Day 149: Leigh Koechner

February 26, 2010 at 12:01 am, Category: Inspiration

“If you just … draw a dot on a piece of paper and … you just lay the dot in front of you and you know what that dot is.  It’s a want, and you take a step to it, and you take a step to it, and you take a step to it, eventually you are going to pick that dot up and it’s going to be in your hand.  I think that life can be that easy, and I think that when we are so clear in our wants and we take a step forward, even if it’s an inch, nothing and no one can stop us from getting to that dot.  And that’s exciting!”

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Toni Reece: Thank you so much, Leigh, for agreeing to be part of the Project today, and before we begin with the questions, can you please introduce yourself?

Leigh Koechner: Hello and thank you for having me.  My name is Leigh Koechner, and I am a happily married woman living in Los Angeles.  I’m currently a stay-at-home mother of four children, and I am excited because I am stepping into what I want to do and starting my backyard talk show.

Toni: A backyard talk show – that sounds pretty cool!

Leigh: Yes, I’m so excited!

Toni: Well, Leigh …

Leigh: For years I’ve been …

Toni: Go ahead, go ahead.

Leigh: Well I was going to say for years I’ve been kind of pitching my ideas.  My husband is a semi-famous actor, and I’ve been pitching myself to him for years.  And he was like “You know, I’m kind of busy with my stuff, but you need to kind of find out what you want to do.”  And I finally figured it out and started moving forward, and I’m so excited.

Toni: Oh, fantastic.  Well Leigh, when you think about that word inspiration, who do you think you inspire and how do you do that?

Leigh: I think I inspire … the first person that comes to mind would be my husband, because he is in a business where he gets rejection a few times a week when he goes in for different roles, and I am trying to … in my life, when I hear the word “No” or I get rejection, it fuels me to move faster and harder and to work harder because I want it that bad.  And I think that my husband gets inspired that I do brush my pants off, and I do keep walking forward.  I think he gets inspired by that.

Another person that comes to mind is my little sister who is single and 40 and we were kind of coming up together and lived together in Los Angeles before I met my husband and hung out together.  And we kind of went our separate paths for a little bit, and I ended up married with children and she kind of always had the boyfriend.  And I was kind of always just running around alone enjoying life, and I think that she is inspired, kind of that she feels like I have created in my life the things that I want and she is starting to talk to me about that, about how to move forward to make it come to fruition.

Toni: So the people that you inspire, your husband and your sister, the way that you build your husband up and how he learns by your example of not letting “no” stop you and how you keep moving on your path, it sounds the same that you do for your sister as well.  That it’s an example that you set, that no matter what, you just gotta keep on moving forward; that’s what I’m hearing as far as how you inspire others.

Leigh: Yes, and I have found also that when I would try and share with them about it, they would be turned off or not open to it or roll their eyes back.  As soon as I just loved them and then moved forward myself on my own, they watched and were interested.

Toni: So it’s nothing that you can pull or push; it’s what you have to do.

Leigh: Exactly.  Exactly.

Toni: How do you think that that mentality or example or even anything else that you do helps other people explore their own potential?

Leigh: You know, I think when people are down and out or if they feel stuck, they kind of want to look around for people who are similar to where they are so they can hold their hands and stay in their “stuckness,” if you will.  But I think when you see somebody that you see something in the … like I’m pretty joyful.  No matter where I am in life. I’m excited about it and I’m interested in moving forward.

And I think that when one of my friends is stuck and holding the hands of others that are stuck and I’m kind of jogging past waving, saying “I love you,” or like “Oh, I want to get my feet out of the cement and move forward as well,” and I think it’s … yeah, I just … I’m just excited about … okay, I’m a little bit lost, I’m sorry.

Toni: No, no, no, it’s okay.  It sounds exactly like …

Leigh: I got so excited.

Toni: The way that you help people explore their potential as well is the way you inspire them, and that’s by walking the talk.  And I wrote down the words that “misery loves company,” and you choose not to be in that company.

