Sep 25, 2018
Today on the show, we have Dr. Nasha Winters, and this is a very, very exciting episode for many different reasons. First, we get to hear her story on how she overcame cancer herself and how that led to her actually becoming a doctor and treating or at least helping tens of thousands of people more overcome cancer in a very unique and powerful way. On top of that, for all the entrepreneurs out there who want to glean a little bit of business information, she is a brilliant systems thinker. She has developed a system around her approach to treating cancer that not only made a lot of sense to her patients but also made a lot of sense to other practitioners, which allowed her to scale her business in ways that many people who do one-on-one practices or have services or are coaches would love to emulate. There is a lot of powerful, powerful content in here between the different stories and between a little bit of the medical speak.
Key Takeaways
[3:33] The incredible beginning of Dr. Nasha’s cancer journey
[6:55] What cancer actually is
[13:35] How Dr. Nasha set her course for her future
[15:07] Dr. Nasha’s goals for her patients
[17:52] Why sharing your story is important in making authentic connections
[18:55] Using retreats as a way to gain trust and grow your client base
[25:06] How Dr. Nasha discovered her process for success
[37:24] The secret to Dr. Nasha’s speaking success
Dr. Nasha Winters Information
The Metabolic Approach to Cancer
Deepak Chopra's Quantum Healing
Transcript of Podcast
Kyle Gray:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Story Engine Podcast. I hope that you are as excited to hear this story and learn about Dr. Nasha's process as I was discovering it myself. Without any further ado, let's turn it over to Nasha. Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Nasha.
Nasha Winters:
Thank you for having me here. This is exciting. It's a whole new approach of discussion today, so I'm looking forward to it.
Kyle Gray:
Absolutely, and I'm excited to break a lot of these brilliant things that you've done down. For people who don't know you already, I'd love to hear your story and how you've come into Terrain 10 Consulting and what's brought you into this world?
Nasha Winters:
Perfect. Well, I'm a licensed naturopathic doctor, and in 2013, I also received my Fellow of the American Board of Naturopathic Oncology, so I had to basically jump through multiple flaming hoops to prove that I've had over 2,000 hours of direct contact with patients with cancer. I had to answer. I had to do a huge board exam. I had to have letters of recommendation from three oncologists, and I had to show 10 case presentations written in great detail of how I approached each of those cases. By the time it was said and done, it was well over a hundred pages of information to submit just to be one of a handful of folks with this certification in North America, so very proud of that hard work to get to that point. It means that I have taken many, many hours above and beyond my education to really dive deep into the world of oncology.
How I arrived at the world of oncology was on my own journey. Well, at 19 years old, I was diagnosed with ... Actually, I did spend the year, my 19th year very, very sick, in and out of ERs, the whole bit. Right before my 20th birthday, I finally had a doctor who did appropriate testing who realized I was in in-stage organ failure stage four ovarian cancer, metastasized my liver, peritoneal implants, carcinomatosis, extreme mastitis, unbelievable weakness, cachexia, muscle breakdown. I was incredibly, incredibly, incredibly sick. I was not able to breathe. I had fluid build up in my lungs. My kidneys had shut down. My liver had shut down, so I was so sick to the point where they didn't even think that any treatment would be worth it because they didn't think I'd even survive the chemotherapy at that point.
I was given ... They told me I had three months, but now that I've been in this field long enough and see exactly where I was at that time, it could have been days of actually where I was, which was a little startling when you start to learn what I have learned since then.
Fast forward, I was on parr to go to conventional medical school. That was my plan, but because I was basically, I don't know, for lack of a better word, failed by the system, I tried very diligently to get help and to inquire what was going on with me and was ignored and dismissed multiple times for that year period of time that I started looking at alternatives. I started looking at what else was available to me and stumbling upon a book at that time, Deepak Chopra's Quantum Healing, and also at the library because there was no Dr. Google. There was no internet, so I ran across a book of integrated alternative medicine and stumbled across this concept of naturopathic medicine.
That time, there was just basically two schools. Well, three schools. There was the Toronto School in Canada, and there was Bastyr, a national school up in Oregon in Washington state. I knew that that was likely where I was going to keep going as I wanted to keep studying medicine, but I knew I needed a little different framework. Basically, the next 27 years because we're almost to the 27th year date at this point, I had to figure it out for myself. I had to do a lot of digging. I had to do a lot of researching. Luckily, I have a good brain for that. Luckily, I'm interested in that, and because I was at a small four-year liberal arts school in Durango, Colorado and because we weren't a very wealthy school, we have very old, outdated textbooks in our library, right? Some of them from the '40s and '50s that we were still basing our science on.
