life daily so that people can start to experience that.
We are going to dive into that a little bit later in the conversation. Those that regularly tune in to us understand we’re big in the power that storytelling can have in connecting to other people. I left some things out of your bio on purpose so that you have an opportunity to take 5, 6 or 7 minutes to talk a little bit about your life story and how it is that you are where you are in life.
It was a great pain and suffering, frankly. I bought into the Nike Just Do It slogan, which was hard work at all costs to your health, relationships and even values at a certain point. I was a scholarship kid. I didn’t have a lot of money. I was hungry. I got into the jewelry business by going to flea markets in New York. I needed to earn some money to eat better and buy a winter coat. I was a highly motivated person based on I come from a working-class do-it-yourself background. I needed to keep my scholarship and eat. I was committed. I was going to take this chance out of suburbia.
I was in Orlando, Florida and I got a scholarship to go get a BFA Bachelor’s degree in New York at Pace University. I was going to make that work even when I was starving so I started selling jewelry. When you show up, you get opportunities offered to you. I was taken under the wing of some wonderful people in the industry that showed me how it worked.
I started to sell to department stores and boutiques all over the world. Henri Bendel was my first one. They referred me to a sales rep, taught me how the industry worked and told me to come back with designs. I didn’t know people worked six months in advance. There were so many things I didn’t know. I was nineteen years old, a fresh college student from suburbia. That was a wonderful experience. It was a rocket ship ride. It was like a hyperspace jump in the Millennium Falcon to a whole other universe. It was a ten-year run.
I worked 80 to 100 hours a week for 7 years without a vacation. I started the business while I was in college so on nights and weekends, it was a massive action kind of plan. It took a while for me to run my health into the ground and all of the energy that I took away from my health, relationships and personal life to catch up with me.
Also, my life was interrupted in 1994 while I was on this whole big run here. I was starting my business in ‘92, getting my first big orders from department stores, opening my boutique in SoHo in New York Downtown and selling to department stores and boutiques like Barneys, Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s and what have you. I got hit by a car right before my Macy’s order. It was a big deal to get bought by Macy’s and a big deal to have a case with my name on it. My jewelry company was called Andrea Renee. To have that case with my name on it in Macy’s 34th Street that I grew up watching in old movies, Miracle on 34th Street, I was a common kid from suburbia so that was amazing.
I got hit by a taxi cab on my way home from work from my store as a pedestrian in the street. The cab was going over 40 miles an hour. That’s a 90% chance of death. It was one of those things that were like a God thing because there was an off-duty cop at the bus stop at 23rd and Madison Avenue that saw the whole thing go down at about 9:30 at night in February 1994. He stopped the taxi from driving away and called the ambulance. That started this whole journey after that.
That was the first invitation that I had to make some big life choices and start to open myself up to what it would mean to become your own medicine to be empowered to help yourself. You go for more than one opinion and it gets scary. The 1st and 2nd guys say the same thing. It sounds not so good. I was a young kid at the time. I was born in ’73. This is ’94. I was 21 years old. I was about to graduate college. I did summer school so I could leave early and go work in my business. I wasn’t ready for all this.
It is the whole idea of not just the recovery from the injuries of the accident but then, you’re going to have these surgeries and have recovery from that. It’s like, “This derails my whole life. What does that mean for the rest of my life?” I wasn’t a sports kid. I never had any broken bones. I had a cavity and braces. Those were the big medical interventions I had growing up. I had a skinned knee. I fell off my bicycle.
I was lucky. I saw an older gentleman who had a lot of life experience in his clinical practice. He told me straight up, “You’re young. Most of the time, when people get all these surgeries replacing joints and all this stuff, they’re older. This stuff has a shelf life. You’ll be back. If you start at 21 years old, how many times are you going to come back? Every ten years, are you going to get some new knees? This is what it is.”
