235. Rewriting Your Narrative: Michelle Rios on Choosing Happiness

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This is happiness solved with America's happiness. Coach Sandee Sgarlata.

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Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining me today. I'm so happy you're here. I'm Sandee Sgarlata. I was born in Virginia Beach and raised in the Baltimore Annapolis area and had very humble and tragic beginnings. And as a result, my life was a hot mess.

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Thankfully, 33 years ago, I got my act together. And since that time, I have dedicated my life to serving others and raising awareness that no matter what you've been through, you can choose happiness and live the life of your dreams. Happiness Solved is dedicated to giving you content that is empowering, motivational, inspirational, and, of course, a dose of happiness. It's my way to give back to the world and share other people's stories. This thing called life can be challenging.

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And my guests share their amazing stories, wisdom, and life lessons that demonstrate anyone can choose happiness. You see, happiness is a choice and the choice is yours. Today's episode is amazing and I am so grateful for you. Thank you for listening and don't forget to leave a review and follow me on social media at coach. Sandee Sgarlata.

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Enjoy the show.

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Michelle Rios, such a pleasure to see you again. And we're practically neighbors. We have to get together. Sandy, thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here with you.

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And we absolutely do need to get together. Yes, yes, for sure. So you have done a lot of really amazing things. I'm not going to read your full bio because it'll be in the show notes, but just to give the audience just a little touch on what you've done, you've had a 25 year award winning career as a communications leader and corporate executive. That's really phenomenal.

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That's really phenomenal. Thank you. Yeah. And so you're about to make a really big life shift. I am, yeah.

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So can you just tell the audience, like, your backstory, how you got to this point and what gave you the courage and the desire to walk away from such an amazing career? Yeah, no, I'm happy to. So the long story is I've had this very long, really fulfilling career in communications. I'm an executive vice president in an agency. I've been in the agency world for a very long time, as you stated, but I've always, always had this urge to take my skills in communications and go further.

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I mean, this goes back 25 years. It wasn't coupled with the courage that you need to move forward with these things. I've always had this desire of what's next? What's next in my life? Can we take this another step?

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And I knew it was coming. It was only a matter of when. It was never a matter of if and when, you know? You know. And I always say to people who say, are you going to do it now?

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You're so close to being able to just kind of ride off into the sunset. And I was like, I've never been more ready. And you know, it because the idea of making a leap and making a change felt very peaceful at this point. And I said, you know what? It is a big life change.

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It does come with risk. But I'm at a place where I'm excited about that that actually is invigorating, rather than staying the course. And I knew that it was time to make a change at that. When that started to happen, when the fear of moving forward was replaced with fear of staying put, then I was like, okay, it's time. Let's go.

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I love that. Let's dive into that a little bit because I think that's a really great thing to hear, for the listeners to hear a little bit more about, because you just said something really brilliant. And so many other big name Tony Robbins talks about it. A lot of the big name personal development speakers talk about it. Know basically what you're saying, the short of it is that you're in alignment, but it's just that it used to be that fear, and now it's replaced with that excitement.

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So what steps did you take? Because that's an inside job. 1000%. It's an inside job. What steps did you take to get to that point?

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Because it's not an easy place to get to. This requires going back a little bit. So if you don't mind, we have time a bit, please. I grew up in a very tiny town to teenage parents, and I was the first born. And that sort of set in motion, or set in motion for me a story.

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And the story that had for me was twofold. One, we were in a financially difficult situation. My parents didn't have a lot. They didn't come from a lot, and things were tight. And I didn't have those kind of role models that said, don't worry if you fail, we're here to catch you.

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I didn't have that safety net built in. And a lot of people that kind of holds them back because they're like, well, then it's not worth taking a risk. On the other hand, for me, it really propelled me forward because I felt like I need to succeed. And so I desperately felt like I was going to be the first to kind of step out and do things differently. And my parents gave me this great backstory.

