Miracle Mindset with JJ Virgin

Trevor:  Hello, and welcome to The Spa Doctor podcast. I’m Dr. Trevor Cates. Life is not always easy. Challenges do come up for all of us, and instead of struggling through those times, I want to encourage you to look at this differently. Today, my guest is going to help you have the power of courage, strength, and resilience, not to survive, but to thrive during life’s hardest moments.

My guest is JJ Virgin and she is sharing some powerful lessons she learned after her 16 year old son was in a brutal hit and run accident. If you’re not familiar with JJ Virgin, she is a celebrity nutrition and fitness expert best known for her New York Times best sellers, the Virgin Diet and Sugar Impact Diet. Fighting for her son’s life inspired a new focus on mindset. Her memoir, Miracle Mindset; A Mother, Her Son, and Life’s Hardest Lessons, explores the powerful lessons in strength and positivity that she learned after her son Grant’s accident.

JJ also hosts the popular, JJ Virgin Lifestyle Show Podcast, and regularly writes for Huffington Post, Rodale Wellness, and other major blog and magazines. She’s also a frequent guest on TV and radio, and speaks at major events. On today’s show, JJ shares her story and what lessons she learned along the way that led her to write a book and create a documentary, and she shares how you can master your mindset so you can lead a bigger better life too. Please enjoy this interview.

JJ, it’s so great to have you on my show.

JJ:  Thank you, glad to be here.

Trevor:  Yeah, so you’ve got a new book coming out, Miracle Mindset. Now, this is quite different than your other New York Times’ best sellers you’ve written on diet and nutrition, so what inspired you to write this book? Let’s talk about this.

JJ:  All right, there’s two things actually, and it seems different but it was super interesting. Last year, I queried my community and I said, “If you are not where you want to be with your health, if you’re regaining weight, all of those things that people complain about, what’s going on?” I fully expected to hear, “Oh, I can’t give up sugar”, you know, the stuff we hear. “I don’t have time. I can’t afford to eat right, blah blah blah.” Wasn’t the case. The number one thing I heard from people was that they didn’t feel good enough. They didn’t feel worthy.

It wasn’t a strategy shortage, it was a mindset shortage. That triggered things for me, because as you know, we’ve been friends for a long time, so you know back four and a half years ago, right when the Virgin Diet was getting ready to come out and [did 00:02:53] everything invested in that. There’s important back story. My 16 year old son was the victim of a hit and run and left for dead in the street, and I literally launched my New York Times’ best seller in the ICU next to him in a coma, overruled the doctors when they told us to let him die, did things behind their backs, fought for him, and basically made a decision we were going to bring him back to past 100%, to better than he was before the accident.

I kept getting asked how we did that, and I put it all together and went, it all comes down to mindset. Whatever is going on. If you’re facing a major health crisis, if you are dealing with relationship issues, come on, there are so many strategies out there right, but if you haven’t really built your mindset, you’re going to get limited by that every single time.

Trevor:  Yeah, absolutely. Obviously you learned a lot along this process to make you want to write this book, so what are some of the things that you feel like you learned during this crazy experience that have helped you grow? I’ve seen you change a lot since I’ve known you.

JJ:  Yeah, and you said that, I kind of laughed, because we both know with writing a book it’s like we must be crazy. I felt compelled to do this because as I sat and reflected, when people kept saying, “How did you do that?” I went, “How did I do that?” Because I was in auto-pilot because habits I’d put into place over decades of my life were what got me through it. I was just lucky in my 20’s I had this amazing mentor who was supposed to be a business mentor, but she didn’t teach me business, she taught me mindset. I kept getting frustrated because I was like, “I want to learn how to close and how to market, and you just keep talking to me about my mindset”, but after six months I was like, “Oh, I get it now. I get it.”