Leigh: Yes, yes.  I feel like sometimes I’ve had some things happen in my life where it really feels heavy and I really feel overwhelmed and I really feel like I want to collapse and cry and ball up, and then I always allow myself, because I think that we do need to cry and we do need to ball up, but I don’t think we stay too long.

Like a little roly-poly, when they get touched on the back and they crumble and roll around for a little bit – you need to do that for protection and for some sort of … yeah, protection and preparation, but  you don’t want to stay in that.  I think then you stand up straight and take a breath and you feel what it is and you almost put it in the palm of your hand and look at it.  And I think when I can do that I’m really not staying in it.  I’m removing it from my heart and my soul and looking at it, and then I can start to mush it around in my hands and experience it and decide what I’m going to do with it.  But if I stay cocooned up like a roly-poly, I’m stuck.

Toni: So Leigh, what do you need to be inspired?

Leigh: I need … what I have found, my mind races crazy, and I have kids at three different schools and my husband never has a steady paycheck or job, and my life is like I’m jumping rock to rock to rock to rock all the time over water.  And I don’t really want to fall in, but I want to keep jumping, and I feel like if I can start … I heard once that Deepak Chopra meditates for two hours every day and he never feels angry.

I thought “Wow, I don’t have two hours or else I’d have to get up in the middle of the night,” so I was like “If I could just find five minutes or two minutes of quiet time to start my day,” and I try and start with quiet.  Sometimes I do it in my closet.  Sometimes I do it in my bathroom.  Sometimes in my bed before my feet touch the ground.  And I close my eyes, and I’m grateful and I get centered and I welcome everything that’s coming that day, and I try to say something grateful, of gratefulness for my life before my feet hit the ground so I feel like I’m already starting a step ahead of the game.  I’m ready for whatever.  I’m welcoming whatever comes at me.

Toni: I would imagine …

Leigh: I’m washing away my victim.

Toni: You said that you have four children?

Leigh: I have four children.

Toni: Right.  I can imagine that that five minutes is a luxury.

Leigh: It is a luxury – and this morning I didn’t really get it because one came in with an ear infection through the night and cried, and my husband is out of town right now, so I was like … kind of did it a little bit before I fell back asleep because I got up and had to go.  But I try and find a few minutes to myself where I can … sometimes if I can’t think of what to think or think of what to focus on, I just feel my breath.

Toni: What else do you need to be inspired, Leigh?  Do you … are there things that you find yourself … when you might be at a point where you’re going “Gosh, you know, I could use a little inspiration here,” do you find yourself reaching for things, looking for tools?

Leigh: Another thing that’s huge in my life is exercise, because I kind of start … I take a really hard exercise class here in Los Angeles.  And the class is pretty small because the woman seems like she’s not very nice or she’s kind of mean, but really she just pushes you.  And she pushes my mind and my body and I get inspired when I feel out of breath and I want to stop.

And I say to myself “This is when I must run harder.  This is when I must run faster.  This is when I must push through the aches and the pains because I can.”  And I feel like that carries over into my everyday experiences because, when the hurt comes or the setback comes, I know physically I can push through and I’m strong enough, and that’s huge to me, is being into my exercise.

Toni: Have you always been positive like that and knowing that you need to push through things in order to get to the other side, to know that you have to have that gratitude and be grateful?  Because there’s a lot of people that are reading and listening to these interviews but maybe aren’t as centered and together and they’re looking for tools and ways to do that.  So it’s helpful when people say “Yeah, I’ve always been this way and this is what it does for me,” or “No, you know, not so much.”  Have you always come to the table that way?

Leigh: Well, I think … I think that we are born how we are.  I was born … my mother said I’d run into a room and say “What are we going to do today?”  And my mother is mentally ill and she used to be an alcoholic, but now she’s just hooked on prescription drugs, and she’s always spent her whole life in bed.  So when I would run in and say “What are we going to do?” she would be like “Who are you?  Get out, and close my door!”

But I kind of was born with that running forward.  But with a mentally ill mother and a father who worked a lot, I was left alone and neglected and really kind of created this really super-strong person that I actually had to be at the time.  And so I didn’t always do it right, and I did struggle, and there was a lot of heartache.

