Still Beautiful: A Burn Survivor’s Advice on Defining Self-Worth with guest Kelly Falardeau
About this Episode
As moms, we second guess ourselves all the time. We question our worth as women, we experience mom guilt for a million reasons, and we fail to appreciate what’s beautiful about ourselves. On this episode of Brainy Moms, Dr. Amy and Teri interviewed Kelly Falardeau, best-selling author of the book, Still Beautiful. When Kelly was a child, she suffered burns over 75% of her body and grew up feeling ugly. But she has turned tragedy into triumph. A four-time best-selling author, TEDx speaker, coach, and Mom of 3, Kelly teaches women how to find their self-worth and talk back to the mirror. This is such an inspirational episode with an inspirational and beautiful brainy mom.
About Kelly
At the age of 2, Kelly was severely burned over 75% of her body in her childhood home. Her life was forever changed in that moment. It led to numerous surgeries throughout her life. Because her scars are so visible it led to a life of being highly visible, to being bullied, to being shunned, to being avoided because they were uncomfortable knowing how to talk to her, and to her not feeling wanted, needed or even loved.
But she has a beautiful story of discovering for herself that she wanted herself, she needed herself and most of that she loved herself. She became herself and she owned who she was. She was not defined by what happened to her, not by any event that happened to her.
She fell in love and had three beautiful children. Her strength comes from within and knowing who she is. Kelly found a way to go from near-death to success; from the ugly scar-faced girl to a Top 10 Most Powerful and Influential Speaker, Fierce Woman of the Year, 4-time best-selling author, recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, and a YWCA Woman of Distinction. Her story on GOALcast has nearly 60,000 views.
Connect with Kelly
WEBSITE:
FACEBOOK:
https://www.facebook.com/kellywoodhousefalardeau
YOUTUBE:
https://youtube.com/c/KellyFalardeau
LINKEDIN:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellyfalardeau/
INSTAGRAM:
https://www.instagram.com/alwaysbeautifulnft
TWITTER:
https://twitter.com/kellywoodhousen
Mentioned in this Episode
Kelly’s book, Still Beautiful
Kelly’s book, No Risk, No Reward
Kelly’s TEDx talk, UGLY is Still Beautiful
Kelly’s Goalcast talk, Your Mirror is Wrong
Optional special offer for listeners:
Free download of Kelly’s author coaching ebook at http://www.7StepsAuthor.com
Our sponsor
LearningRx is a worldwide network of brain training centers offering cognitive, reading, and math remediation and enhancement for all ages. LearningRx has worked with more than 100,000 clients who have learning struggles and disabilities, ADHD, traumatic brain injury, autism, and age-related cognitive decline. Visit www.LearningRx.com or call 1-866-BRAIN-01 to learn more.
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Read the transcript for this episode:
Dr. Amy Moore:
Hi, and welcome to this episode of Brainy Moms, brought to you today by LearningRx Brain Training Centers. I’m Dr. Amy Moore, your host, here with my co-host Teri Miller, coming to you as usual from Colorado Springs, Colorado. We are thrilled to have our guest today. Her name is Kelly Falardeau, and she has the message that, “You are more than enough.” Kelly is a single mom, four-time best-selling author, a documentary producer, advocate, artist, international motivational speaker, and burn survivor. She’s been to the TEDx stage, not once, but twice, and a documentary about her life, Still Beautiful, launched on TV plus Goalcast with over 10 million views. Kelly is the author of Still Beautiful: A Burn Survivor’s Journey to Discover True Beauty.
Teri Miller:
So glad that you are here with us today. Kelly. Thank you.
Kelly Falardeau:
Oh my God. I’m so honored and excited to be with you girls. This is awesome. Thank you.
Teri Miller:
We’ve been looking forward to it.
Dr. Amy Moore:
Yeah, you have so much inspiration for us today and before we even get into all of that, I want you to give our listeners your background, your story.
Kelly Falardeau:
My story. Well, this story started when I was two and we lived on a farm and my cousins were nine and 11 and they were throwing shingles on the fire. And a spark came out and landed on my dress and I exploded. And they rushed me to the hospital and I spent four months in the hospital. Every two days I’d be in the operating room for surgeries. And then every two years until I was 20, I would go back to the hospital for more surgeries. Then I have also done about 40 different laser surgeries on my scars. That’s the start of my journey of being a burn survivor.
Teri Miller:
Okay. I think of your mom in that, when I’ve heard you tell that story before, that’s what I thought of. And I know you said in one interview, you talked about that your mom was quite young and here she was, I think you said she was 18 or 19?
Kelly Falardeau:
A little bit of back story of my mom, she was 16 when she had her first baby and gave that one up for adoption. That was back in the sixties when it was very shameful to have a baby out of wedlock. And then she got pregnant with me at 19. And then at 21, she was pregnant with my sister and I got burnt, and so I got burnt in August in 1968. And then my sister was born in November, three or four months later. So yeah, so my mom was 21 years old when I got burnt. And I still remember seeing my daughter when she was 21, I was thinking, “Oh my gosh, that was my mom.” She was pregnant for the third time.
Kelly Falardeau:
And in the hospital with me every day and here she was fighting for my life too, being a two year old, they didn’t think I was going to live. Here I am in the hospital. I think I lost something like 16 pounds and my head was swollen like a football and wrapped up in bandages everywhere. And they just didn’t think I was going to live. And here, my mom was 21 years old and my dad was, I think, 24 at the time. And it’s just crazy to think, how could they have gotten themselves through something so devastating and tragic?
Dr. Amy Moore:
Yeah. Neurologically at 21, your brain is not fully developed. I mean, you don’t have the reasoning skills. You don’t have the control over your big emotions yet. That must have been so hard.
Teri Miller:
Yeah. I mean, she’s a story of overcoming too.