He also said, “The pain you’re in now, the surgery is still invasive. You can have pain after the surgery. There’s no guarantee that you’re going to have less pain than you do after the surgery than you do now. There’s no guarantee that it’s going to fix everything for you. That’s not the way it works. You’re going to have the recovery time from the surgery too. You already have this trajectory of how long it’s going to take you to recover without surgery. We’re then going to start the clock again for you. We’re going to do one surgery at a time. You’re young.”
I had the walk signal. I didn’t even know anybody was coming. I was tired after work going home from my store. I was going to school and working and all this stuff. I was so relaxed I was like a wet noodle. Thank God. I didn’t have any tension. I had less severe injuries than I could have. I could have been broken up. He said, “Honestly, considering what happened, you could give yourself a chance and see where you land.”
He said, “You can always come back for surgery. Why don’t you get into physical therapy, some yoga or some things that you can do to live your life in a way that’s going to help you ameliorate your pain and give you some quality of life? If things go south, come back and see me in a decade. I’ll help you out. Why don’t you see where you land first?”
It was such a relief and amazing because it was so empowering. Everybody else was telling me I couldn’t help myself and I needed them or I was going to be screwed. The trajectory with painkillers, we had a whole opioid crisis that got popular in the news a while back. If you keep taking painkiller prescriptions or medication, you build a tolerance and it stops working for you. It gives you organ failure. It will kill you. If you’re going to start taking some heavy opioid painkillers at 21, that might not last too long, frankly. That was heavy.
If you’re going to start taking some heavy opioid painkillers at 21, that might not last too long.
What was that like for you to hear that news? What was running through your head when you have a doctor that was coming back and saying, “You might want to think outside the box?”
It was empowering. The other conversations I had made it sound like I was on an express train to hell into an unknown territory that probably wouldn’t look so good for the rest of my life and that I might not ever have a normal life.
I don’t know if crisis is the right word but you have a moment of a huge dose of reality. You’re being empowered by somebody to think outside the box. You have a self-leadership opportunity.
It was the first time I had taken that on too. All of the career counseling in high school is all like, “Be a cog in a machine. Get a job. Become a slave to somebody else. Be a part of a totalitarian dictatorship regime. Do what you’re told. Find a place where you can plug in and be directed by somebody else.” In modern allopathic Western medicine, healthcare tends to come from that dictatorship point of view. The true meaning of a doctor is a teacher.
Our role is to be a facilitator to educate people and make informed decisions like this orthopedic surgeon did for me. It is to explain the lay of the land so that I could make informed decisions for myself to tell me what I didn’t know. On a very long-range trajectory too, it’s like, “This is what it’s going to be for you. If you go down this path, this is what the next 20 or 30 years are going to be for you. You might not make it past that point. You could be dead in your 50s or 60s, for sure and never have a normal life. Are you hearing me?” That’s a real possibility.
As we say on this show, you have a moment to be the CEO of your life. Take control of it to be empowered and make decisions for yourself that bring out the best result for you.
You have to be honest with yourself too. You have to know yourself, what you’re willing to do and who you are. I was born in Chicago and moved to Florida when I was nine. I was bullied as a kid. I did not fit in. I had already had some grit. That’s what made me go after the scholarship. That’s what made me go after working while I was in school and making stuff work. I already had hunger. I had some grit and will. I knew if I was given direction and got committed, I would follow through. I was already in that mindset of, “I’ll do whatever it takes. Tell me what the best thing is to do that makes sense to me and I’ll do it.” We have to be real.
I was willing to do any type of yoga, physical therapy, Qigong, meditation and breathwork. I was willing to go to acupuncture college so I could learn how to fix myself. I give myself acupuncture every single day. I do four hours of self-care every single day minimum so that I can have a normal life. It was so I didn’t have to have multiple surgeries or take painkiller medications and I could be of benefit to the world, be able to work and have a decent quality of life. I’ve been willing to be committed even at a high cost to all of the luxuries of TV. I don’t have a TV and all these things. You have to be clear about who you are and what you’re willing to do. That’s how you can be a leader in your life.