I looked at all this and I went, “Wow, there’s so many lessons in what I went through”, and it comes down to a premise. There’s a psychologist named Carol Dweck who identified that there’s two types of mindsets. There’s this fixed one, and we all know these people. It’s the victim. Life happens to me, oh poor me, there’s nothing I can do. That’s a really sad place to be because you basically don’t have any options, but there’s another type of mindset, the growth mindset, and that’s the person who knows that life happens through them, by them, for them, and that’s the premise I led with, was that we can develop our mindset. In fact, it’s a muscle. I have to say that because I’m nutrition and fitness and mindset. Those are my pillars.

I really looked at what were the attributes that helped me get through this. Then, as I started to look at other people in our community, it’s amazing, and I know just talking to you, you have no idea that the people who you admire, who inspire you, everyone’s gone through challenging times, and they got better. In fact, the science of resilience shows that. That people who go through challenging times and step up are happier, more successful. They have better lives because of the hard stuff.

Trevor:  Right, so JJ I know the story behind what happened, but tell our audience a little bit more about what happened with Grant and how things are now.

JJ:  I have two boys. At the time, they were 15 and 16, and I know we’ve talked about this too. It’s like you always have the one child who’s so easy, and then you have the other one who’s not so easy. Grant, my 16 year old, was the not so easy. He had bipolar disorder, he got diagnosed young, it was rapid cycling, and so we had good days and bad days, and I even had to send him to Utah to live in a residential treatment center to get better and learn how to manage it. We’d gotten to a really good place where we didn’t have as many bad days, except for that day of the accident.

I came home, he was in a bad mood, he’d missed school because he had a migraine, he spontaneously healed, now he wanted to go to martial arts. I was like, “No, you’re not, because you didn’t go to school”, and he escalated it and stomped out the door barefoot, no ID, nothing. That was when, we’ll never know what happened. He was mad and stormed out the door. Next thing I know is my other son comes running in and says, “Grant’s been hit by a car”, and airlifted to the local hospital. You know when someone’s airlifted it’s not good. We called as we were driving over there. They won’t tell us anything because he’s a John Doe.

We get there, they usher us into a room, and they tell us that he’s got a torn aorta. That kills 90% of the people on the scene and his was hanging on by onion skin they described it as, and it had to get repaired or it’s going to rupture sometime in the next 24 hours. The problem was he had multiple brain bleeds. He was in a deep coma, and it’s a very special surgery to be able to repair a torn aorta without blood thinners, and they couldn’t do it there. Besides that he had 13 fractures, I’d find out later how bad these really were. At the time, to me, fractures were no big deal when you had an aorta ready to rupture.

We went to see him and he literally was covered in road rash, glass, and gravel, bones sticking through his skin, a tube coming out of his head to manage the pressure on his brain, on ventilator, and just gruesome. We found out that there was a hospital that could do the surgery so we asked about it and the doctor in charge said he’d never survive another airlift, and even if he did, he’s not going to survive the surgery, and even if he were to survive both of those, he’s going to be so brain damaged it wouldn’t be worth it.

My [inaudible 00:09:04] says, “like a 0.25% chance”. The doctor says, “Yep, that sounds about right”, and Bryce says, “We’ll take those odds.” That was really, you look at that, there’s the first example of mindset. That we all just were like, “We’re doing this. We’re overruling you.” We got to that hospital, we didn’t know if he was going to have survived the airlift or not, so it was a really rough drive in the middle of the night, but we got there, he’d survived the airlift. We had this amazing five surgical teams working on him, and literally a doctor who walked in and goes, “I got this. I do these all the time, you don’t even need to worry about it.” Just what you want to hear.

Once he got through that first surgery and then the surgeries to rod his broken femurs and set all his bones and deal with his heal, the neurosurgeons they didn’t think he’d ever wake up. I was standing in the hospital ICU holding his hand and talking to him, and he was just lying there in a deep coma with all the bells going off, and I said something about his brother, and he squeezed my hand. Then I said something else, and he didn’t respond, and then I said something about his girlfriend, and he not only squeezed my hand, he lifted it of the bed. That’s when I went, “He is in there.” I said, “Grant, we’ve got this. You’re going to be 110%. This will be the best thing that ever happened to you. You don’t need to worry, you’re a warrior. We’re all here, we can handle this.”