Kelly Falardeau:
She is. My mom finally forgave herself about four years ago when we had released the documentary, my life story called Still Beautiful. And when she got to watch it, she finally forgave herself because she was going to keep me inside to change my diaper. And she didn’t. And so she felt it was her fault I got burnt because she should have been a good mom and kept me inside and changed my diaper and this never would’ve happened. Right? I’m not saying that’s what my mom should have done, because I honestly believe that everything happens for a reason and I’ve never ever blamed my mom or my cousins or anybody for me getting burnt. I always knew that there was a reason I got burnt, and I just had to discover that. Yeah, and that had led me to being a speaker.
Teri Miller:
And it wasn’t… I mean, what a tragic horrible accident. But yeah. As moms, isn’t that the thing we do? We struggle with that mom guilt. We’re going to talk about that more in a little bit.
Dr. Amy Moore:
Yeah. We will.
Teri Miller:
I want you to tell about what, just more of your story. I just want you-
Dr. Amy Moore:
Your childhood.
Teri Miller:
Yes, your childhood and…
Dr. Amy Moore:
What was your childhood like?
Kelly Falardeau:
Yeah. When I was in grade five, I walked past my teacher’s desk and I saw a picture of someone had drawn of me that said that, it was a circle with scribbles all over it. And it said Scarface. And so I knew that the kids were calling me the Scarface girl. And of course I was devastated. I mean, who wouldn’t be? When we’re that age, we just want to be beautiful and we want to be Cinderella and Snow White. And we just want to be loved. And I knew because of all my surgeries I was going through that I felt I would never be anything but the Scarface girl. Right. Because we were also taught too that the beautiful girls are scarless. Right. And girls with scars on their face are not beautiful.
Dr. Amy Moore:
Right.
Kelly Falardeau:
And I was taught too. I always believed when I was young that if someone had glasses, they could just get contacts and they wouldn’t be called four eyes anymore. If someone was overweight, they could just go on a diet and lose their weight. And they wouldn’t be called fatty fatty anymore. Right. But my scars were never going away. And so I thought I would never lose my title of being the Scarface girl.
Kelly Falardeau:
And I remember being 15 and I prayed to God and I would say, dear God, please don’t make me wake up in the morning. But if I have to, can I at least be scarless? So I can be pretty like all the other girls. And of course I woke up and of course the scars were still there. And I just thought, well, God’s not taking my scars away. And my doctor’s not taking my scars away. Am I supposed to be ugly forever? Right. I never ever thought I’d get married or have kids or have a good life because I just thought, well, life is for the beautiful people, right. It’s not for us ugly people.
Dr. Amy Moore:
Yeah. You said something really profound that you learned that the mirror speaks to you very early.
Kelly Falardeau:
Yeah. And in fact, one of my talks that I do now is called Ugly is Always Beautiful. And that’s actually one of my TEDx talks. And in there I prove that the mirror doesn’t talk and how we learn the mirror talks is when we watch Snow White.
Dr. Amy Moore:
Right.
Kelly Falardeau:
And we watch Snow White at 3, 4, 5 years old. And when we watch Snow White, we see the evil mirror or the evil queen talking to the mirror and the mirror talks back. The big face comes out of the mirror and a booming voice talking to us. And so we learn at three, four years old that the mirror talks to us. But what we don’t understand is that voice that’s in our head can be controlled.
Dr. Amy Moore:
Yeah.
Kelly Falardeau:
And we can change that narrative. But a lot of times it’s easier just to say those negative things about ourselves.
Teri Miller:
I think for teen girls, young girls, teen girls, I mean, even moms, the mirror talks back to us through culture, through social media, I think. And we hear, that’s what we see. We look in the mirror and we see that comparison and yeah.
Kelly Falardeau:
Yeah, absolutely. We walk in the room and we compare ourselves to other women or other moms. And we think all these other moms have everything together and they’re super moms, they do everything and they get everything done and they look perfect. And then we think about ourselves and we’re thinking, oh my gosh, how do they do it all? I can just barely stay alive.
Kelly Falardeau:
And especially now I’m a single mom. Right. I left my husband 11 years ago and I struggled tremendously with mommy guilt and bad mom syndrome. Right. Especially being a speaker. I was traveling a lot, probably traveling about 30 to 40% of my time. And I still remember one of my family members saying to me, Kel, you need to put your kids first. And I said, I can’t put my kids first. I have to take that $3,000 speaking gig. That’s going to pay my bills this month.
Teri Miller:
Yeah.
Kelly Falardeau:
That’s going to keep food in the cupboards for the kids. And a lot of times I struggled with bad mom syndrome thinking, oh my God, I’m such a bad mom that I’m not here for my kids all the time. But I had a lot of family support that was able to help them and take over the kids when I needed to do that. But one of the things that I did to help myself get over the bad mom syndrome was I involved my kids. When I was speaking, we started up a foundation called the Blankets for Burn Kids. And basically what I did is took a painting of mine and had it made into a blanket.
Kelly Falardeau:
And then I would go, me and my son, Cody, actually, would go around to different rotary clubs. And we would speak about being a burn survivor and the children’s burn camp. And then we would ask them if they would sponsor the blankets and then we would give them to the kids at summer camp. And my kids got to come with me and we would go to summer camp and we’d be giving away all these blankets to the kids. And it was so awesome because I included my kids in what I was doing, and that would alleviate most of the bad mom syndrome.
Dr. Amy Moore:
I love that. Yeah. Talk to us a little bit about how you were able to shift the narrative. How you were able to ignore or realize that the mirror can’t talk? Where was that in your life, where you were able to say, wait a minute, I have to stop listening to these voices?
Kelly Falardeau:
Yeah, absolutely. I love that you brought that up. This brings me to my story of, I call it the garage sale story. And what happened was I was in my forties, I was still married at the time. And my husband and I and the kids went to a garage sale. And this lady says to me, they couldn’t do better than that? And I was like, oh, I was so upset. Right. Because I was like, if only you knew how many surgeries I’ve been through, through my whole life, right. If only you knew that I got burned as a two year old and they didn’t even think I was going to live. If only you knew the staring and the teasing and the bullying and the shunning and everything that I’ve been through, you wouldn’t say something so hurtful. And anyways, I’m thinking, what am I going to say to this lady?
