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EP577: TL Nugget #163 Cindy Starke - From MD To Thought Leader
96 Plays5 months ago
“If you really start turning inward and tapping into that inner wisdom, the people who are supposed help you on your path are going to come.... You’ve got to trust it, you can’t question it.”
Have you ever felt trapped in a life that doesn’t fulfill you, despite achieving what society considers success? What if the path to true healing lies in transforming your deepest traumas into your greatest strengths? Are you someone who feels stuck in a cycle of dissatisfaction despite your accomplishments, or if you’re searching for deeper meaning and impact in your life?
Dr. Cindy Starke, an internal medicine physician with 30 years of practice under her belt. Regardless of her success, she felt a frustrated as her patients kept coming back with the same issues. This realization led her to discover self-healing, where she let go of her childhood traumas and found a new calling. Today, she serves as the Medical Director of a hospice, helping people die dignified deaths, and the Director of a home health company, aiding patients in their convalescence at home. Dr. Starke is also the founder of Soul Circle Academy, where she helps people discover their true selves and what lights them up inside.
If you want someone who can help you uncover your true path and achieve genuine healing and fulfillment, visit Dr. Starke’s website: http://drcindystarke.com/letstalk/ to schedule a call.
Expert action steps:
- Spend some time alone and get honest with yourself. Don’t let external things distract you from looking inside yourself.
- Journal. Write down the things that you’re holding on to.
- Turn inward and learn to listen to your spirit. You will attract that people that are meant to come into your life to help you.
Visit eCircleAcademy.com and book a success call with Nicky to take your practice to the next level.
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Transcript
Cindy's Dilemma: Making a Real Impact
00:00:03
Speaker
I'm not doing a lot to truly help anyone in their health journey. I would treat them, use all of, you know, my smartest tools in my toolbox, right? And all of my energy and heart and soul and love and fix them. And they come right back.
00:00:19
Speaker
a month later with the exact same thing. I'm not making a difference in anybody's life. How can I do this with my training and still help people and get that impact that really lights me up? I want to feel like I'm truly helping people in this world.
00:00:37
Speaker
Welcome to the Thought Leader Revolution with Nikki Ballou. Join the revolution. There's never been a better time in history to speak your truth, find your freedom, and make your fortune. Each week, we interview the world's top thought leaders and learn the secrets of how they built a six to seven figure practice. This episode has been brought to you by eCircleAcademy.com, the proven system to add six to seven figures a year to your thought leader practice.
00:01:08
Speaker
Welcome to another exciting episode of the podcast, the Thought Leader Revolution. I'm your host, Nicki Ballou. And boy, do we have an exciting guest lined up for you today. Today's guest is a dear friend and client of mine.
Cindy's Path to Medicine: Escape from Trauma
00:01:22
Speaker
She is Dr. Cindy Stark, an internal medicine physician who over
00:01:29
Speaker
30 years of practicing has evolved into a fabulous healer. Welcome to the show, Cindy. Thank you so much for having me here. Nikki is such an honor and a privilege.
00:01:44
Speaker
Thank you. It is fabulous to have you here. So Cindy, the folks who listen to the Thought Leader Revolution, these are the seekers. They're the misfits, the crazy ones, the round pegs in the squared holes, the ones who aren't fond of rules and are looking to shift and change the world. They want to learn from you because these are the people with the growth mindsets.
00:02:08
Speaker
But before they can open themselves up to you, they need to get to know you. How'd you get to be the great Dr. Cindy Stark?
00:02:18
Speaker
Well, I like to take it back to what actually led me down that path. So let's go back to Cindy when she was 14 years old. And I always say, I don't think anyone else in the world came into medicine the way I came into medicine. Most of the people I met along the way, they all had moms and dads that were doctors. But we were from a family of blue collar workers.
00:02:41
Speaker
hairdressers and electricians and through an unfortunate series of events when I was 14, my brother had been struggling with some drugs and alcohol and so all of his friends that were 19 also just a lot of drugs and alcohol around my house.