I just decided, I looked over at my ex-husband, I said, “so this is a do-over and he’s going to be better than before.” That’s what we operated on from that time forward. Trevor, there was zero indication of that for most of the last four and a half years. No indication of that. He was in a coma for weeks, he was barely responsive for weeks after that, and then for months he had to learn everything over again. Who he was, how to eat, how to go to the bathroom, how to tie his shoes, how to brush his teeth. Then he’d forget. You’d answer a question and then he’d turn around he’d ask you the same question again.

It was just like, “oh my gosh, how are we going to get him”, but it was asking the right question. “How are we going to get him to 110%?” The answer is, 1% at a time. You get him to wake up from the coma and we just watched every little miracle. We looked for them. We have miracles that happen around us every single day and we miss them. We miss them all the time, but I was watching for every single one. Now, I would say I know we have so much more we can do, and I’m just making it part of my life’s work to accumulate everything out there as options for healing your brain, but he at this point was better than he was before the accident in so many ways. He’s a nicer person, he’s empathetic, he’s never been a victim, he’s more creative.

Literally, I asked him the other day, I said, “Grant, let’s go back four and a half years, and you’re standing at the side of the road, and you can cross the street or not. What would you do?” He said, “I would cross the street, because I’m a better person.” I’m like, “You could have knocked me over with that one.”

Trevor:  Wow, that’s a crazy response. If you ask him what he feels got him through that, to be better at this time, what is that?

JJ:  He says his family. I can tell you that these attributes of this miracle mindset that Bryce clearly exemplified over and over again and Grant did too. Grant is so resilient it’s ridiculous. We call him a cat because he’s just the embodiment of resilient and courageous, so I think that has played a big part in it. Combined with one of the attributes of the miracle mindset is being collaborative, asking for help, being in [impunity 00:13:06] and we have just circled the wagons around him. That’s an important thing because brain injuries, like a lot of health problems, don’t just effect that person, they affect everybody around that person, so it’s been all of us stepping up to take care of him.

I will also tell you that 25% of people with brain injuries are suicidal and Grant was one of those. It’s not been good all the time. There have been some horrible times during this, and as I was writing the book, I remember thinking, “Gosh, what if I’m writing this book and my son kills himself and I’ve written this book?” Then I really realized that this book, and the movie that we put together with it, You are Stronger Than You Think, and the academy that trains you on how to develop your own miracle mindset is not about things working out perfectly. They’re actually about the fact that things will never work out perfectly.

I’ve never done one perfect thing in my life. Life throws us stuff, and really it’s about building that mindset so that you’ve got the habits in place, you’ve got it in you so that you can handle those things.

Trevor:  I think that’s amazing for you to say that JJ, because I think so many people look at you and they think that you are perfect. Everything that you’ve achieved in your career, your level of health and your physical appearance and all of that. You appear perfect. How are you getting that across in your book to help people understand that we don’t have to be perfect, because I think they everybody thinks that. We all think we have to be perfect.

JJ:  It was very interesting for me, because when I wrote this book it’s the way I do things. I wrote the book, then thought we should do a documentary. Then I thought, “Gosh, I can teach this.” I realized that the only way to do any of this was to be completely vulnerable and open. All the stuff that you put in the closet, you’re like, “Well no one will know about that.” I just went, “You know what? I’m going to put it all out there.” It’s been so interesting, because just even in the academy, the number one thing people talked about was just how real I was. The things that I was sharing, because we all have them.

25 years ago I was a personal trainer in LA. I was one of the first personal trainers. It was me and Body by Jake, and so back then it was all celebrities and super wealthy people that had trainers. It was like this big luxury thing. I was in all their houses, and these are all the people who have the most glamorous, amazing perfect lives, and uh uh. I never saw one situation where that was the case. It was unbelievable and it just makes you realize there is no perfection. If you look at the most successful people, they take imperfect action. They just keep moving forward. They learn as they go.