Kelly Falardeau:
I said to her, I happen to think, I looked pretty damn good. And I turned around and I walked away. And my husband got back in the car with me. And he said, she didn’t mean it that way. And I said, she meant it how she said it. And I was so upset for the whole day. And finally I said to myself, why am I letting a complete stranger take my power away?
Dr. Amy Moore:
Yes.
Kelly Falardeau:
I’m never going to see this lady ever again. And yet I’m letting this complete stranger make me feel ugly. And I thought to myself, that’s it, I’m done. I’m done feeling ugly. I’m done letting people’s thoughts or people’s comments hurt me. And so I went to the mirror this day. And you know how would they say to you when you go in the mirror, you should just say, I am beautiful, I am beautiful, I’m beautiful. And eventually you’ll believe it? Right. Have you ever had that? Where people say that to you, right?
Dr. Amy Moore:
Yeah. Yeah.
Kelly Falardeau:
Just tell yourself you’re beautiful. You’ll believe it.
Dr. Amy Moore:
Positive affirmation, right? Yeah.
Kelly Falardeau:
Yeah, absolutely. Right. And when I would look in the mirror and say, I am beautiful, the mirror would say, no, you’re not. You’re ugly. You’re covered in scars. Beautiful women don’t have scars. And so this time I thought, I’m not going to go in the mirror and say I am beautiful. This time when I go in the mirror, I’m going to say, I happen to love my big, beautiful green eyes. And I didn’t hear that voice. The voice didn’t say anything because I believe it. And then I looked in the mirror again. And this time I looked at my nose and I said, oh my God, I happen to love my cute little nose.
Kelly Falardeau:
And then I looked in the mirror again. And again, I didn’t hear that voice, right? It didn’t say nothing. Because I believe it. Then I looked in the mirror and I saw my ear, right? My little ear, it’s deformed, it got burned pretty badly in the fire. And it doesn’t look like a normal ear. And I thought, you know what? I happen to love my cute little ear. It makes me special. It makes me different. It makes me unique. And at one time I was going to get a new ear made. And what they would do is they were going to cut off this ear. They would put some titanium posts into my head and then that would have to heal for six weeks. And then they would be making a mold out of this ear. And then I’d have a snap-on ear. And I thought, why am I doing this? Just so somebody looking at me can feel more comfortable looking at me?
Dr. Amy Moore:
Oh yeah. Right, right.
Kelly Falardeau:
Why am I doing this? Am I doing it so I can hear better? Because ultimately I’d love to be able to hear better, but no, that ear isn’t going to make me hear any better. I thought, why am I doing this? Just so somebody else is more comfortable and I thought, I’m not doing this. And so then I looked at the mirror one more time. And this time I had my favorite jeans on and I turned around, looked at my bum and I thought, oh my God, I have a cute little hot ass. And I wasn’t bragging about myself. I was embracing myself.
Dr. Amy Moore:
Yes.
Kelly Falardeau:
And the next time I looked in the mirror, I didn’t see all the ugly scars. I saw all the things I loved about me. And that’s why I always want to encourage people. When you look in the mirror, don’t judge yourself, just go in the mirror and pick out all the things you love about you. And it just makes it so much easier. And it just makes it so much better because we’re so hard on ourselves. And when we look in the mirror, we typically will look for all the bad things. And I want to encourage you, look for the good things about yourself, right? And that’s how you’re going to feel beautiful. That’s how you’re going to feel better about yourself.
Teri Miller:
I’m thinking about what you were talking about bad mom syndrome and applying that, not just to the wasted energy that we do, trying to say “I’m beautiful, it’s okay, I’m beautiful.” That the wasted energy “it’s okay, I’m a good mom. I’m a good mom, I’m okay.” When we’re really feeling like, no, I totally failed it with my kids this morning. I botched it. I injured them. They went to school stressed out because of me. They are going to have a bad day because I’m a bad mom. We do all these things. And then how can I take everything that you just said? I want you to talk about now, how can I apply that to I’m a good mom, but not be so general. I’ve got to find the little specific things, help me with that.
Kelly Falardeau:
I think what we have to do is really hang on to those moments when they tell us how much they love us. I’ll give you an incident. I had to drive my son to school one day. This would’ve been two, three years ago. And I was feeling like a bad mom. I’m driving him to school. And he said, mom, my friends were telling me how much they don’t like their moms and how upset they are with their moms. And I said to them, I can’t relate. I love my mom. I’m proud of her. And so I wrote that story down, right? Because I was feeling like a bad mom. And yet my son told me how proud he is. For Mother’s Day, not this Mother’s Day, but a year ago. My other twin for Mother’s Day, he didn’t buy me anything and I didn’t need anything, but he wrote me a letter. And as soon as he gave it to me, I started crying. I didn’t even have to read it. And I was crying. Oh my God, I don’t know why I’m crying right now.
Teri Miller:
I know, you got me all weepy too.
Kelly Falardeau:
I know. Right.
Teri Miller:
Because there’s nothing we want more than for our kids to say that I love you. I’m proud of you, mom.
Kelly Falardeau:
Yeah, absolutely. And this beautiful letter, right. I can’t even say everything, but it was just a beautiful letter and I have it in my purse. Right now I’m having a little bit of a challenge with my daughter. And so I’m feeling like a bad mom because my daughter and I are not getting along like we could. And all my friends who have daughters, all say Kel, it’s okay, you’ll get through it. Eventually she’ll come around. Meanwhile, I’m thinking, what am I doing wrong? And what did I do wrong as a mom? And what should I have done better? But I just hang onto those times when they tell us how much they love us. Or I’ll reach out to them and I’ll tell them I love them. Right. They need to hear it just as much as we need to hear it.