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As young and inexperienced as they were as parents, they had the wherewithal to say, my story came with a lot of shame. And I was born out of not out of wedlock. They got married before I came, but this idea of I wasn't planned, and it felt heavy. And they said, you might have not been planned, but you're exactly what the world needs. And so I was hearing these messages at like, six, and they were saying things like, your story is you're the first born.

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I have two siblings that are younger and they need you to pave a path so they see what's possible. And so a lot of it was on me and I would say my parents really encouraged me to go, go and go far, so I just took off. I felt a lot of responsibility, an obligation to break some cycles in my family, and I took it as a badge of honor, like, I'm going to do something that's going to set us in motion, that changes things generationally. So I was the first to go to college, I was the first to go to grad school, I was the first to start to travel around the world. I was the first to really earn what they would have considered a lot of money back then, right?

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I was willing to dig in and dig deep. I won a lot of awards. I was an ambassadorial scholar over to Europe. I went to graduate school at Georgetown on a full tuition scholarship. I really hustled in those days.

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I had great habits and I hustled hard and I was willing to do that, but I always had this mindset of, I don't have a safety net, so there's no other option. Nobody is coming to save me, and if I want to break out of this experience where my parents loved us dearly, but we didn't have a lot, it wasn't what I would say particularly fun childhood. It was easy. We played in the woods, we did that kind of thing. But I always had this feeling of like, I want to do more and I want to go places and I want to experience things and I don't want to have to feel like money is so tight all the time or that we're worried about money.

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I want that to not be my story. And my parents really planted the seed of like, anything's possible. It starts with you. And so that sort of became my story. I didn't feel like I could fail because there were people depending on me.

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And I also felt like I had everything I needed because no one was going to come save me. And so it was phenomenal for me. It was a lot of pressure, but it was what moved things forward so that I could succeed fast and early. And I got to a place where probably it was mid 20s, where I really had a bit of a breakdown, but I always call the breakdown before the breakthrough. It was like my first big awakening moment handy, where I went from I'm on a hustle and grind mode and I can work harder than anybody else and I'm going to basically outwork everybody.

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That was my mindset. They might have more privilege, they might have more money, they might have more status, but I have work ethic up to the wazoo, so watch out. And I would prove everyone wrong. Like in college, I was told, went to a really good liberal arts school that said, oh, well, you've never studied languages. You grew up in rural Maine.

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They didn't have languages other than Latin. And I studied Latin and Greek for ancient Greek for years. And they know you can't just go study Spanish and be a Spanish major. And I'm like, well, why not? And they're like, because everyone behind you has six or seven years over you.

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And I'm like, well just let me try, and then we'll evaluate that. And it was exactly what I needed. I need someone to say, that's not possible. And then I was the top student that year. I got the Book Prize award I was paid for, for me to go study abroad, because they knew I was serious and there was going to be no stopping me as long as I knew what I wanted.

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And I had a vision. But then I got to my twenty s and it was different. I had worked really hard. I'd gotten to a place where I was working. I was one of the younger directors of communications in a large organization.

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I was going to school full time at Georgetown. I was on scholarships, so I was balancing a lot. And for the first time in my life I had this moment of lack of clarity. I had such a vision of where I was going when I was younger because there was a ladder to climb, right? School to get through, and awards to win, and college and grad school.

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And I got there and I started to realize that I was in pursuit of things outside of myself with no real sense of who I was. And that's when I realized I didn't even know probably what the word alignment meant back then, to be honest with you. But it was this reckoning of I'm in going 150 miles an hour in pursuit of what? I couldn't answer that question. I'm like, what am I doing?

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I was trying to get away from that experience of lack in my childhood, and I wanted to become established and well off and to not feel inadequate for a better word. And I'd already gotten there and it wasn't enough. And whoa, it hit me over the head like a ton of bricks. That was a real eye opener of like, well wait a minute. Everything that I worked for, I've now achieved, and I still don't feel fulfilled.

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Now what? And that was really hard, I will tell you. That was a moment of I hadn't been sleeping well because I was studying and working full time. I'd run from school, jump in my car, get to my office, go back from the office, go back to class at night, study. I was literally sleeping at two or 3 hours a night, eating granola bars on the run kind of thing.