On that point of self-leadership, that’s so important. We’ve talked so many times. I go back to our first season, Andy. True leadership starts with self-leadership. What do you feel are the cornerstones of that self-leadership for someone?
For me, the most important three lessons that I learned the hard way from this life experience is that it’s imperative to be clear on what is the vision for your life. You got to have that blueprint and know where you’re going. You can’t set your GPS to go anywhere if you don’t know where you’re going. You have to be real with yourself too and your strategy. There are a lot of strategies to get to where you want to go but what are you willing to do? What are you going to show up in and do no matter what?
Clarity is so important because you have to have your vision and destination. You have to have your strategy for how to get there. When you know your values and ethics, that’s your North Star of where you operate your compass from. The vision is the compass. The strategy is the map. The North Star is your values and ethics. You have to have that solid ground to stand on. From being hungry and wanting to bust out and make some kind of life for me, I didn’t until much later take the time to understand that I needed this clarity.
When you know your values and your ethics, that’s the North Star of where you operate your compass from.
When I come from that place, then it’s easy for me to be courageous and keep going no matter what. I’m very clear that the destination that I’m working towards is something that I am committed to doing or dying over. I’m living for it. It matters enough to me that it’s worth my life because that’s what I’m giving it. We can’t get the day, time and energy back. This is a finite experience here in this lifetime. What I’m doing has to be worth it to me because I’m dying for it every day. It’s not just a job to make money, pay bills and be in a house because things get hard. You have to be courageous.
Going down that path, you’re not only generating value for yourself but for others by talking about your experience. You’re saying, “I’m blazing a path. I’m at the lead of the pack. This is what I’m learning as I’m blazing that path. Come follow me. We’re going to go figure it out together.”
It is being honest too. You got to be clear to be committed and courageous. Courageous means you’re walking away from your comfort zones. You’re going out into unknown territory as you explore. You’re walking right into the belly of the beast of fear. You’re facing it head-on by choice.
You need to walk through it.
That’s correct. You’re not letting it shut you down no matter how hard it hurts, how scary it is, how frightening it is or how overwhelming it is. For me, it’s been essential to be that tuned into my truth. I live my truth no matter what at any cost. I can make fun of myself, call myself out, admit when I’m wrong, be vulnerable and ask for help. It takes a lot of courage.
It’s a tragedy and triumph game we’re playing here. We only fail when we don’t get up. We’re going to fail and fall on our faces. It’s going to get dirty and hurt. We bleed over and over again. The game is, “When I fall on my face and this time, I’m studying Hapkido, I’m going to roll.” I’m studying Hapkido. The other guys, since I started, fall, roll and stand right up. I’m like, “That’s the way to do it. That’s the game of life and how to play it. I got to learn how to roll and pop up.”
I don’t think you realize and Andy probably didn’t brief you but my office’s mantra is courageous.
I love that. I have a pendant. It is the Chinese character for courage.
We could press on that for another two episodes probably.
This is behavioral psychology. Arguably, the most successful behavioral psychology strategy is to be courageous. You have a different cascade of physiological responses, neurotransmitters and hormones. Our state of being is entirely different when we are courageously choosing to go forward and face the dragon and the forest fire as opposed to being emotionally reactive and shying back. It is that fight or flight zone. What’s so vitally important is that we understand that the only way to truly operate in the world successfully is to be committed to being courageous. It’s the only way to heal ourselves, be empowered and move forward in life. There’s nothing else to do.
You mentioned the neurotransmitters and all that. It’s a mindset. It’s that self-leadership leading to a mindset. How are the mind, body and also spirit connected?
Mind-body mastery is the game that we’re playing here. The mind is more than our thoughts. Our minds are our feelings as well. We could say the mind is the spirit realm as well. It’s all interconnected. We have our subconscious which can be called our soul, karma, personality or life experience. If we attune ourselves to be able to connect to the superconscious or we could say cosmic intelligence, there’s the collective unconscious like Carl Jung described it.