Teri Miller:
Yeah.
Kelly Falardeau:
To me, it’s all about telling them how much we love them. I’m sorry to make you cry, Teri.
Teri Miller:
No, it’s beautiful. No, it’s inspiring and good. No, I truly did have a rough morning with my children this morning. I was stressed and anxious about some other things going on with a different kid. I didn’t do well, but then I need to hold on to the fact that just a couple of days ago my 13 year old daughter said, I see Jesus in you, mommy.
Kelly Falardeau:
Aw.
Teri Miller:
Yeah, it’s good. That’s a good reminder that that can go so far. That’s the moment of saying, I like my cute little nose. That’s the moment of looking in the mirror of motherhood and saying it’s okay. I had that moment where my kids said, I’m proud of you, mom. I love you, mom.
Kelly Falardeau:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it just means writing those things down so we don’t forget them. Right? I’m a big believer in keeping those stories so that we can go back to those happy moments when we need to hear them.
Teri Miller:
Yeah. You write them down in a journal or do you have some place where you put them in front of your face? What do you do?
Kelly Falardeau:
A journal or even on your phone, right? Because you don’t want to forget it. Absolutely wherever, it doesn’t matter. Just write it down. That could be a journal. It could be anywhere.
Dr. Amy Moore:
What I’m hearing you say is that we have to stop having this expectation of perfection, whether it’s about our bodies or our faces or our ability to parent our children and just focus on those moments that we can cherish. Where we do experience successes and where we focus on the things that we do love and appreciate about ourselves. You coined a term “flawesome.” I love this: flawesome, an individual who embraces their flaws and knows they’re awesome regardless.
Kelly Falardeau:
Oh, I love that.
Teri Miller:
I do too. So good
Dr. Amy Moore:
Anyway. I think that we need to all say, okay, we’re going to embrace our flaws. Because expectation of perfectionism is unrealistic. Right?
Kelly Falardeau:
Absolutely. And I think what happens too, for those of us who are perfectionists or were perfectionists, is as soon as you reach the goal, you raise it higher.
Dr. Amy Moore:
Oh yeah.
Kelly Falardeau:
An example of this is when we were doing the book launch for my Still Beautiful book. I have 20 other people in the book. And we were constantly promoting the book and trying to get to a minimum of a hundred sales and then we reached it and then all of a sudden someone said, oh my God, we made it. We made it to a hundred. And I said, that is so awesome. We made it to a hundred, let’s go to 130. Didn’t even stop to celebrate that we had made it to a hundred. I had instantly raised the goal. And then when I raised the goal, we didn’t make the goal. So then I, of course I could say that I failed.
Dr. Amy Moore:
Yeah.
Kelly Falardeau:
Right? And that’s what we do. One of the things that I say is instead of striving for perfection strive for near perfect and when you strive to be near perfect, then you’re okay with things not being totally perfect.
Teri Miller:
Yeah.
Kelly Falardeau:
Right. And you set yourself up for success that way instead of for failure. Because everybody that’s a perfectionist will tell you that it was not perfect. They’ll always be able to find something wrong. Right? Whether it’s in how they look or how they did something, they can always find something wrong. I always say, well, let’s go for near perfect. Because then we’ll be fine. We’ll be awesome.
Teri Miller:
We’ll be flawesome. I love it.
Kelly Falardeau:
Exactly. I love it.
Dr. Amy Moore:
My 17 year old actually taught the message at youth ministry Sunday night. And I went, because I wanted to hear him teach. And his message was that when you have an achievement mindset, then you will never achieve enough to feel fulfilled. That every, every goal will come up empty because like you said, you’re constantly moving. You’re moving the mark higher and higher and higher and you’ll never be fulfilled. And he said, instead, if we can be genuine and focus on connection, then everything else will fall into place. And I think that for a 17 year old to have that kind of wisdom, that those of us in our forties and fifties haven’t quite grasped yet.
Teri Miller:
Yeah.
Dr. Amy Moore:
I think that we can apply that to parenting as well. If we focus on being, and connecting with our children, then the idea of perfection falls by the wayside. Right? Because you’re going to find fulfillment in those everyday moments.
Kelly Falardeau:
I love that because I think definitely we need to be more genuine. We need to be more authentic and more real and willing to share those vulnerable moments. I know there’s some speakers that there’s no way that they’ll share some of the things that they do. And then there’s someone like me, that’ll tell people that I’ve had a hot flash on stage. Right. And was so funny because the whole audience started laughing. And I asked my friend, I asked my best friend, why were they laughing about that? Why is that funny? And she’s like, because when people are having hot flashes and they’re worried about sweating, they’re worried about what everybody’s thinking about them.
Kelly Falardeau:
And yet you go and you put it right out there, I’m having a hot flash on stage and you’re willing to be vulnerable and share that. And I think that is as moms, I think that’s what we need to do more of.
Dr. Amy Moore:
Yeah.
Kelly Falardeau:
More of, it’s okay that we’ve had a bad morning. It doesn’t mean we’re going to be a bad mom. It just means we had a bad morning and we know we messed up, but we know that we can do better.
Teri Miller:
I think even what you just said a few minutes ago that you talked about, you had this sweet, inspiring story that your son had this precious… Just brought me to tears. Just beautiful. What we all long for. But then you said I’m struggling with my daughter and I don’t know why. Why should that be encouraging to me as a fellow mom? That’s so dumb. And yet it is because it’s that flaw-some word. It reminds me that I am flawed, but I can also be awesome. That there is awesome and flawed all mingled in there. Oh my gosh. My head just exploded because, because Kelly, you are beautiful and you are scarred. They are not separate. They are not one is except for the other. They are entwined. You are beautiful and scarred. I am beautiful and scarred as a mom.
Dr. Amy Moore:
We all are.
Teri Miller:
You hear listeners, do you hear listeners? You’re beautiful and you’re scared.