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There were immigrants that were running food trucks on the side of 17th street in New York Avenue. Who had gotten used to seeing me, seeing this young woman run from point A to point B, drop her car off, run upstairs, and they were literally waiting, going, have you eaten today? Oh my gosh. And I was like, no, not yet. But I will when I get home at some point.

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And they started stopping me. There's this young couple with a newborn baby literally waiting with a bag lunch for me every single day of grad school. I mean, it was amazing. But here are these people who are coming from somewhere else, realizing that I'm probably in a similar situation. I had no family.

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I was twelve hour car ride away. My parents were up in Maine and rural Maine. I was by myself in DC. I didn't know anyone. I didn't have any ties here, family or friends.

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I had to make everything from scratch. So it's kind of starting over. Like an immigrant, right? Spoke the language at least, and I just didn't have a sense of who I was. So here I was, hustling and bustling and going, and I know what was happening is I was getting more run down and more worn and tired and physically being compromised, and it started to take a toll emotionally, I started to feel off.

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That's all. I could explain something's amiss. And there got to a point, Sandy, where I could not get out of bed one day, which had never happened in my life. Here I was, I was 26 years old, I can barely get out of bed, I was so worn down. And when I did, I made a cup of coffee.

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I'm looking out the window of my 10th story apartment out onto the city, and all I could think of was, I wish I could just jump, because I felt so overwhelmed that here I had worked and worked and worked and worked and worked, and I still felt empty. I felt like everything that I thought I was working toward was going to magically start to fulfill me. And I would feel happy and joy and all this stuff. And then it wasn't happening. And I was getting more tired and more worn down.

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And I'm like, what am I doing this for? So I literally found myself on this fall day in DC. Going, oh my God, what is happening? I'm talking about jumping on a window like, no, this is not me. This is not who I am.

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This was my moment of breakdown where I really had to step back, grabbed a jacket, got outside, got on a bus just to get away and clear my head. And I'm on this bus going through Georgetown, down in this loop, the 30 buses that kind of run through the city, down by the White House and back up through Georgetown again. And I'm sobbing. I'm just letting it all out. I have snot all over my face.

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The poor bus driver is like looking at me going, should I be concerned? We're going to let this ride for a little bit. She clearly needs to let it all out. And after about two loops together through the city, he finally said, all right, you and me, what do we need to do here? Because he wasn't going to leave me on the bus.

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And here I was, young, and I kept thinking I should be so grateful. I've worked so hard, and I've done so much, and why am I feeling so discombobulated? And I was angry at myself. I felt like I had let myself down, like I missed a memo somewhere. I was doing it wrong.

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And he said, I got to get you somewhere where I know you're going to be okay. I'm going to worry about you. And I said, no, I'm going to be okay. I'm tired. And he said, oh, man, me too.

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And we chatter for a little while, and I just remember going, I got to get off the bus. The guy's shift was ending, and he said, I want to know that you're okay. I sat there and I was like, okay. God, I surrender. I don't know what to do.

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I don't know how to fix this, and I don't know where to go now. And in that moment of saying, I surrender, I kid you not, on a street I had walked a thousand times. If I had walked at once, a sign I had never seen appears community Mental Health Center. Oh, wow thing. I'm like, I'm getting off and I'm going in.

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So it was my first time of going in and going, hey, I feel like I need to talk to somebody, because everything I thought to be true is starting to not feel true, and I'm feeling lost. And that was that moment of realizing what I valued and what I really cared about deep within me was not what I was living in the external. I was in pursuit of all of these things that I thought that I should want and I should do, and if I did those things, that I would feel fulfilled and I would feel happy and I would be joyful. And the big news flash was not necessarily, and you need to be aligned with those things. So that set me in motion.

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That really started a new way of thinking, god has a sense of humor. Because that day I literally walked in, like, a little bit of backstory. I went into the communications field. My sister became a therapist. My brother is an attorney, and we're in that order of birthright, my father wanted me to be attorney.