00:02:57
Speaker
And I came into medicine as a way to escape a childhood where bad things ended up happening to me at night when my brother had his friends over. And I always say I don't want to go into a lot of details, but I was sexually abused by my brother's friends. And all I could see around me, Nikki, were like this
00:03:16
Speaker
repeating this pattern in my generational, traumatic pattern of drugs, alcohol, sexual abuse, blue collar jobs. And I said, let me get the crap out of this place. Let me go. The one place where I don't see anyone in my family is gone. And that's down the field of education. And so I became the first person to go to college and then it just kept going on and on and on. I just kept saying, I love this and I want to get further and further away. So then I went to medical school. Then I went to graduate school.
00:03:46
Speaker
And that's what led me to be a doctor, is just escaping my childhood, actually. Wow. Escaping your childhood led you to be a doctor.
Career Crisis: Seeking Fulfillment and Facing Opposition
00:03:58
Speaker
So you became a doctor. What had you go on this quest to seek out how to become a great healer and how to do more than just treat patients in the old medical paradigm?
00:04:14
Speaker
Yeah, so it took a while for me to really get the realization that I'm not doing a lot to truly help anyone in their health journey. How I see it is that I was
00:04:29
Speaker
getting them out of the emergency room. I was helping them breathe a little better. I'd get their fever down and then I would treat them, you know, use all of, you know, my smartest tools in my toolbox, right? And all of my energy and heart and soul and love and fix them. And I would discharge them and they come right back.
00:04:48
Speaker
a month later with the exact same thing. And it took about 10 years of doing this where I'm like, this is just, I'm not making a difference in anybody's life. And the guy I was married to at the time said, oh, you can't quit. And I said, I can't do medicine anymore. I'm not making an impact in anyone's life. I dedicated 30 years of my life to training myself up. And these people aren't getting any better.
00:05:14
Speaker
And they just go right back out and do the things they always do. And he said, you can't not be a doctor. He said, you're the top 5% income earners of the world. And I'm like, I don't care. That's not what matters to me is the income I make. It's the impact that I make.
00:05:31
Speaker
And we just weren't seeing eye to eye at all, Nikki, and we really butted heads for about 10 years over this. And the pandemic brought about an entire ability for me to stand up for myself, and I realized what had to happen. Again, really, unfortunately, I never wanted this in my life, but I had to leave him to be able to pursue my calling.
00:05:53
Speaker
Because he was just like very adversarial to me 24-7. And once I got away from my kid's dad, I really was able to dig deep and I healed from my own childhood traumas. And I was able to forgive myself for everything that had happened to me from age 14 to like 46.
00:06:13
Speaker
And in those deep, dark moments, and it took a lot of soul searching. This was just in the pandemic. So this just happened four years ago. But I said, you know, I've really, really uncovered the keys to the kingdom. And I think a lot of people are holding themselves back because of societal expectations or lack of forgiveness. And so then that is when I took another year long course to be able to do what I had just undertaken in my healing work.
00:06:39
Speaker
And I got certified to do it for other people. So that's how that all happened.
Healing Success: Jenny's Journey to Self-Acceptance
00:06:44
Speaker
It was a very, um, circuitous and I felt like divine led because I don't think I ever would have gone down that path without that specific, you know, um, this chain of events occurring. Wow. Pretty, pretty profound personal story. Yeah. So, so Cindy,
00:07:09
Speaker
What are some of the key pain points that you've discovered, the people that you're helping have? And do you have any stories to illustrate those pain points for us? Yeah, the ones that I help now that I feel like I'm a true healer.
00:07:27
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. The one that I think is the most profound is one of my clients, Jenny, who was in also an abusive marriage, you know, verbally abusive, not physically abusive.