And really until in my early thirties, when I met my husband who loved me with pure love that I’d never experienced before, did I truly find out who I am.  And for a while when I was learning, finding out who I was and I was going through therapy and stuff, I would look back on my days of being neglected and needing my mom so badly and never having her – she was there, but just behind a locked door – and how hard that was and how hard that was to raise myself with five other siblings when you really do need your mother so bad.  And so I remember looking back on that feeling like a victim and feeling like “How could she do this to me?  What about me?”

And I realized that that was a part of healing, and I did need to feel that, and I did deserve to have a mother, but I couldn’t stay in that.  And I started learning I can’t hold on to my past in a victim mode.  I have to appreciate it, because where I have grown today by doing hard work on myself and working hard every day, I have gotten to a place of having the life that I want from experiencing the heartache through healthy eyes instead of wallowing in it and wanting … and having the heart’s desire.

My heart’s desire is to experience every moment of this life because it’s so quick, it’s so short, and I never know when it’s done.  So I don’t want to spend any more time not knowing myself, being a victim, or living in pain or fear.  So I’m making a conscious effort and decision to move towards what I want.

Toni: What a great legacy you are living and then creating for your own children and those around you that just, you know, everything that you have said and talked about how you inspire and what you need to be inspired and what you’ve been through – my gosh, what a living legacy.  That’s really awesome.  What do you do, Leigh, to continue to explore this potential within yourself?

Leigh: You know, I’m going to use my current project as an example because I think we all, no matter how much we work or how strong we’re becoming, we all have a veil of fear that falls in front of our face.  I think every day something kind of falls in front of my face, and I always have … you know, I kind of come from being neglected, so I didn’t think I was really good enough for anything and had kind of a wild life until I had love for my husband and worked on finding out who I was.  And still I was thinking I wasn’t good enough and then I thought “You know, I actually am good enough.”

I’m going to have my own backyard talk show.  So I kind of went around to Hollywood, which is such an interesting place, and knocked on doors and got meetings and said “Hey, I’m gonna shoot this talk show in my backyard, would you like to be a part of it?”  They said, “You are middle-aged, nobody knows you, nobody really cares about you – no, we’re not interested.”  And I was like “Oh!  What?!?  I thought it was actually good enough.  What?!?”

And then I would have to come home and pull my veil out and look at myself and remember that I am just as good as anyone else who is pursuing or doing what I want to do.  And that is exciting, but it doesn’t matter what age I come in the game.  It doesn’t matter.  It matters what your heart is and how bad you want it.

I have this silly philosophy, but it works for me.  If you just imagine a dot or get a puff ball or draw a dot on a piece of paper and you lay that dot in front of you at five feet or one foot, wherever, you just lay the dot in front of you and you know what that dot is.  It’s a want, and you take a step to it, and you take a step to it, and you take a step to it, eventually you are going to pick that dot up and it’s going to be in your hand.  I think that life can be that easy, and I think that when we are so clear in our wants and we take a step forward, even if it’s an inch, nothing and no one can stop us from getting to that dot.  And that’s exciting!

Toni: That is exciting; what a great analogy, too.  Leigh, you have been amazing and it’s really … the interviews are 15 minutes and they go by so quickly, but the valuable information and insight that you’ve given in this interview are going to really cause a lot of people pause and a lot of people to go “Wow – wow!  Good for her!”  So we will put a link at the bottom of your interview on how to get a hold of you, and I can’t wait to see this talk show!  I hope it makes it here on the East Coast.

Leigh: Now, I’m going to have to get connected to a huge network so I can have someone fly you to my backyard to gab with me, because you’re lovely!  And thank you for the work that you’re doing bringing all of these different people together that we can share our stories and inspire each other, because that’s all we’ve got.

Toni: Absolutely, absolutely.  Thank you so very much, Leigh, for being part of the Get Inspired! Project.  It’s been a real pleasure.

Leigh: Thank you so much for having me.  Best of luck.

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For more information about Leigh Koechner:  www.AbsoluteLeigh.com

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