In traditional Chinese medicine, that’s the dao. This is natural law. This is the force in Star Wars. We have the opportunity to create a union. That’s a great definition of yoga that I enjoy. It’s the unification of the mind. That’s the thoughts. That’s the emotions, the response to the universe and how connected we are to natural law, spirit, our survivability and then what’s going on in the body.
This is the biggest thing. As a clinician, acupuncture is well-clinically researched for pain, for example. We could say that’s a physical symptom. When someone’s in pain, they are emotionally reactive. They don’t have a lot of bandwidth for education, learning or change. To be courageous is hard when you’re exhausted from the pain. When you’re emotionally exhausted, you’re not the best person in any area of your life. If the body is tanking out, it drags down the mind, spirit and then vice versa.
That’s what’s nice about 8,000 years of wisdom from a Daoist perspective. This is a way in which to understand ourselves, the universe, the natural law and the game of life that we’re playing. If we get a lay of the land or understand the game of life that we’re playing and what we need to cultivate to train ourselves to be able to play the game better, then we’re not lost, confused and overwhelmed in chaos without any sense of empowerment.
Latching onto anything or anyone that sounds like they know what they’re talking about to tell us what to do, that’s a spiritually bankrupt depraved state. That’s a bad mindset. That’s a victim mindset. It’s not good. It leads to hell, from my experience. It leads straight to hell fast and it’s excruciatingly painful to come from that place.
It’s interesting too because, from the way in which we perceive the world, our thoughts that become our beliefs create our mindset or doctrine that we’re operating on that influences how we feel about the world. Emotion is the motive force for life or energy. Your emotions can get you in a lot of trouble. That’s how the trauma gets into the body and makes the physical body sick.
It’s the powerful emotions that are coming from a messed up mindset, frankly, that we’re attached to. We can get this safety of like, “I understand things. Even though this is an understanding perception of the world that’s disempowering and misery-ridden, at least I feel I’m comfortable that I understand this miserable Machiavellian universe of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It is a zero-sum game. Somebody has to lose for me to win the war.”
It’s also cliché like, “I am at war. Somebody’s got to lose.” That’s a terrible game to play. People can get so comfortable there. What’s rough is that if you start taking on this self-leadership point of view, you’re taking responsibility. It’s not a blame game anymore. It’s not that the world is messed up and I’m swimming with sharks and I got to become a warmongering Alexander the Great Hitler. I got to take responsibility.
You might get a bad start.
Oftentimes, we do. We have a bad start and bad examples. That’s the thing about the blueprint. In my experience, I didn’t think about everybody around me that’s successful monetarily the quality of life that they’re living, their relationships and their quality of health. In our society, it’s more about material success. We’re not looking at the other aspects of somebody’s life like their health, wealth, relationships and also perfect self-expression that comes from using their skills and experience in a meaningful way that makes a lasting impact on the world.
The ultimate human need to fulfill at the highest level after we’ve gone through a trajectory of evolution is growth and contribution. It’s not significant for ego. It’s not love and connection in a heavy-handed way to be idolized like a guru. That’s not it either. We do need variety but if we want variety, are you living to eat or eating to live? We can go for a variety of kicks or cheap thrills as adrenaline junkies but is that contributing to anything meaningful in which we’re living our lives in a way that matters to us and that’s worth dying for?
We can get off on these tangents with the success of money and cheap thrills and get lost far away from any real ethics and values as a real viable North Star to direct our life from. That’s a very slippery slope. We have all these trauma moments that way. From these mental and emotional traumas, it goes into the physical body and gets launched there.
For chronic pain, there is a great study through Kaiser of 900,000 people. Chronic illness was associated with unresolved trauma. The physical chronic pain is related to mental and emotional trauma. In Chinese medicine, we don’t separate psychology and spirit from the physical body. The acupuncturists we’re dealing with, all of it, we’re not just treating pain. That’s that union idea.
To me, it’s an inherent part of human life from the perspective of life is complex. We like to simplify life. To simplify it, we have to compartmentalize it.