00:07:44
Speaker
And she had gone through menopause and she had been an alcoholic almost her whole life, you know, adult life. And she, through realizing that she didn't love and accept herself or how she was,
00:07:59
Speaker
she just kept masking this version of her that society didn't seem to really accept, masking it with alcohol. And through going through my program, she was able to actually love herself for who she was. She stopped drinking. She left her husband. She moved across the whole entire country from Oregon to Florida to be at her mother's bedside while she was passing away of
00:08:22
Speaker
dementia and just to see her blossom into who she used to be before the alcohol and the and the blurring of her true identity started happening when she was probably about 19 or 20. That's one of the pain points is I just think
00:08:38
Speaker
Women especially in this world maybe men too most of my clients are women They just they kind of they're not accepted for who they are. And so they do something to try to gain acceptance I kept educating myself. She kept drinking alcohol and You just kind of wake up one day in your 40s and you realize you don't even know the person in the mirror so what was the impact on her of Drinking every day
00:09:07
Speaker
I mean, she she she estranged her first child, you know, and when she went through this program and stopped drinking her, she rekindled her relationship with her 30 year old child, which was huge to watch. And she also had a had really
00:09:28
Speaker
a really struggling type of a relationship with both her father and her stepfather too. And it just seemed as when she was able to kind of blossom into who she always was, she was able to stand up to those two men as well and kind of let them
00:09:45
Speaker
see where she was coming from and just kind of have a have a still not a great relationship with the two dads, but definitely they understood each other more eye to eye. And just even the impact of being able to work where she wanted to work. She just wasn't even doing really what what lit her up inside. She was able to start dancing again. I saw her start volunteering at the zoo. She's she's an artist and a mystic at heart. And she just had kind of
00:10:11
Speaker
stuffed all that away and just did the one thing you could as an alcoholic, which was be a bartender and work at restaurants. And so she doesn't do that anymore either. So just watching her come alive. Coolio. Coolio. Okay, great. So what are some of the other key pain points that you've gone through yourself or seen your clients go through? Hmm.
The Struggle of Stuck Physicians
00:10:40
Speaker
I think that, again, for me, I feel like just admitting the truth that medicine wasn't satisfying me anymore. I just think sometimes that people kind of, you kind of go down this path when for me, it was pretty young. The path of medicine started at 17.
00:11:07
Speaker
Society loves that shit, you know, like they eat it up and they just, you know, praise you and the accolades and they brag about you. And to be able to say at 46, I don't like this and I'm not doing it anymore full time. And and just the backlash that you think is going to happen, Nicky, and it actually doesn't happen.
00:11:27
Speaker
People are actually really freaking proud of you that you're able to do what you actually want to do. When I go to the hospital now, I work about four days a month because I truly love working a little bit. I just didn't want to do it 14 hours a day, five to six to seven days a week there. When I go there now, some of the first things that happen almost every day when I walk through the door is a couple of doctors will pull me to the side and say, how did you get out?
00:11:56
Speaker
Like, how did you leave? What did you do about malpractice? What did you do about your shareholder thing? What did you do about this? Can you teach me how you got out? Because they just, they kind of have pigeonholed themselves into this box. And the proverbial hand golden handcuffs. I mean, that is so real, especially in medicine, because everybody's making six figures, everybody thinks they're kind of
00:12:20
Speaker
tied to this mothership and they can't get out. And it's a really sad kind of a pain when you've spent from age five to 33, finally getting this degree and these credentials and this board certification to do this one certain job. And then you kind of look up 10 or 20 or 30 years later and you don't like it anymore. It's a really specific kind of sadness that when you can't get out, you feel like you can't get out of it.
00:12:55
Speaker
So, Cindy, what has had you be able to get out of it? And what have you been able to show other people? Do you have any other stories that specifically illustrate this point? What I had to do is get really clear on what I wanted
00:13:26
Speaker
I had to really clearly define what success was for me. And success for me was at that time, it wasn't given 14 hours of your day over to this geographical building. I was on this, I call it a 30 minute leash. You literally, you signed these clauses, Nicky.
00:13:51
Speaker
when you start these jobs and you can't be within 30 minutes, you can't be further than 30 minutes. It's like they have you on a leash from seven in the morning till not at night. You've got to be able to get back to that hospital, right? And so between that and then also you sign this clause when you're a physician called a no-compete clause and you can't
00:14:12
Speaker
You can't work for a whole year after you quit. If you ever quit, you can't work anywhere within a 25 mile radius. So this is like a huge radius. You know, here in Atlanta, it's like almost an hour and a half. I had to drive to go to work.