Dr. Amy Moore:
I want to hear a little bit about how your tragedy and your experience as a child with being burned, being bullied, the self-esteem issues that you probably had growing up. How did that impact how you parent?
Teri Miller:
Yeah.
Kelly Falardeau:
Oh my God. That’s such a deep question.
Dr. Amy Moore:
That’s why I asked it!
Teri Miller:
She’s straying from the script. We are totally off our outline to confess, we are just in the thick of it with you Kelly.
Kelly Falardeau:
Oh my God. Stick to the script, okay? Take it easy.
Teri Miller:
It’s too good. Yeah. It’s a hard question, but this is.
Kelly Falardeau:
I think what one of the things that you’re asking is how did my kids feel about me being a burn survivor?
Dr. Amy Moore:
Well, I wasn’t asking that, but you can answer that for sure. Go ahead.
Teri Miller:
Yeah.
Dr. Amy Moore:
I was more thinking, did the fact that you suffered so much make you more safety conscious? Did it make you more overprotective? Did you not want your children to take risks because you were afraid they might get hurt or injured or did it make you more empathetic? Because if they were going through something hard, you knew what hard was? Things like that.
Teri Miller:
Yeah.
Kelly Falardeau:
Interesting. Okay. Of course, definitely around the fire, we did a lot of camping and definitely I was more protective of the kids there and everybody’s kids. No kid was allowed to put anything in the fire and I didn’t care who you were. I made sure that it didn’t happen. Right? I was more safety conscious of that, but I don’t believe that I was that mom that was overprotective over everything. I believe I was the mom that, you know what, this is your life and this is your journey and you’re going to have to go through some stuff. And that’s actually how I feel about my daughter, it’s her journey. And she’s making decisions that she believes are the right ones for her life.
Kelly Falardeau:
And I’m making decisions based on what I think is right for my life. And I believe that we all need to go through our journey no matter what that is or it can be. It’s interesting because I actually believe that sometimes my kids got annoyed with me that I wasn’t very empathetic in certain cases. For example, my kids would fall and hurt their arm. Well, they would actually compare what happened to them to what happened to me. And my daughter would even say to me, okay, mom, I know what happened to me is not as bad as what happened to you and I didn’t almost die like you did, but still my arm hurts?
Teri Miller:
Yeah.
Kelly Falardeau:
Sometimes it made it kind of challenging even for me, because I felt like maybe I’m not protecting them enough. Right? I don’t know. I don’t know how to say what I mean about it, because my kids would be like, well mom, I’m hurting. I’m like, I know you are just put a bandaid on it. You’ll be fine.
Teri Miller:
Yeah.
Kelly Falardeau:
Right? But when my son, for example, had a head injury or had to get stitches and that happened a few times then of course I was like, oh my gosh, what are we going to do about this and blah, blah, blah. And then I had more empathy or sympathy for him as far as that went, but it had to be bad. Right? I think a lot of times were too cautious as moms. We don’t want our kids to hurt. Well, the fact of life is they are going to hurt.
Teri Miller:
Right.
Kelly Falardeau:
I’m sure my mom didn’t want me to be teased and bullied and have to go through all the pain of all the surgeries and everything that I went through. But I had to, and now I’m at the point where I can teach other people what to do.
Teri Miller:
Yeah.
Kelly Falardeau:
Right? And how to get through it. I mean, I even lost a baby. In between my daughter and my twins. I lost a baby girl at 28 weeks and it was devastating losing my baby. But now I see the gift in it. And the gift is if I wouldn’t have lost her, if we would’ve had her, we never would’ve had the twin boys. We would’ve stopped at the two girls. And I see the gift in that. I see the gift in me getting burnt is that I’ve been on stages around the world and I’ve two Ted talks and I’ve won the medal from the queen. And I was nominated for entrepreneur of the year and all these things have happened because I’ve chosen to take my story and make something with it.
Kelly Falardeau:
And I think that’s the problem with a lot of people is you have two choices. You can take your story and you can see it as a tragedy and it’s going to hold you back in life. Or you can see it as something that’s going to empower you and you can help other people with it. And a good example of that is with my son, he was violated by a girl when he was 15. It was a big whole ‘Me, Too’ type of issue with my son. And he was really quite upset and he was suicidal about it and it turned out to be a whole big lie. One day he’s laying on his bed and I went and I laid down beside him and I’m holding his hand and he said, mom, I didn’t deserve this.
Kelly Falardeau:
Why did this happen to me? And I said, did I deserve to get burnt as a two year old? He said, no. I said, and what am I doing about it? He said, well, you’re helping people. You’re telling people your story. I said, exactly. And maybe this is going to happen to you someday. Maybe some young man is going to come up to you and say, this is what happened to me, Cody, how did you get through it? And I say, that’s what our life is all about. That’s why we are going through all this stuff is because we’re learning how to deal with it so we can then pass it on to other people.
Dr. Amy Moore:
Yeah.
Teri Miller:
Who is it, Amy? That quote, Amy, Michael Alcee? It makes me think of the quote, recycle pain into purpose. I think we attribute it to him, but that’s what you’re talking about, Kelly. What I’m hearing you say is that how that impacted your children. What you went through is that you are allowing them to see that. I think many of us parents don’t, we hover too much. You’re allowing your kids to see that pain is in the world. It will happen, but can you recycle pain into purpose?
Kelly Falardeau:
I love that. I love that message. And that’s the whole thing. My kids have seen me as a single mom. They’ve seen me cry. They’ve seen me struggle or they’ve seen the power cut off. My son came to me one time, mom, why can’t we tell anybody that we have no power? Are you kidding me? I am so embarrassed that we have no power. Right? I don’t want anybody to know that we had to go out to the dollar store and buy a whole bunch of candles so we could have light in the house.
Teri Miller:
Yeah.
Kelly Falardeau:
Right? But that’s life. And you can use that to empower yourself or you can use it and then hold yourself back in life. And yeah. I choose to use it to empower myself. And yeah. My kids have seen that we had no power. Oh, well, move forward.