I have never learned one thing from things going well. I have never had a situation just be amazing and go, “I learned so much from that amazing beautiful great situation.” The only time you grow is through the challenges. Through the hard times. If you’re looking at someone going, “Wow, look at their life and look how amazing they are.” It’s probably because they’ve gone through some serious hard times to get there.

Trevor:  Yeah, it’s so true how tough times can help us grow. As painful as it is in the moment it can help us be better people. I really appreciate how vulnerable you are and how you’re sharing all this information rather than just keeping up some sort of façade like a lot of people do, of “Yeah, everything’s fine, no everything’s good here.” You were willing to talk about it and I think everybody, obviously your circumstance, your situation is much bigger issue than a lot of us have gone through, but everyone goes through some sort of difficulties in life. I’m excited to see your documentary and so excited about your book to help people wherever they are.

JJ:  I really looked at it as three things. In fact, we came up with this idea, this whole idea, first of all, is that your mindset’s a muscle, because honestly, no point in writing a book unless, while the story’s specific, like you alluded to, the lessons are really universal. Really, this metaphor or your mindset being a muscle, which means it’s either growing or it’s going. We put together this whole concept of miracle mindset, mindset CPR, really having that courage. The courage is really what can help you handle things.

Often, we tend to shy away from things, and I hear a lot about being fearless. I actually don’t believe we should be fearless, because you should feel the fear. It’s there. You’re going to feel it. It’s being courageous. It’s feeling something and knowing that you’ve been through this before and you can handle it and stepping into it. Then that second part, purpose. What I see with so many people is they get stuck in their lives. So many people are just stuck in a rut. I’ve been there, I’m sure you’ve been there. We all do, we get stuck.

Maybe right now I’m stuck in a rut with my fitness routine. I’m looking at it going, “I really need to do something else.” I’m in such a, stuck. When you have a purpose, when you have a big enough, ‘why’ … I looked at the Virgin Diet. That book had to be successful. Then the R, for resilience. The more you lean into things, you step into that fear, you exercise that courage, you’ll find that you’re stronger than you thought you were, you’re stronger than you think, but it builds that resilience. You can do all this so that as these things show up, you go, “I can handle this.”

By the time I was dealing with my son in the ICU, I’d gone through dad dying of cancer, son getting diagnosed with bipolar, a horrific divorce, and a lot of sick, alcohol dad, schizophrenic brother, I mean, I’d gone through some stuff. It was like, “Oh, okay. I know what to do here.” The situation may be different, but the same muscles are going to apply here. Those same attributes are going to apply.

Trevor:  Yeah, absolutely. With your book, who did you write this for? When you wrote the book, who were you thinking about?

JJ:  It’s interesting, but I look at this so much because it still resonates with people who, with moms, because I know for me, and I said it actually so many times before this happened. I go, “I can handle anything. Anything in business, anyone being mean. I can handle anything, just don’t mess with my kids.” As long as my kids are safe and healthy and happy, we’ve got this. I think any parent, mom or dad, feels that same way. It’s like, “Okay”, but so many people to me, Trevor, they say, “I could never have done that.” I go, “You would have done it because when you’re looking at a loved one, you’re like, what do I need to do?”

You know I did a lot of alternative stuff. A lot of it behind the doctor’s and hospital’s back, because they wouldn’t let me, and I knew that it was the right thing to do, so I did it. It’s really interesting, because as much as I don’t want to say it’s a book for everyone or a movie for everyone, because that violates all the principles of marketing, what we’re seeing now is people are taking the documentary and they’re having their kids watch it. I look at this now and my thought process going through it and really seeing how Grant has been going through this, is we are never better than when we’re challenged.

As Grant was coming through this, as you can imagine, I became super over-protective mama bear when he’s out of the hospital. He would go to cross the street and I’d literally be on him. He’s like, “Mom, stop.” As we’re going through all this and his memory’s been challenging, it’s like, “I can’t remember appointments, can you just text me when you know I have one?” I go, “I can’t do that sweetheart. You’re going to have to do this. You’ve got a phone, you’ve got to program it. This is not going to be easy, but you’re going to be strong.”

