To Grit with Grace, Episode 7 — Rachelle Fender: Unstoppable
Transcript
Randy: Hello, I’m Randy Kaufman, and this is To Grit with Grace: stories of perseverance to jumpstart your month.
My guest today is Rachelle Fender. In 2008, she, like I, was stopped in her tracks. But she’d seen devastation before, and realized that this time, the worst news could actually be the best news, with the right mindset and her courage.
Rachelle found her life’s purpose working with a humanitarian organization, appropriately named Unstoppable.
In my earliest days as a wealth advisor, I believed, like so many people, that more is more, that somehow a number in a bank account would make my clients happy, and that my job was to help them amass the most amount of money possible.
I learned quickly that nothing could be further from the truth. Then, I redefined my job to help my clients find purpose and passion — to have enough, and to find a way, as Rachelle did, to do what they were meant to do.
I hope that, in listening to her story, you will be inspired, and you will realize that when your devastation comes, with the right attitude, you, too can use it as a springboard to find your own “more.”
Meltdown
Rachelle: Back in 2008, I felt like I was finally kind of at a peak, or climbing my career.
I was selling people life coaching, improving their lives. I worked for a New York Times bestselling author brand. I had been promoted to manager, got a pay raise, and I was just hitting it out of the park.
While I was working 60-70 hours a week, it was a lot of being on the phone, eight to 10 hours sometimes, and managing people. It was like every day was Groundhog Day.
Our corporate building was right by a golf course. I would look out the window sometimes and see people golfing at noon, midmorning, and think, “How do they have time to do that? Who are these people?” [laughs] You know? We’re all in here, treading water, doing the best we can to try to make a six-figure number every single week, and the moment you make it, it starts over.
That was the grind. I wasn’t sure how I would ever out-produce it, or get out of it, but fate had its way to stop me in my tracks.
When 2008 hit, when there was the financial meltdown, suddenly what we were offering was a “nice to have,” not a “have to have.” I was aware of what was going on, so I was working even harder to make sure my numbers were high.
If I’m producing, how could they let me go, right?
I went into work, and just, your intuition — everything didn’t feel right. I wasn't seeing people I normally saw. Little did I know they had all one by one been let go, and I was just basically — it wasn’t my turn yet. But I didn’t know that.
I got called in, and it was that feeling like the movie Up in the Air, where they’re explaining to you, “It’s not you, we just need to cut back, you’ll find something better,” whatever, it’s not what you want to hear when you’ve got bills. “It’s easy for you to say that because you’ve still got a paycheck…”
It was devastating. I had never been laid off in my life. I had always been a top performer. I was ahead of budget even when they were laying me off. I was shocked — I just couldn’t believe it.
Divine Comedy
I was single at the time, and all my family had left the state for various reasons. I was completely alone.
I’d never been home at noon [laughs] like, “My gosh, okay, I’m home, in my neighborhood, it’s noon, I don’t even know what to do with myself.” I just cried and cried and cried, and I just felt so vulnerable. I didn’t have anybody to ask for help. My family didn’t have the means to help me. I thought to myself, “I only have this much runway — what am I gonna do?”
After feeling sorry for myself for about two weeks — you know, you get sick of crying, and you know you need to move forward. I called one of my very dear friends, Murray. He was really a mentor to me, and really known as a business strategist. I thought, he’s the best person I could call and just kind of get some advice on what should I do next.
So, I called him up, and I told him, “Murray, I got laid off from my job, and I really feel lost, I just don’t know what I should do next.” Murray said, “You got laid off?” And I said, “Yes.”
And he started laughing.
Not quite the pity party [laughs] I thought I was gonna get when I called a friend. Like belly-laughing.
And I’m in complete shock! I’m like, “Murray, did you hear what I said? I got laid off, I don’t even know what I’m gonna do past the next three months.”
He said, “You know what? I think this is the best news I’ve heard from you in a really long time. I think that this is the perfect opportunity for you to think about doing not what you have to do, but what you were meant to do.”
When I got off the phone, I started thinking about it more and more. I thought, “No matter what I do in life, I’m gonna be asked to do more. Produce more, do more, more, more.” And I thought, “Do I want my more to just be all about dollars and numbers, or do I want it to be about lives? People always have mission statements for their companies. I should have a mission statement for my life.”
I took a few weeks, and I made my own mission statement so that I could stay focused on taking something not out of fear, but because it’s what I wanted to be up to, at a deeper level.