Teri Miller:
Yes.
Kelly Falardeau:
But they also seen me busting my butt. They’ve seen me be on Zoom. They’ve seen me gone speaking. They’ve seen me on stage. They’ve seen me do all these things. They’ve seen me persevere. They see that I don’t give up. And there are times when I feel like I’m a bad mom, but that’s okay. They’re going to have feelings of feeling like they’re bad too, but we can all get through it. And that’s what we need to understand is have a mentor, listen to your guys’ podcast, right? Because I know you guys are putting out great content out there. And get people in your life that are going to empower you. And that’s the problem is a lot of times people have people in their lives that are just being negative Nellies and not encouraging them to follow their dreams. Right? And that’s what we need to do is have more people in our life that are going to empower us.
Teri Miller:
Love it. So good. Me too.
Dr. Amy Moore:
We need to take a break and let Teri read a word from our sponsor. When we come back, I want to talk a little bit about, your story is about big tragedy and big scars and it’s a big overcomer story. I want to talk a little bit about small scars and those small things that eat away at us as women and moms and how we can shut those voices off.
Kelly Falardeau:
Sounds good.
Dr. Amy Moore:
When we come back.
Teri Miller: (Reading sponsor ad from LearningRx)
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Dr. Amy Moore:
We’re back talking to Kelly Falardeau about her amazing story of turning tragedy into triumph. Kelly, I want to talk a little bit about how not all scars are visible scars and not all scars are big. Right? Some of us struggle with our weight, right? Then we’re embarrassed to go to the swimming pool in the summer. Some of us have made mistakes as young adults or college students. And we don’t think, because of the mistakes we’ve made, that we’re worthy to give advice or do certain jobs. We all have these scars, whether they’re internal, psychological, or physical, that I think create barriers to what we want to do with our lives. Or create barriers to even looking to achieving our dreams. Right? Talk a little bit about those and what your advice would be.
Kelly Falardeau:
You’re right, a lot of times the little scars that will hold us back from feeling like good moms or feeling like we’re doing great things in our life. I still remember this one time. This was I think about eight or nine years ago. And all kinds of things started happening to me. My husband started the divorce proceedings and now I was only able to see my kids every second week for a week at a time, we’re doing one week on one week off.
Teri Miller:
Yep.
Kelly Falardeau:
Wasn’t liking that at all. Because I was a stay at home mom for a lot of years. My friend had committed suicide. I got into a car accident. I had absolutely no bookings as a speaker. I was maxed out to my credit cards and had no money at all. And I had just bought a new place and I was thinking, oh my God, what am I going to do now?
Kelly Falardeau:
And I remember sitting on the end of my bed and I had my iPad and I was Googling about how to end my life. And I thought, oh my God, what am I going to do? And I had three rules. One was my kids couldn’t be the one to find me. The second was that it had to be painless. And the third was that it had to be final. And I couldn’t find anything to achieve all three of those things. And I thought, what am I going to do? How am I going to get through this period, something has to change. Right? And I started thinking about my mom. She would’ve felt horrible. If I had ended my life, she would’ve taken the guilt herself.
Kelly Falardeau:
Right. My sister would’ve said, if all Kelly needed was money, why didn’t she come to me? We have money. My kids would’ve blamed themselves. My daughter would’ve said, if I was a better daughter, my mom wouldn’t have wanted to do this. My sons, they’d be devastated too. Everybody in my life would’ve been devastated. And I thought, okay, how can I get through this? And I thought, you know what? I need to just do one thing. That’s it, just one thing. And then if I need to go back to bed, go back to bed. And so I would go and I’d look at my emails and someone sent me a thank you email and I wrote it down. Right. And then something else that happened and every day something would happen. This one girl said to me, Kel, I’m going to give you a coaching call, a 90 minute coaching call.
Kelly Falardeau:
And so we talked and I didn’t even know this lady. And she said, okay, I’m going to coach you. She said, normally it costs $20,000 a year to coach with me. I’m going to do it for free. And I’m going to get you through this horrible spot that you’re in. And I said, okay. And so we met three days a week for about an hour to two hours a day. And she asked me one of the most profound questions ever. And she said to me, Kelly, why don’t you value yourself? And I said, what do you mean? I value myself. I’m a speaker, right? My ego kicked in. My ego says I speak to schools and I speak to women’s groups. And I share my story. I value myself. And she goes, no. She says, I think the reason you don’t value yourself is because you’re not making the money you want to make.
Kelly Falardeau:
And I was like, oh. That hit me right on my core because she was right. I had set a goal to meet, make a six figure income three years in a row and still hadn’t made it. And all my friends that are speakers are saying Kel, you used to be making more money. And I’m thinking I was so mad. And she was like, okay, don’t call me back until you know what value is. And I’m thinking, what the hell is value? If it’s not money, what is value? And in my family, I’m the oldest. And I’m the only one who’s not a millionaire of all my siblings. And I’m thinking what the heck? I’m supposed to be the strongest. I’m supposed to be one looking after my siblings. They’re not supposed to be looking after me. I’m supposed to look after them.
Kelly Falardeau:
And I was thinking, what is value? And then I started thinking about all the things I’ve done. For example, my first book, No Risk, No Reward, is in Africa. And they’re teaching people, young teenagers about self esteem. And I thought, well, nobody in my family or friends is doing that. And then I thought about how another friend of mine, I connected him with all his family. They hadn’t seen him in 25 years. They thought he was dead because he was drunk. And they told him, don’t come back to the family until you’re sober. And then he was in the U.S. and his family was in Canada and I reconnected them at our 25th school reunion. And then I thought about my other friend and how I helped him become a best selling author. And now he’s teaching people how to be best selling authors.