Well, I got lucky because I stumbled across the work of Otto Warburg and the concept of mitochondrial dysfunction and cancers and metabolic disease that he was doing research on in the 1920s. Unfortunately, his work basically got buried as people like Watson and Crick came along a few years later and started putting all our attention on the genetics. Where we spent the last 70 years in cancer is focusing on the genetic cause of cancer, and frankly, we haven't gotten very far. We've not really changed outcomes very well, and we're still using some pretty outdated archaic treatments such as nerve gas and mustard gas and whatnot from World War II that have now become our chemotherapeutic agents, for example.
I've just taken a deep dive in learning about well, what causes this? One thing we can agree on in an integrative, alternative and conventional standpoint of cancer is that it is a collection of hundreds of diseases. That's what cancer is. It is not a single disease. Therefore, why do we keep trying to treat it with a single treatment or a couple of treatments? It's a little bit bizarre that we know this about the disease, but we keep still treating it a different way. That is what prompted me to start to unknowingly create a, "Well, where do you start? Where do you start to create a methodology? How do you start to analyze these hundreds of diseases and make sense of the data, and then do something about it?" That is basically what led to where I am today and how I've worked with patients for a very long time.
Kyle Gray:
This is stunning. What an amazing story. I am so excited. I wanted, I want to get into how you've helped people and examining some of the brilliant things you've done, but what I really have to know right off the bat is, I want to go right back to the day when you're 19 or 20 and maybe you have months or perhaps even days to live, because I think a lot of people, when faced with something like that, when faced with something that seems absolutely insurmountable would withdraw, but it means ... I mean you've found a way to not only overcome this but turn it into an amazing thing that has impacted hundreds, if not, thousands, if not, tens or more thousands of people. I would love to know about this moment and how you used your story and how you changed the direction of your story to say, "I'm not going to let this define me. I'm not going to let this defeat me. I'm going to rise above this."
Nasha Winters:
Well, it's so funny that I'm being asked this question today because just over the weekend in Sacramento, California, I spoke at what would be the final Cancer As A Turning Point Conference. It was the 25th year and the 38th conference on this topic of healing stories. People basically sharing their story. I have been a very, very private person about my cancer diagnosis, about my cancer history all the way up through until basically, I sold my practice in 2014 partially because of the way I chose to handle this, to deal with this for myself. I knew as a clinician that if someone said, "Okay. This woman's alive now. After all these years, this is exactly what she did. I'm just going to do exactly what she did, and I'll be fine." I knew that, that would be negligent and dangerous, and that, that is not the way it works. We have our own individual path in all of this.
Until I became more of a consultant, stepped out, started getting my book out there, started doing some lectures, I definitely started giving little teasers or little examples of my journey. Just to qualify that for your listeners is that it wasn't part of my practice, and I did help tens of thousands of patients in my time of private practice without them even knowing that part of my history. I pride myself that it wasn't just my story selling something because I actually really hate to be associated with it as a cancer patient. I am not, okay? I'm adol, and I actually ... I mean it's a very dangerous place to be. I have a pattern. I have a process. I have many, many paths within my body being a life experience. Even the experiences of my ancestors, at least four generations out, that have impacted how my body deals with the stress on, in and around me at any given moment. That is what makes my personal blueprint or fingerprint, if you will, how this disease manifested for me. Therefore, how I address it for me.
Flash all the way back to that day, age 19, age 20, right? That's being told I had nothing. Interestingly enough, I had wanted to be gone for a very long time. I did not want to be on this planet for a very long time prior to that diagnosis and in fact, tried a few times to take my own life. It was in that moment when I was basically given no choice that it woke me, frankly, the hell up. You know, there is no way. It was like it was exactly what lit the pilot light that had been out for some time within me. Maybe because you can't tell it on because I've aged a lot, but I'm a redhead. I don't know if it was my stubbornness, my passion. They know that this very fits the red-headed model.
I got angry when I was told that they couldn't do anything. Pretty much, when you tell me that, and my mom will tell you, even as an infant, you tell me you can't. I would ... I had other plans. It was in that moment that I was acting like a stubborn toddler pretty much saying, "Well, I'll show them." I wasn't even doing it for myself at that point, but that is where I stumbled upon Deepak Chopra's book, et cetera, and started changing, frankly, everything about my life. That moment was, and why I was so drawn to that book, Quantum Healing is it's a moment. It's an instant where the world as you knew it looked one way. In a moment, it now looks entirely different. That, you can't medicate into somebody or educate into somebody or inspire into somebody. It has to come from within. I had one of those come-from-within moments. I've met hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands and thousands of people along the way who've had their own moments like that, that defied all odds in this work.