It was the whole, “don’t wish it was easier, make yourself stronger”, and the minute I challenged him and said, “you can do this. Look at what you’ve been through. You’re a warrior. Step up.” He was like, “Okay.” I look at it now, and go, “Maybe this is a parenting book.” Really, we look at a lot of the kids now, and we’re all grumbling about them, but who’s creating the entitlement? We want to work hard. We want to show up bigger, and you do that by challenging yourself, not by shying away from things.

Trevor:  Yeah. I think that’s so true, and it’s easy to just get stuck in our, not just a rut, but just the mundane. Just getting by and not really pushing yourself outside your comfort zone to change your mindset. Where is a good place for people to start? What do you think are things that people can start doing to change their mindset?

JJ:  One of the things that I used in the hospital, and again, I never would have thought of any of this stuff because it was just such a part of me. It’s kind of like when someone says, “Hey, what’s your secret to success?” You wouldn’t say it’s brushing my teeth. You wouldn’t say some things. You just are used to the things that you do every day. I had a habit in place that that first mentor had gotten me locked into for decades. It was pulling out a journal every morning with a pen, on paper, physically writing, not on my phone, and writing down three things, three people that I was grateful for. Then really feeling it. Not just writing it down.

You can write more, of course, but that’s what I did every morning, and it is amazing. There’s actually research on gratitude and how it builds resilience, and there’s research when they look at school shootings and stuff, that the kids who didn’t have the big fear were the kids that were grounded in this. I know for me, it’s been a terrifying four and a half years, and it has been a complete mindset test. That is why he’s here, that’s why I’m here. It’s like completely.

What has gotten me through it are a lot of strategies that I put into the academy and the lessons in the book, but the big thing that’s so easy that you can start right now is just doing the gratitude challenge. Just three things every morning, but you got to write them. That’s the critical tool is to use the journal. We hear people in a matter of five to seven days, it’s done this whole shift in their life. It got them unstuck, it taught them how to be able to step up and handle things. That little thing.

Trevor:  Wow, and so you’re saying to write it down. Not put it on your phone. Why is that?

JJ:  There is something about the process of your pen to paper and how your brain interacts with that. Actually Mary Morrissey just explained them. I’m like, “I got to write that down so I’ll remember it”, but there’s a neurological hookup when you put the pen to paper versus the phone. Intuitively, I always knew it, but I just got it explained to me, so I’m like, “Oh good. I was right on that.”

I actually carry a gratitude journal with me everywhere I travel. Teeny one, write it down.

Trevor:  You do this in the morning or night, or whenever you have time, or do you have a specific ritual that you do?

JJ:  Yeah. Every morning I wake up, I roll over, I grab my book, I write those three things down. First thing, because otherwise, all of a sudden, and this has happened, and it’s interesting. I talked with a couple other people of the same morning routine. They go, “If I get of my morning routine, the whole day is like ah. It goes sideways.” At night, I make a practice of talking to Tim, my fiance, and you can do this with any accountability partner, spouse, kid, is what were three, what I call little miracles, or whims of the day.

I say that because we tend to live in the horizon. I especially was challenged so much with always being out there in front, forward, setting a bigger goal, a new goal, and never looking going, “Gosh, what was great about today? What happened today?” You’d be amazed as you start to look at what were the whims of the day. How many things actually are just awesome. We tend to focus on the crappy thing that happened that day and we never think about the good things.

Trevor:  I agree, and I think when we are grateful and we bring energy to that, that we’re bringing more of it in our life. We’re attracting more of it. The law of attraction, so since you’ve been doing that practice, how have things changed for you? What have you noticed?

JJ:  I’m a very naturally high anxiety person. When you look at what they talked about with depression and anxiety, the depressed people tend to live in the past, and the anxious people tend to live in the future. One of the key mindsets, attributes of the miracle mindset is the ability to live in the present. When my son got hit by the car, for the previous six months, every single morning, I had written down, “I am more present for my kids.” Every single day, opportunities presented themselves and I didn’t take them. Nothing gets you more present than what I went though.