Kelly Falardeau:
And I wrote all of these things down, and I emailed it to my coach, because I always had to email my homework to her. And the next day I’m reading it. And I said, who is this chick? I’ve got to know her. And I thought, oh my gosh, why am I so hard on myself? And so I sent it to my coach and we had the call in the morning and she says, I think you finally get it. Your value is not on how much money you make or don’t make, your value is in the acts of service that you do. It’s in the things we do that gives us value. It’s not in money. People place so much value on money and they think they’re bad people if they’re not making enough money. And I struggle with that. There’s lots of times when I struggle with, I’m not making enough money or I need more money or whatever.
Kelly Falardeau:
And it’s like, hold it. What else are you doing? There’s a couple things that I do. One is of course gratitude. Even my boyfriend the other day, because I was having a little pity party and I was sitting in my poopy diaper. That’s what my friend always says, are you going to stay in your poopy diaper or are you going to get out of it?
Teri Miller:
Nice.
Kelly Falardeau:
How do I get out of my poopy diaper? And he said, what are you grateful for? You’re grateful for where you live. Are you grateful for having a roof over your head? Are you grateful for the people in your life? What are you grateful for? And it’s amazing how much that actually works when you actually start thinking about what you’re grateful for.
Kelly Falardeau:
But one of the other strategies that I use to get out of my poopy diaper is what I call my happy land. And so happy land is like a 30 second visual. A little movie that I play in my head. For example, when I was going through my divorce, of course, divorce was horrible. And there were times when I couldn’t even stand to see my ex-husband’s name. If I saw his name, it instantly would trigger anger. And I thought, this isn’t good. I can’t do this. I can’t be in anger because I’m a speaker and I need to be able to motivate myself. I’m motivating other people. I need to motivate me too. What I did is, I changed his name on my phone, and I changed it to poor soul.
Kelly Falardeau:
And then the next time I would see his name pop up, I would say, oh my gosh, what’s poor soul doing, what’s he up to? What does he need? And I didn’t get triggered by anger anymore. Just doing that one little simple trick helped me to shift my mindset so that every time I saw his name, it didn’t bother me. Now his name doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t trigger me so I can call him by his real name and it doesn’t bother me, but that was one of the first things that I did.
Kelly Falardeau:
Getting back to happy land. Another thing that would happen is that he would text me or phone me and we’d maybe have an argument or it didn’t go the way we wanted it to. I had this happy land visual. And basically it was a date that I went on with this guy and he was so good looking and he had a red convertible Porsche. And he came and he picked me up and this is true, right? Like it’s a true thing. He came with the red convertible Porsche and we went and got some lunch and we had a picnic and a bottle of wine. And so every time I think of that visual, I do a whole mindset shift. Right. And that’s one of my second strategies is have a happy land. And I keep track of all these different situations that make me really happy. And sometimes it might take thinking about it in my head four or five times in a row, but eventually it’ll happen. And music is the same thing for me too.
Kelly Falardeau:
That’s a third thing for perseverance is have empowering songs. And even we were doing my documentary and I was having a meltdown. And they said, okay, Kel, go do what you got to do. And don’t come back until you’re ready. And there was this one song that I played and I played it like five times over to get me out of that. Because I was crying about something and it shifted me physically into then being happy again. Those are three, three of the things that I do when I’m having those little scar moments and need to deal with them.
Dr. Amy Moore:
Yeah. That’s great advice. What’s what’s the song?
Kelly Falardeau:
The song is Pretty Vegas by INXS.
Dr. Amy Moore:
Okay.
Kelly Falardeau:
Yeah, it’s just really high energy. I call it a blood thumping song.
Dr. Amy Moore:
Okay.
Kelly Falardeau:
Yeah.
Dr. Amy Moore:
Okay. Good to know. We’ll all have to look that one up.
Kelly Falardeau:
Yeah. Okay.
Dr. Amy Moore:
That’s great. You actually had a couple, you have a free download, an ebook, right? And I think it’s seven…
Kelly Falardeau:
Dr. Amy Moore:
Yes. And you list these ways, help me out. One of them is that you make a list of all your favorite things. And I remember thinking that’s a great idea because when we are upset, we can’t always think of what is it that we can do right now to cheer ourselves up. Because your amygdala hijacks your prefrontal cortex when you’re upset. Right. And you can’t reason. And so if you actually have a list pre-made of your favorite things. I think your list said things like, what’s your favorite ice cream, your favorite song, your favorite thing to do, your favorite hobby, whatever. So that you can just pull up your favorites list and choose something to get out. Yeah.
Kelly Falardeau:
Exactly. I have the perseverance tool kit.
Dr. Amy Moore:
Yeah.
Kelly Falardeau:
And I actually had a little card deck made of it, because you can just pull out one of the little cards and it’ll tell you go listen to your favorite song, or go plan a vacation, or all these little things just to physically do a mind shift. Because sometimes we get stuck, like I said, in my poopy diaper and how do you get out of it? Actually it was funny because a few years ago I did that on Facebook and I would always say, what’s your favorite color? And then people would all put their favorite colors, and every day would be a favorite something. And in fact, I actually did that with my daughter too.
Kelly Falardeau:
This was quite a few years ago, but I was doing it with people that I was getting to know when I was dating. And I was like, why am I not doing this with my kids? And I actually did it in a mother-daughter workshop too. And in the mother-daughter workshop, same type of thing. We had yellow sticky notes. And I had a list of 30 questions. And then the moms and daughters would each answer what their favorite color was or their favorite movie or their favorite something. And it was just awesome because they passed the notes back and forth to each other and put it on a page and could keep track of their favorite somethings. And what was cool about it is that the moms and daughters didn’t realize how much they didn’t know about their son and their daughter. They thought they knew everything. Right. They thought they knew everything about their mom or their daughter. And it was like, oh, I didn’t know my mom loves watching hockey.
Teri Miller:
That is such a fun idea. That’s really good. Yeah, that would just be super fun, I’m thinking on a sticky note and then just sticking on your window to do with the kids sitting around the dinner table or whatever. Hey, everybody put, what’s your favorite color? What’s your favorite dessert? And that’d be super fun. I love that.