It can be useful to a certain extent.
It is to a certain extent to understand what might be going on in a particular system or life.
You have to chuck down some kind of action that you can take.
Some need to understand and comprehend it. By doing so though, then you can start plugging it into the other parts and understand how two parts work together. What type of relationship is it between the two systems? How do they affect each other? That’s where we get lost in life and business. One of my favorite subjects to talk about is the system of systems. We lose that system of systems mindset. To be very simplistic, the left hand is affecting the right hand. We’re so worried about what the left hand is doing, not understanding the relationship the left hand has with the right hand and how they interact with each other and affect each other.
It’s usually separated often in our culture like life and work or the two hands.
That is a big part of the platform in my coaching.
We leave a little bit of left-hand life energy but it is all right-hand work. We design our little tiny life around this overbearing work until we’re pretty much starved out over here on the left and collapse, in my experience. If you don’t feed it, it dies. A lot of us have to figure that out the hard way.
I want to get to acupuncture. It’s not what people typically think of as Western medicine. I got to experience it once. I went on a cruise and there was an acupuncturist on board. I’m like, “I got to try this.” I went to pay my $30 or whatever it was. I had one session with this acupuncturist to experience it and check the box. It was a wonderful experience. Everybody thinks, “They’re sticking needles in you. It’s got to hurt.” It doesn’t. Can you talk a little bit about the mechanics behind it? Putting needles in certain places, how does that help with pain or the systems? How does that help a body get back into an appropriate rhythm or mechanics?
Piggybacking on where we were a moment ago, the mental and emotional experience that can be caused by trauma gets launched into the physical body and creates physical symptoms.
I don’t think that is well understood.
Exactly, which is why I love to talk about it. That’s one of the elephants in the room that needs to be discussed. This argument with the reality that’s creating this mental and emotional turmoil changes the physiology of the body. You make different kinds of hormones. You make stress hormones like cortisol. You don’t make the hormones that run the other functions of the body. You turn off your immune system. You’re also turning off your regeneration system.
Even if it’s not post-traumatic stress disorder or a severe type of stress, most people are living in the fight or flight stress response. That’s the sympathetic nervous system response because our modern cities are too loud. There is too much energy, too much going on and too much pressure. Beating the clock is what most people play. They’re overscheduled personally and professionally between their family responsibilities and work.
There’s a lot of traffic too. You have to be a defensive driver because people are overwhelmed with their bandwidth not paying attention. You could have died 10 times on the way to work in 45 minutes. You got to be on it because all of a sudden, somebody’s driving into your lane. Somebody’s coming into your space and it is like, “Drink some more coffee.” What is that?
I have lived in LA for twenty years. I’ve seen it all. People can open their doors into the street and all kinds of stuff. It takes a specific daily practice to teach your body how to relax again. That’s the problem. Most people are living in this fight-or-flight zone. They’re not regenerating and repairing themselves. Their immune system is down. It also creates brain fog, sluggishness, lack of energy, emotional reactivity and exhaustion. That doesn’t create the best kind of person to show up in the world to make the best kinds of decisions. Maybe you noticed that a little bit.
I’m experiencing it.
We can always fall into that place. Acupuncture is part of traditional Chinese medicine, which is a complete holistic healing system. Acupuncture is the last intervention. The two before that are about lifestyle. Are you living in a way that promotes wellness? You are in complete control of your life experience. Nobody tells you this but you are.
In doing so, you’re acting in a self-love way.
That’s correct but also, it’s a duty. You’re acting in a self-responsible way because you not only compromise yourself but you’ll drag the whole world down with you. This is what people don’t necessarily realize. We have a responsibility not only to ourselves but everything and everyone around us. If I don’t show up daily living in a way that makes me well, I not only destroy my health but I drag down everything and everyone that I love. I’m a negative influence so I make more hell by my lack of responsibility that I take for myself and how I live. That’s a big deal.