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He wanted my sister to be attorney. He wanted my brother to be attorney. So it finally happened with my brother, but the joke was we all became what we needed. So I became the advocate. My sister is the therapist will listen to anybody, and my brother will fight for anyone that's awesome.

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I walked into this office and I met this woman. I kept saying, you probably won't understand what I have to say because you're going to tell me I should be grateful and I should be grateful and all of these things, and I understand that from where I came from to where I am now, I've done so much. And she said, stop. Take a breath. I might understand more than you think.

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And I'm like, well, but you're doing something you love that's so noble and all of this. And she said, I'm an intern here. And she was about my age at that point. I'm like an intern. How could you be an intern?

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She's like, oh, I was an AOL executive. I just took a bio. And now I'm here because this is what my real path is and my purpose. So I'm just starting, and you're my first. So we were our first engagement with one another, and it was hysterical because she really helped me question things like all of the things I thought that I had to pursue and had to do.

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She's like, but why? I'm like, well, because I've always said that that's what I would do. And she said, well, what if you change the story now? The story doesn't fit anymore. It worked for a really long time, and it got you out of there, and it got your siblings on a great path, and your parents are incredibly proud of you, but it doesn't serve you.

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So what is your story going to be now? Michelle? I love that, and that was the turning point. That was the beginning know, several more decades of stepping into my authenticity and really starting to ask myself the deep questions and do the deep work around what does it mean to live your purpose, not what is it going to be to get a good paycheck? What is it going to be to be secure?

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Because security was something I pursued wholeheartedly because I didn't have it growing up. And now I was starting to say things, well, maybe you can live your purpose and find fulfillment and still make a living. That was a novel concept to me. I kept thinking, well, if I live my purpose at a heart level, I probably will be like a starving artist and I will never be able to succeed. And lo and behold, everything I kind of knew of the world in that sense was sort of turned upside down when I started to realize the more I leaned in to my authenticity, the more successful I became is actually what propelled me forward.

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And I had no idea that all the resistance that was showing up inside of me was actually creating all this negative energy around me that made people want to kind of step back and say, she's got too much on her plate. We don't want to burden her with more. She's such a great worker. I resigned from my job. I was all of 26 when I went to grad school, and I went to resign, and they said, no.

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They're like, you don't need to resign. We're so proud of you. Go to grad school. You've got this scholarship. Stay here.

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Don't take out loans to live. Work here when you can. But I took it so seriously that I worked 40, 50 hours a week at my job and then 40 or 50 hours a week at school, and there was just I was burning the candle at both ends, and it was really funny. One of my mentors sat me down and said, what if, just for a moment, you started receiving some of the good stuff coming your way instead of trying to pay back everything somebody gave you? You don't need to be so grateful all the time.

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We know you're grateful. It shows with your work ethic. It shows with your passion. Why don't you just let us allow this in as our way of being grateful for you? You don't have to prove yourself all the time.

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Wow, what a gift. It was hugely game changing for me because I didn't realize I didn't know how to receive. I was constantly on a proving ground. Like, I'm trying to prove that I belong in this new setting of college. Right.

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When I got into a place that no one in my family had ever stepped in, I was trying to prove myself in a corporate setting. It was the first time anyone in my family had done anything that wasn't blue collar. And so I was constantly in that proving ground mode and trying to be grateful. Because when you don't grow up with a lot, you're always told, Be grateful for what you have, right? Yes.

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And I deeply feel my roots every day. I feel very humbled by them. But I also am very cognizant of how that mindset held me back. Now, in retrospect yeah. Thank goodness that you had that mentor and that you were able to learn how to receive, because it's those limiting beliefs that hold you back in life in so many ways.

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I just want to point out to the listeners, because you said something very brilliant, as with everything that you're talking about today, Michelle is really phenomenal. So you mentioned your story, and I love talking about that just a little bit more because it's those stories that we make up that feed into these limiting beliefs that we all right. Absolutely. I mean, I will say the best story I had, though, early on in life was the one my parents gave me, which was, you might not have been planned, but you were so what the world needs. And I felt like I have a mission.