The mission statement I came up with was, “I only want to work with individuals and organizations that are transparent, that operate in complete integrity, and are dedicated to helping humanity, the planet, or both. No small print.”
After I wrote that, I got a call from a dear friend who was having a 50th birthday party in Los Angeles. I was living in Salt Lake City. It was one of those situations where, “Well, I have the time, and there’s nothing like taking a great road trip when you’re sad.”
I drove to the party, and it turns out, she’d just come back from a rural women’s African conference where she’d promised these women that she’d do something, but had no idea what she should do for them. So, she decided to turn her birthday party into a fundraiser. She charged us to come, she asked us for more money when we were there, and she raised $85,000.
The next day, I had a chance to visit with her. We were sitting down, having coffee, and I said, “Wow, with 110 of us, you raised that amount of money.” She said, “You know, I wonder what would happen if I actually dedicated the rest of my life to this.” And I had the same thought in the moment.
I thought, “If she decides to dedicate her life to that, I might just wanna join her.”
On the Ground
We went our separate ways. I did some contract work, she did some other things. Then suddenly, she called me up, and said, “I started that foundation. I’m having a big event, I want people I can trust to call my friends, invite them to it. Would you mind just helping me out?”
Nothing had come my way, and it was kind of in line with my mission. So, I said, “Yeah, sure!”
It then grew and grew into me coming on full-time and traveling with her on the ground to host people, meeting people on the ground. I was actually scared to go on the ground — I was worried it was gonna be too close to the bone, emotionally.
The reason why was because I had grown up homeless.
We lived on the streets. We ate out of garbage cans. We didn’t go to school. I knew what that felt like to be hungry, and just wishing somebody would notice you and care. I was worried that going to visit others that lived that way day-to-day would be too hard for me. Like I’d want to take them all home. It is hard when you’re on the ground. Sometimes kids attach themselves to you.
Eventually, my family got connected to the resources that we needed, and we were able to turn our lives around because there’s infrastructure here. It’s not perfect. We all know that. But there is infrastructure for me to be sitting here in front of you today, where you would otherwise never know that about me.
Where my passion started building for this work even more was I realized when a young girl (especially) wakes up in rural Africa, and she doesn’t wanna be married off at 12 or 13 years of age, or traded for a few cows and a dowry, there’s nowhere for her to go. No infrastructure for her to turn her life around. Her destiny is decided by others.
So, I thought, “You know what? I wanna be a part of creating an infrastructure that when a young girl or a little boy wakes up, and they wanna change their lives, and they have the desire to do something different than what’s been shown to them, that they can go do it. And there are people to help them. There’s a place to go.”
Heart to Heart
My days now are connecting with individuals all over the world who’ve reached varying levels of success, and really getting to hear and understand their stories.
A lot of times, their giving stories have something to do with their own lives, and their own pain, or things they’ve seen on travels that they want to solve. I look at ways that I can connect what’s in their heart with what’s on the ground that would fulfill that philanthropic goal for them. Then, I get to host them, which is one of my favorite parts, to see what they’ve made possible, and to look in the eyes of those whose lives they’ve completely transformed.
I’ve now been part of this work for 11 and a half years. We help over 75,000 people a day. We’re in 17 communities. We’ve built 115 schoolhouses. We have a college. We do micro-loans now. We’re now expanding into the coast on Kilifi. Some of our girls have graduated, they have their own businesses, they’re hiring other people — this is unheard of in this area. Our first class of nurses will be graduating in 2023. That’s significant, because this is an area where there’s one doctor for every 100,000 people.
Being human is a challenge. It’s difficult. We all need each other at one time or another. That’s what I reflect on the most: I wouldn’t be where I am had a lot of people not cared about me, helped me, supported me, and now I get to do the same thing for others.
Randy: Thank you so much to Rachelle for opening her heart and her mind for us today. It was wonderful for me to hear her story about finding her life’s purpose through extraordinarily difficult events. I’ve learned in my career that often, the real magic is found not by earning more money, but by helping others, by actually giving time, money, and heart away.
Thank you also to Dustin Lowman for producing and editing, and to you, for listening. If you want to learn more about Rachelle’s life mission, visit unstoppablefoundation.org. Unstoppable is a humanitarian organization that provides education and life-saving services to communities in developing countries. You’ll learn how they change lives, one community at a time.
We’ll be back next month with another speaker’s tale of struggle and perseverance. Till then, with grit, with grace, with growth, and with so much gratitude.
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