A lot of people don’t necessarily think about it in those terms. I’m either building the world up or I’m dragging it down into hell by the choices that I make daily regarding how I choose to take care of myself. It’s true. I’m making it better or I am making it worse for me and everything and everybody else. Every day, every hour of the day, are we being mindful to check in? “Am I burnout? Am I tired? Am I moody? Am I hungry? Did I drink enough water? How am I managing myself?” This is a self-regulation and self-management game. That’s why I use terms like this is a mind-body mastery game. We have to manage ourselves and that takes an awareness.
There are 8,000 years of wisdom here being shared in multi-translations for thousands of years. This is to help you all to manage yourselves. How to live and become your own medicine with your lifestyle is first. There’s yoga, Qigong practices and breathwork. We can reset our physiological state of being from fight or flight sympathetic to parasympathetic whenever we choose.
We can reset our physiological state of being from fight or flight sympathetic to parasympathetic whenever we choose.
It is not by coming in for an acupuncture treatment, which is what we do. What I focus on is while you’re in treatment with me, I can teach you things that empower you to do that yourself daily as needed throughout the day in minutes at a time so you never spin out of control and start that cascade of a nuclear meltdown. Nobody has to nuclear meltdown if we notice, “I’m running a little hot. I might want to do something.”
The terms that Zach and I use are, “Are you generating value or are you extracting value?”
You have to be paying attention. Ask the question. That’s the self-leadership angle. Are you paying attention to asking the question on an hourly or daily basis what you’re doing, which is generating or distracting?
It goes back to what you said in the beginning. The modern education system was put in place to teach people to go by the rules, be part of an internship, go get a job and cook.
It’s all about survival and mind-based.
It’s a mindless life that we’re taught to live. Nobody was ever taught to lead themselves because they’ve always got somebody else telling them exactly what to do with every minute of their life.
Most of the time, our circle of influences is filled with peers that have fallen into that delusional sheep game. That’s the whole issue. Are you looking around? Usually, in my experience, you have to look outside of your peer group to find some kind of model of someone who’s living in this very different self-leading way. It’s not usually going to be in your family or peer group that you go to school with or the peer group that you work with. That’s why you need to be courageous. You’re going to go outside of your comfortable circles of influence. You’re going to have to search out some people that are doing life differently.
I went into Eastern medicine. I was raised Catholic. This is about as far away from that as I could go. I wasn’t satisfied with the examples that I was seeing so I needed to expand my vision of what was possible by getting a different perspective from looking at a different culture and paradigms. It was so I could adopt a new way to see myself the world’s reality, my place in it and how to live in a productive manner that would generate value. That was the journey here.
What we find is that if we can end that mental and emotional turmoil by adopting a paradigm that’s self-leadership based, that takes a lot of stress out. I’m not arguing with reality anymore. I can be at peace. Using tools like acupuncture to reset my nervous system and take me out of fight or flight and into homeostasis balance or parasympathetic rest, digest and repair, I get to be in an ideal state of being. It lets me be operating from my conscious mind in the forebrain. I get to get out of the amygdala trauma center fight or flight response. I no longer am a prisoner of emotional reactivity. I’m no longer a prisoner of fear making fear-based defensive decisions. That’s huge. That’s what being a leader is. I’m no longer the prisoner of fear and unregulated chaotic emotional reactivity.
I didn’t plan on September 11th, 2001. I don’t think anybody planned on the COVID-19 pandemic either. There are big circumstances that can roll in that are huge challenges beyond imagination. I could have a successful business for 10 years and then have no sales for 2 years. How did that affect me, my business and my life? I wasn’t diversified and risk-resistant. I couldn’t take a hit like that. That led me to a health crisis under the stress of that, seeing my whole life washed away. There was no action that I could take that was effective enough to keep my boat floating.