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I felt mission driven as a six year old to go to school and get good grades and make my parents proud, and it really propelled me into this level of work ethic that was kind know, above. And like, I still know all of my teachers that are still around, they're around on social media, they still reach out and they go, oh, Michelle, we remember the drive, the ambition. And I'm like, I was off to set the world on fire at six, I would say in my 20s. After that, sort of, again, that breakdown, right before the big breakthrough, I sat down and read a book. It was a Wayne Dyer book, of all people.

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And I love Wayne Dyer. And you'll see it when you believe it. That was the very first self improvement book I ever read. Mine too. Life changing, right?

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Because it's completely different than what we are told. Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it. I'll believe it when I see it. Absolutely. And we're so conditioned to think that way and it's really the reverse of that.

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Oh, my gosh, I love that. That book is what made me step back and say, I need a new story. I need to decide. I'm the narrator of this story. I always have known that I was the narrator of the story.

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I knew that early, but it was interesting. I got stuck in the first story and I didn't make room for a new story. So you need to be able to grow and evolve and make sure that the story that you had originally still fits. And if it doesn't, here's the great thing. Start a new chapter or get a new book.

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Yeah. There's no rules here. And that's the thing that I think trips so many people up, is because society conditions us so often that you've got to do this, you've got to do this.

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And we believe it because that's what we're told you've got to do. Yeah, well, the interesting thing is, I think we grew up in a society in this modern era that really grooms us the minute we leave the house to be good employees, to be good workers. Right. Everybody fits in the box. We want everybody to conform.

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You want a certain work style and ethic, and everyone wants to belong. And if you do those things, then you will get yours and you will move up slowly but surely. But the minute that you have one of those breakthroughs and you allow yourself to start to expand, you realize, I don't fit in the box anymore. Now what? That doesn't fit me.

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So it was really, for me, liberating and nerve wracking because I started to realize I felt like a bit of a unicorn. I was going through this early part of really the accelerated growth of my corporate career, and I was starting to sound very different than everybody else because I was saying things like, well, we need to think about mindset here. And everyone's like, what talking about? What do you mean alignment? What do you mean that we have to have a values based conversation, and I was like, well, otherwise, I don't want to feel disconnected from what I'm doing, and I want to make sure that I am being authentic in the way I'm approaching work.

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That's the only way I'm going to do great work. I can do good work. I've been doing good work my whole life. I can develop, competencies in a lot of things with work ethic and discipline and practice. But now I want to tap into my gifts, and I want to think about what it is that I do naturally, because I am so in tuned with who I am that I become the best version of me, not who you want me to be or not who I think you want me to be.

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And that was kind of not really well received in the beginning. It was actually kind of like, okay, we're not quite sure what to do with her, but I will say what happened was they were like, she's got leadership ability, it's clear, because she speaks her mind. So I would get more responsibility, and I'd move up more. And the great thing about that is, the bigger your platform, the more wiggle room you have for autonomy and sovereignty. And so I was able to just continue over time to just become more me and bring more of me to the table and really work on that.

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And there were other moments of awakening. I'll tell you. I got a phone call. I was in a movie theater with my husband, enjoying a Saturday evening. And my grandmother, who helped raise me, had passed away, and I had just seen her on a trip home to Maine, and she was 93 years old, and I thought, I need to go.

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I need to go home. And I knew that as the gift, the person with the gifts of speech and writing, I would be writing the eulogy and probably giving the eulogy. So I got working on that right away. And, you know, the thing that really blew my mind, Sandy, is my grandmother had eight children. My dad was the youngest of the eight.

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I was the first to go to college. Of all the grandchildren of everyone, I'm at the bottom of the family. My brother is the baby baby, but my siblings and I are at the bottom of that family group. And my grandmother had lost a daughter to dip. The her son passed.

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He was killed on the battlefield of Korea. She had to leave my father in the hospital to attend her eldest son's funeral. In 1952, she overcame cervical cancer, ovarian cancer. My grandfather was a raging alcoholic after losing two of his children. I mean, all these things had befallen my grandmother, but my grandmother was the kindest, sweetest, nicest, most I never knew her to be angry or frustrated with life a day in my life.