00:14:28
Speaker
And so that trapped feeling was what was bothering me the most. And so success, I had to define for myself, what is success? Because I didn't mind being a physician. I just didn't want those two things. That was making me feel so claustrophobic and just like a rat in a cage. Literally, it was just
00:14:50
Speaker
I literally am getting palpitations just remembering it right now, talking about it, because I haven't thought about it in a while. And so I had to realize the one thing that was holding me back, unfortunately, was my husband. And then the other thing holding me back was this kind of like programming that I had to keep doing it because I had, I mean, my gosh, you're making $140,000 a year. Isn't that the best thing in the world? I mean, you're
00:15:14
Speaker
You know, this is like this this programming that was just just drilled into our heads. This is like the epitome of what you wanted to do. And so I had to get really clear with my definition of success and what my definition was. I love being around friends and family. I love feeling connection to people and I love being outdoors.
00:15:33
Speaker
And so I had to just really put it out all out on a sheet of paper. How can I do this with my training and still help people and get that impact that really lights me up? I want to feel like I'm truly helping people in this world. And so I just sort of brainstorming. I had a lot of really close friends that were coaches and
00:15:55
Speaker
You know, it's when I met everybody in clients on demand, and they they kind of breathed into me this this belief that I could have something else that I could offer the world. And so it was just it was just a lot of untraining. Nikki, it's kind of a hard question to answer, but it took years. It took from 2018 to almost 2022 when I finally retired. So it took four years to get the courage to do it all. It was a very slow process, little by little.
00:16:24
Speaker
Amen. Amen. So
Finding Fulfillment: Hospice Care and Retreats
00:16:27
Speaker
Cindy, right now, what is it that you actually do to serve people?
00:16:37
Speaker
Right now, well, I do a lot of things in my life right now. I'm a medical director of a hospice, so I get to take care and help people die of more dignified deaths all across my beautiful city here. I'm also a medical director of a home health company, so I get to help people that are convalescing in their home setting.
00:16:58
Speaker
Couple days a month. I will go back to the hospital as much as my Soul and heart and spirit can handle it because I do I do love serving the community in that way But what really lights me up?
00:17:10
Speaker
is running Soul Circle Academy where I help people find what's really true in their soul and in their heart and what lights them up. I call them primitive luxury retreats where I take women deep into the woods and I cook over an open fire for them.
00:17:29
Speaker
And we do meditations by Creek and yoga and we do all kinds of just rituals together, whether we just depends on what setting I'm taking them to, whether it's a campfire or whether it's.
00:17:42
Speaker
really long hikes. And I just help women kind of get in touch with who they are so they can start loving themselves, so they can start seeing that path out for whatever it is that might not be going right in their life, whether it's relationships or whether it's a job or whether it's, you know, just the second half of their life after becoming an empty nester. And I just I help them kind of light their own path for their preferred future. Beautiful. And if someone wants to
00:18:12
Speaker
Get on your calendar and have a chat about this. What's the best way? DrCindyStark.com forward slash Let's Talk. I love that. Kind of easy. Let's talk. DrCindyStark.com forward slash Let's Talk. I'm going to write that down. That's pretty good. Yeah, I like that one. OK, so we like to end off each episode by asking you, so our guest expert,
Steps to Personal Growth: Guidance from Within
00:18:40
Speaker
What are your top three, what we call expert action steps? These are your three best pieces of advice to help my listener take her life, his life to the next level. What say you? OK. I need to think about that for a second. So first of all, I say get really honest.
00:18:59
Speaker
Spend some time alone and get honest with yourself as what it is that you want because there are so many things competing for our attention these days, whether it's our cell phones, whether it's our spouses, kids, parents, whatever.
00:19:15
Speaker
So just get really honest and just feel like I say I say take your shoes off and get a towel if you need to go sit in the yard somewhere with some sun on you preferably a tree behind you and just get get quiet and get honest. Number two journal about what it is that you want in your life and just just let anything out just kind of do a brain dump and let anything come out that that you might want to do. Don't hold don't put any filters on it.