Dr. Amy Moore:
Tell us about your new documentary.
Kelly Falardeau:
The documentary is called Still Beautiful and it is based on my life story. They even recreated my accident of me getting burned as a two year old. And recreated some of my hospital scenes and the school scenes. And they follow me right along to speaking to a group of 3000 teenagers. And it turned out really awesome. I was quite excited.
Kelly Falardeau:
I was quite impressed with how well they did it, especially the recreation. Because, keep in mind too, as a two year old, I didn’t remember how I got burnt. Yeah. A lot of people asked me, do you remember it? And no, I don’t. I don’t remember it at all. And so it was really quite challenging for me to watch because they had four different versions of me. The hardest part for me was seeing that little two year old that didn’t have any scars. And then watching the whole thing of my mom running out and crying and upset and wrapping me in a blanket and taking me to the hospital and everything. And it was phenomenal how they did it. They did a fantastic job on it.
Teri Miller:
How did that come about?
Kelly Falardeau:
Oh my, this is so funny. What happened was what four or five years ago? Well, it was before Wayne Dyer passed away. What had happened is I wanted to meet my favorite authors and on Facebook popped up a conference that Hay House was putting on and how to write a book proposal. And Wayne Dyer was one of the speakers and it was in Maui. And so I said to the universe, okay, I want to go, but show me the money. Because I didn’t have the money at the time. Because I was broke single mom at that time. And the next day or so I got a check for like $1,500 and then my credit card limit got raised by a thousand bucks. And I was like, oh my gosh. Okay, fine. I get the hint. I’m supposed to go. I booked my flight, booked the conference and everything, found out how to write a book proposal.
Kelly Falardeau:
And then they were having a contest and someone could win a $10,000 publishing contract. Well, I didn’t win the contest, but I said to myself, okay, I didn’t win the contest. Why else was I supposed to write this proposal?
Teri Miller:
What else?
Kelly Falardeau:
And I heard that little voice in my head saying email Brian. Now Brian works for a broadcaster here in Canada called AMI. And I sent him an email and I said, Hey, I just wrote a book proposal for my book called Still Beautiful. I’m being encouraged to make a documentary out of it. I don’t know if this is something you’re interested in or not, but maybe you guys are interested in it. And he said, yes, send it to us. There’s no stupid ideas. I sent the book proposal over to them and sure enough, they call me back and they said, okay, do you want to produce it yourself? Or do you want to co-produce it with us and we’ll put money in the pot. And of course I said, well, I want the money. Right. Let’s co-produce it. And that’s what we did. And two years later we finally had the documentary and it aired all across Canada and it’s a beautiful documentary. They did a fantastic job with it.
Dr. Amy Moore:
And so how can I…
Teri Miller:
I love this story! Sorry, go ahead. I love the story how it happened. Anyway, go ahead.
Kelly Falardeau:
Yeah, I know. I love looking back at the domino effect of things, how one thing led to this, that led to this, that led to this. That’s one of the things I just love. If you’re in Canada, you can watch it on AMI’s website. But if you’re not in Canada, we’re still trying to find a broadcaster that’s willing to air it. We’re still working on that, trying to get it outside of Canada.
Dr. Amy Moore:
Okay. But you have a book that goes along with the documentary?
Kelly Falardeau:
Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Amy Moore:
Okay. Yeah. And that’s available widely, anywhere.
Kelly Falardeau:
Yeah. It’s on Amazon. You can go on Amazon and order the book Still Beautiful. And what’s really cool about the book is that I actually put the scenes from the documentary in the book.
Dr. Amy Moore:
Oh good.
Kelly Falardeau:
Yeah. You’re actually reading the documentary instead of watching it. And then we have like 22 other authors that share their stories about feeling still beautiful.
Dr. Amy Moore:
Oh, I love that.
Kelly Falardeau:
Yeah
Dr. Amy Moore:
Kelly, is there anything you’d like to say that you haven’t gotten to say to our listeners today?
Kelly Falardeau:
Well, you guys have been asking the best questions ever, so thank you. You guys are awesome hosts. The one thing I would love to wrap up with is that dreams are meant to be found, not tucked away in dreamland. And it’s a quote that I came up with many years ago and it’s so true because I remember my grandma saying your dreams are never going to come true and stuff like that. And I just want you to know that your dreams are meant to be found, not tucked away in dreamland.
Dr. Amy Moore:
I love that. Thank you.
Kelly Falardeau:
Yeah. You’re welcome. Thank you.
Dr. Amy Moore:
This has been super inspiring, what a great conversation. Teri cried through the whole thing. If you want to see all of that emotion, you can watch us on YouTube. I’m a psychologist. I’m used to hearing the stories, right?
Dr. Amy Moore:
What a wonderful conversation that we’ve had, we want to thank you, Kelly Falardeau, for taking time out, sharing your experience and your encouragement and your wisdom for our listeners. If you all would like more information about Kelly’s work, her website is KellyFalardeau.com. That is F-A-L-A-R-D-E-A-U, but we will actually put that in the show notes. You can also find her on Facebook at Kelly Woodhouse Falardeau and Instagram @AlwaysBeautifulNFT. What does the NFT stand for?
Kelly Falardeau:
It stands for a non-fungible token.
Dr. Amy Moore:
Okay.
Kelly Falardeau:
Basically I’m also an artist along with the speaker. And it’s a way for me to sell my artwork on the crypto space.
Dr. Amy Moore:
Nice. And your artwork is beautiful too. The blankets that you make for burn victims, just absolutely gorgeous. Okay. We will put all of her links and those handles in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening today. If you liked our show, we would love it if you would leave us a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, like I said, if you would rather watch us, we are on YouTube. You can find us on every social media channel @thebrainymoms. Look, until next time we know that you’re busy moms and we’re busy moms, so we’re out.
Teri Miller:
See ya!
Kelly Falardeau:
See ya. Thank you.