I was on Titanic. I had to take a lifeboat and declare bankruptcy. It led to divorce. I had to dissolve my business after thirteen years. I went from a ten-year run to the top to a fast misery train down to the bottom. Within 3 years, my whole life that I had built for 10 years was entirely obliterated. It was a total nuclear meltdown until nothing was left of the life that I had. I was in this place of unrecognizable reality of a complete start over. That makes you ask these big questions.
It is like, “What’s your definition of success?” A leading question I typically do with prospective clients is, “What do you want?”
What do you want? It is not the indoctrination of what you should want.
A lot of people start pulling that from examples they’ve been around that are following a different kind of model as opposed to thinking why and looking at other different models you can extract from in answering the question for yourself, “What do you want?”
That’s the thing. If you do a practice like getting acupuncture treatment and you’re in this ideal conscious state of being where the body isn’t dragging down the mind, then you can answer those questions from an objective and wise place that’s not defensive and emotionally reactive. You can get honest with yourself even when it hurts. Even when it hurts badly, you can look at the truth.
When you had acupuncture, it’s a tiny little needle. It feels like a mosquito bite if you feel it at all. Especially I do the Japanese non-invasive style. That is very shallow needling. They are tiny needles like a strand of hair. You get relaxed and fall asleep. You get some good endorphins. You get good circulation and some pain relief. You come into this state of being. You can get there with a yoga practice, breathing techniques or Qigong. The point is to get there.
You can’t get there if you’re starving and forgetting to eat because you’re overworking for six hours until you get a headache and you feel like you’re going to throw up. You can’t get there if you’re not drinking any water all day and sucking down some coffee, soda or energy drinks and chain smoking to get through the day. We have to be responsible with our body or it drags us down. That is the only way to get to this in-command and capable self-leadership place where we can ask the big questions and come up with answers to, “What do you want?” It is not the clichés. It is not the chatter. It is not what you should want according to the world and what’s on TV. It is who you are from your values, ethics and life experience.
We can get caught up in, “I want success.” “What’s success?” “That’s money, houses, positioning, significance or accolades.” “What is the quality of life that you’re living with those things?” That’s what I didn’t ask myself. “What is the quality of your health? What’s the quality of your relationship and your integrity with yourself? What’s the quality of the relationship with the people you care about? What’s the quality of the relationship of you doing something that matters enough to you that you live and die for it every day? Do you feel that you’re generating the value that you’re capable of that’s worthy of your life with your life?” These are big questions.
We’re going to leave it right there. We went 45, 50 or 55 minutes leading up to that big question. Ask that question to yourself, please.
At least every six months or once a year, take stock and ask these big questions.
Can I do it once a year between Christmas and New Year?
Yes, please. That’s the game-changer.
Zach started to understand why our initial conversation went on for two hours.
I feel like we’ve been talking for five minutes.
We’re on the same page.
We’re so aligned. That’s why I wanted to bring you on. It is so other people can hear somebody else’s story and so forth that’s in line with Zach’s and mine’s thoughts about life. Zach, Doc Andrea is worthy of a hotel room. What do you think?
Come visit when I’m in Atlanta. I’d love to see you guys in person.
What Andy’s referring to is certain people we bring on the show get a hotel room in the show.
The Generate Your Value Hotel is so vast. It doesn’t fit in 45 minutes. We create a hotel room for them so we can invite them to come back out of the hotel room and come back to the show.
I would be honored. Thank you.
If people wanted to reach out to you to keep this conversation going and that loved or resonated with our conversation, what’s the best way they could reach out to you?
The best way to find me is if you go to my website. My website is ChillaxOm.com. You can email me there. I have over 100 videos on my YouTube channel. I’m teaching these self-care mind-body practices to help you do what we talked about. I teach that so that you are a mind-body master and you do become your own medicine. There are a bunch of resources there for you.
You can also work with me virtually to design the lifestyle that would be best for you, your health, longevity, peak performance and highest quality of life. You can shoot emails through my website, ask any questions and have access to all of the tools that I’ve provided for you. I want you to rise with us together to generate value. We don’t need to drag everybody.
We need to extract it but not be preponderance nothing but extraction.