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And here I was reflecting on her life and thinking I had spent. All of my young adulthood and really all of my childhood working away from what I grew up around to get away from it. And I go home and I'm standing at the podium in this church that's packed, sandy packed. Now my grandmother's 93 years old. She doesn't have any more friends that are alive.

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So I'm like, who are all these people? It was people in the community she had impacted. It was the children of her friends that knew her, and she had made such an impact on her life. And I knew when I finished writing the eulogy, I was like, oh, my God. I have run away from home in lots of ways.

00:31:32
Like, I thought everything I needed to become was going to be found away from my beginning. And yet the person that I admired most on this planet, and I was striving to be like, was my grandmother. She had such an impact on the world. She had resilience and grace and fortitude, and she was a blessing to everyone. And yet she was a seamstress.

00:32:01
She worked in the halfway shirt company for, I don't know, 50 years or so and retired. Never really had any money, but had a major impact on her community and on her family and completely so she. Was, in fact, extremely wealthy. She was extremely wealthy in ways that I realized then. Kind of the next big awakening for me.

00:32:28
There's a whole dimension that I need to go really dial deeper into that I haven't allowed myself because I'm measuring success on these external measures. And that's where life started to really get better, when I started to realize, like, talk about impact. My grandmother always said this, and I always kind of thought, that's such a nice grandmother thing to say, but now it's my mantra. And she'd always say, how may I serve? She'd walk into a room and first thing she would say is, how may serve?

00:33:03
Kind of was a rolling choke. And now I ask myself that every day, how may I serve? How may I serve? I love that's. That's really awesome.

00:33:13
You have said so many incredible things. And we're almost out of time, Michelle, for today. So is there anything else that you'd like to share with the audience? You've just unpacked so many things. You touched on leadership, which was know, limiting beliefs, making up a new story about ourselves.

00:33:32
It's been amazing. Is there anything else? Any other golden nuggets you'd like to share with the audience? I would just say I've been talking a lot about gifts this week. I had a friend call me and say, Michelle, how can I discern what my gifts are?

00:33:46
So I will just leave this with your audience because I think it's such a simple and yet we overthink things sometimes. Yes. Gifts are something that we all have. We're all endowed with innate gifts, and our job is to find what those gifts are. And then bring them to the world.

00:34:04
That's our job. That's how you step into your most authentic self, find your gifts, bring them to the world. And your gifts are those things that you do well with ease. Yes. And I say that because a lot of us, and I'm sure you're one of those people, Sandy, can do a lot of things really well with effort, with practice, with discipline.

00:34:29
Those are not your gifts. Those are just your ability to develop good competencies. But once you discover your gift, that thing that you just innately comfortable, you're at ease. For me, I'll go on any stage at any time and talk about anything with anyone to engage. I'm comfortable there.

00:34:51
For somebody else, it might be writing. For somebody else, it might be a listening skill. I'm a good listener, whatever that is. Really understand that your job in this lifetime is to take that gift, hone it, and bring it to the world. And when you do that, you're going to be so lit up from the inside out, and people are going to get so much from that experience.

00:35:18
You're going to feel the light. Not just see the light, but feel the light. It's going to be a game changer for you, and life's just going to get a lot better. Love it. Beautifully said, Michelle.

00:35:30
Thank you so much. Where can people find you? We'll have it in the show notes, but go ahead and shout out. Follow on Instagram at Michelle Rios One or come visit me on either Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcast at. Live your extraordinary life.

00:35:51
Love it, love it, love it, love it. Thank you so much, Michelle, and good luck with your big transition. I'm so proud of you and I look forward to meeting you in person very soon. Oh, wonderful. Thank you so much for having me.

00:36:06
It's been a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you, everyone.

00:36:20
I certainly hope that you enjoyed today's interview. Thank you so much for joining me. And as always, I hope that you and your family are healthy and safe and that your lives are filled with peace, joy and happiness. Take care, everyone.