I sit there and go, “Did I somehow, wasn’t listening to all the signs out there, and I had to take this big lesson?” That has been one that I really focused on, because the gratitude in the morning will shove out that fear. This has been really scary for me. This last two years of working on this project just absolutely terrified me, and the gratitude in the morning has helped keep me grounded. In the evening, where I normally start to get myself a little anxious, which really doesn’t help with sleep, that’s where I do the wins. It just changes your whole day. I call it my day framer, because it just frames you day.

Another great little strategy, this happened to me yesterday, actually. Yesterday I started to get in a really overwhelmed place, and I’m sure you understand. I think launching a book is like having ten weddings, so I was completely getting all this stuff thrown at me yesterday, and I was getting just cranky, irritated, stressed, blah. What I did, was I thought of someone who just had done something really amazing. I shot them a text and said, “That was such a great thing you did, and why and blah blah blah”, and this person was like, “Gosh, thank you, wow.” Boy, does that flip your crabby, irritated.

That’s one of my state shifts that I do, is to text appreciation.

Trevor:  That’s a great one too. I love this idea of gratitude and appreciation. Thank you for sharing that with everybody and I think that even if people are in a really negative place and they feel really stuck, if you can just think of something positive. There’s always something to be grateful. Even if it’s just, “I’m here. I woke up. My kids are here.”

JJ:  I’m in a house.

Trevor:  Something to be grateful. Yes, in the house, yes.

JJ:  In a house with running water. Do you know how many people can’t say that?

Trevor:  Absolutely. Tell us a bit about this documentary. Tell us more about this because I think people are going to love it. It’s something I want everybody to be watching.

JJ:  Yeah, wow. It was one of those things that I thought, “this is a great idea”, and then I didn’t really think it through, that when you do a documentary, we had some footage from the hospital, pictures and video, but a lot of it had to be explained, recreated. I had to go to the scene where Grant got hit that I purposefully never knew where he got hit because it’s four blocks from my house and I didn’t really want to know the spot. It’s hard enough to drive around there. When I came back from the hospital, there were signs lining the roads all around my house that said, “Slow down, we love our kids.”

I thought, “I just can’t come back here. I need to get away from here.” I basically went through and relived every bit of this, but what we did, it’s kind of like the movie Rudy, meets The Secret, meets a car crash. That’s the best way to explain it. ER meets Rudy, meets The Secret, where we take you through this but we also have the lessons woven throughout the movie. We show that progression, which is super cool.

The book goes a little deeper into the lessons, and then I also interviewed people who I’ve really admired over the years, because again, what I saw is that everybody had this in common, and so I wanted to have more stories people could relate to and really see how they could put this into their life. Then I went on, that’s when I started looking at, “Could I teach this?” Didn’t know if I could, and so I did a pilot group of people, brought in 150 people, I told them, “We’re going to co-create this thing. Not sure what it’s going to be.” I would tell them, “Listen, I’m scared, I have no idea what we’re going to do”, but I figured this is what this is about.

It’s been the most transformative thing I have ever done. That’s how the whole thing fits together, is the book is the story, and then shares other people’s stories and the lessons and the movie brings it to life, and then the academy helps you develop your own miracle mindset.

Trevor:  Great, excellent, and we’ll have all the links up to that on my website under your podcast interview so people can go and check it out. Watch the documentary, read your book, and the academy too.

JJ, thank you for being so open and vulnerable and being willing to share your story with others and help other people shift their mindset and achieve more in their life. I really appreciate everything that you’re doing.

JJ:  Thank you, appreciate you.

Trevor:  I hope you enjoyed this interview today with JJ Virgin. To learn more about JJ and her new book, and her documentary, you can go to my website, TheSpaDr.com, go to the podcast page with her interview, and you’ll find all the information and links there. While you’re there, I invite you to join The Spa Doctor community on my website and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes so you don’t miss any of our upcoming shows.

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