You can’t withdraw from a bank account that you don’t make any deposits into.
We can make more deposits than withdrawals. It’s a fun game.
We always finish up each episode with the same question. There is no right or wrong answer to this but I feel like you’re going to have a very valuable answer to this. What do the words generate your value mean to you?
I feel that it’s important to take this very personally as far as what value I can generate with this life while I’m here. From a personal place, that’s an important place to come from. I want to be an example of what’s possible, walk my talk, embody this medicine and show that it does make a positive difference in my health and well-being. That allows me then to share that with other people so that there can be a ripple effect or a lasting positive impact on humanity.
I feel that we are stewards of the wisdom of humanity. We have a duty to step up and share the truth and wisdom that we’ve found to be most valuable. That’s how we generate value long-term as the lasting positive impact that we are born to make here, to be the steward and share this so that people can also take advantage of this truth and wisdom, live by it and pass it on to the next generation. If we drop the ball here, then we are dragging down future generations of humanity. Generating value is picking up the torch that’s personal to you and carrying it until you can pass it forward.
This chose me. I had to go in this direction to help myself recover from my accident and health crisis. I was called to this. This is my value to generate. This is my message and my example of being. This is my torch to bring forward to light the spirit candles and future generations so that they can continue. That’s the calling. It’s my job to do whatever it takes to show up to be able to carry this torch effectively for myself, everything and everybody else. That’s what generating value means to me all the way.
I can spend two hours on your answer. We can’t thank you enough for coming on and sharing your wisdom. We’re going to build a hotel room for you in the Generate Your Value Hotel. We’ll bring you on in a future episode and keep this conversation going. For the audience, there are golden nuggets all over this conversation. Hopefully, there’s at least one that you picked up on and can extract into your life and make it a better place to go after what you want in life regardless of what the world says.
We bring out an episode every Tuesday. We’re going to have three more before Zach and I wrap up this season, go take a summer break and then come back in September 2023 where we’re going to start Season 4. The last three episodes are going to be about coaches. Every single week is going to be coaches that do much like Doc Andrea does in life, self-leadership and those types of things.
They have incredible life stories themselves. The value they want to generate is by going out, as Doc Andrea does, and helping other people find it for themselves. I highly encourage you to tune in for the last three episodes of our season. With that being said, have a great time. We’ll see you next time. Keep generating your value in this world. Thank you so much for joining us here on the show. Take care.
IMPORTANT LINKS
- Dr. Andrea Renee Rivera
- YouTube – ChillaxOm
- https://ChillaxOm.com/About/
- https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/ChillaxOm/
ABOUT DR. ANDREA RENEE RIVERA
From 1992-2007 Dr. Andrea Renee, DACM, LAc. enjoyed 15 years of international acclaim as the president founder of Andrea Renee, Inc., an innovative Jewelry design and manufacturing house based in SOHO NYC. Her collection was carried in the top global department stores including Barney’s NY & Japan, Daimaru Japan, Fortunoff, Bloomingdales, Macy’s and Nordstrom as well as her own SOHO NYC boutique with celebrity clients including Drew Barrymore, Johnny Depp and Julianne Moore. She enjoyed recognition as one of New York Magazine’s “favorite downtown jewelry designers” and was featured as her company spokesperson in media coverage including NY Times, NY Magazine, In Style, Entertainment Weekly, Seventeen, Elle, Cosmo & Savvy Japan, NY Post, Time Out and Good Day NY.
Since 2007 she delivered over 9000 coaching treatment sessions as a peak performance healthy lifestyle coach and Acupuncturist. She has been a certified Yoga Instructor/Meditation Teacher teaching exercise therapy since 2007 and a Passion Test for Life and Business Coach since 2011. As an Acupuncturist and licensed primary care physician in CA, she is extensively trained in both Eastern and Western integrative, functional, preventative medicine as well as nutrition, pain management/orthopedics, acupressure massage, energy work, herbal medicine and acupuncture.