00:19:45
Speaker
And then number three is kind of
00:19:51
Speaker
I'd say turn inward, you know, it kind of, it might seem the same as being honest with yourself, but if you turn inward and you really listen to, there's infinite, infinite, infinite wisdom in your soul and your spirit. And if you kind of start admitting that signal, Nikki, that you want help in figuring out how to get where you want to go, the universal starts, you know, bringing you the people that are supposed to be to you, same people that are listening to your podcast, right?
00:20:19
Speaker
Like the round pegs in the square holes. If you really start turning inward and tapping into that inner wisdom, the people that are supposed to help you on your path will come. And it might seem like a really crazy circuitous route, but you'll get to where you're going. You know, I like all three of them, but the last one really resonated with me. The people that are supposed to help you on your path will come. That's pretty powerful. Yeah. And you got to trust it. Like you can't question it.
00:20:50
Speaker
You got to know they're coming. That's how I found you.
00:20:54
Speaker
Amen, Sister. Amen. Dr. Cindy Stark, you are a joy and a delight. Your energy is vibrant. It's powerful. And it's an honor to be a part of your journey to help you attract more people to you. You've been one of the best students we've ever had and get booked and get paid because you just ran at it. And you've set up so many podcasts. And as a result, you've set up so many
00:21:24
Speaker
Breakthrough calls and you have an opportunity to set up a whole lot more. I'm clear you're gonna start enrolling some people We're just gonna be we're just gonna be we're just gonna be with you You're gonna record some of those calls so we can really listen in on you and fine-tune those conversations and make sure they get there So make sure you do that, but it's
00:21:42
Speaker
It's amazing to see somebody that is ready to do the work. So God bless you, Cindy. Thanks for thanks for coming into my world and into my life. And thanks for being this dynamo of energy and fire. I love it. Yeah, I was going to tell you one thing, you know, it's called a funnel for a reason. It's supposed to be bigger at the top and smaller at the bottom. And I just said to myself, if I can pack that full to the gills, like something's going to come out the other drop.
00:22:12
Speaker
You know, my favorite American president of my lifetime is Ronald Reagan, and he was relentlessly optimistic and positive.
00:22:26
Speaker
He would tell these stories of optimism, and he talked about how there was a set of parents who had a son that was a favorite and one that wasn't. The son that was a favorite for Christmas got all these amazing gifts.
00:22:45
Speaker
And he was still grumpy and upset, oh my God, I didn't get the bicycle I wanted, blah, blah, blah, and the parents like that. The other son basically saw a pile of manure, this Christmas gift, because they wanted him to spread it in the field to work, right? And he got all excited. He started digging it. He says, why are you digging it? He said, with all that manure, there's got to be a pony somewhere in there. Oh, that's awesome. I've never heard that story.
00:23:10
Speaker
Yeah, it was a Ronald Reagan original story and I just loved it. It is great. It's true, too. I think you can make some lemonade out of almost every lemon, even something that's really terrible. Nikki, I was just talking to my mom about this this morning. She's 78 and she's at her at her, you know, winter house in Florida for three weeks and she's missing me. So I'll call her every morning and we talk for an hour. And I was talking to her today and I said, you know,
00:23:40
Speaker
We were talking about my divorce and she was upset for me that I had to go through that. And I said, you know what, unless I would have gone through that, it would have never I would have never been gifted the amount of contrast that the rest of my life can have, because now everything is so great compared to that. So even in the worst thing, you can find a way to make it be your contrast. And so now everything's awesome because of that bad, you know. And so it's just I feel like I'm like that, too. I can find
00:24:09
Speaker
I can find a horse in a pile of manure. There you go. It's gotta be a pony in there somewhere. I love it. All right. And that wraps up another exciting episode of the podcast, The Thought Leader Revolution. To find out more about today's incredible guest, the one and only Dr. Cindy Stark. Go to the show notes at the thoughtleaderrevolution.com or wherever you happen to listen to this episode, be it iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, Audible, Rumble.
00:24:39
Speaker
or what have you. Until next time, bye-bye. This episode has been brought to you by eCircleAcademy.com, the proven system to add six to seven figures a year to your thought leader practice.