The key is that I'm still working at it 27 years later because, for your listeners, I did not do conventional medicine. I did not have surgery other than outside my initial biopsies and multiple drainings of myositis. Again, this is 1991. We were using antiquated studies at that time as well. MRIs, unfortunately, blew out my kidneys. It put me into kidney failure, gadolinium poisoning. It's still in my body, unfortunately, today. CT Scans, I had a terrible reaction to the dyes. I couldn't use some of the conventional methods of testing so I had to get creative with other forms of testing. Blood tests and lifestyle journals and being really aware of my body and pulse diagnosis and tongue diagnosis from Chinese medicine and Achilles heel reflex to see what was grabbing my thyroid, and eye pupil testing to see what my adrenals are up to.
Then, later, more provocative tests became available. Heavy metals and autoimmune testing and whatnot. It took me until 1996. I was one of the first people studied for the BRCA gene and found out I've got BRCA2 expression. They explained a lot of why I was such a young person with this process. Flash forward into 2010, 2012 when I had my epigenetics run. That's when it made a lot more sense of, "Of course, this was the path I was going to take," as I was feeding it everything at the early stage of my life to make cancer express within me. Then, just things I've learned along the way from other mentors. I jokingly said at my speech this weekend that for every day or every week that I stayed alive, I learned something new so that I could actually kick the can down the road a little bit further.
I didn't expect to be here. I didn't expect to have to pay back my student loans. I didn't expect a lot of things, and so I surprise myself through this journey all of the time and yet, I would probably not be someone considered in remission per Western medical standards, but what I've learned about my body and about my process and about that of tens of thousands of other people I've had the pleasure of working with is when we test, assess and address, we know how to basically manipulate the micro-environment and the expression of illness or health in a way that allows us to work with this as a chronic illness just like diabetes or osteoporosis or high blood pressure. That is what I've learned. So my goal with my patients is not to eradicate cancer. I don't treat cancer. I treat people and I treat their patterns. I help their body come basically into harmony because cancer is us, it's of us, it sprouts of us, and we all have cancer all the time so why do some of us keep it dormant and some of us keep it on the move? Those are the crazy little nuances I've learned just by, one of my patients calls it CYA University, or excuse me, SYA University, Save Your Ass University. That is what I've been in for all of these years. And I laugh when she said it. Like, oh, yeah, that's where we are.
Test, assess and address
Kyle Gray:
That is amazing. I can totally feel for that switch-over moment and identify with it in my own life. I think it's fascinating. A lot of the people I work with, we try to bring out their story and bring it forward, as a way to connect. But I really do appreciate your approach and your mindset on really using, or relying on your methods and your process, which is what I want to dive into next. Before your own story, you didn't want to have a celebrity effect, you wanted people to trust in your process and your intelligence, and your experience that you've gained, not only with yourself but with many people.
One of the reasons I'm so excited to talk to you is, as a health practitioner, you've done something really, really innovative, not only in the way that you are addressing this disease in particular, but how you've developed your practice, and how you have built your business. I think a lot of people with any kind of one-on-one coaching or consulting, especially in a brick-and-mortar situation, could learn a lot from the innovative ways that you have built your practice. I think you gave us a few hints on, in your own journey, and how you were testing yourself. You've actually sold your practice and now work mostly online with people. Is that correct?
Nasha Winters:
Totally correct. And even in the last few years of having my brick-and-mortar, I had to bring on more providers to do more of the one-on-one because we were being swarmed with clients that I just couldn't ... There weren't enough hours in the day for me to take care of people. So we brought in some really good colleagues to help do what I do. People who applied my methodology, and have my templates, and whatnot. It was scaling it in more of a smaller setting. So scaling it within a community, even though we had a lot of patients coming from all over the world, even in my tiny little town of Durango Colorado.
In 2012, what happened is, I was invited to speak at an ovarian cancer summit. It was the first time I gave a glimpse of my history, just a glimpse to this group. Just a basic, I'm here because I have some experience with this, but here's what we're going to talk about. Of course, I gave my great presentation, but still, people were fascinated by, "You're a survivor?" And then that did, unfortunately, or fortunately, however, you want to look at it, spark some people to say, "Well, now I'm really listening." Because you do have a methodology, you have the intellect, all those pieces, but you've also been on the journey, which is unique.
Most oncologists have not walked the walk of cancer. Probably most cardiologists have not walked the walk of heart disease. You get my point, but I think patients really want to have someone that they know has been on this journey, and gets it on a deeper level. So we started getting hundreds of calls a week of ovarian cancer patients from all over the world saying, "We got to see Nasha, and Nasha only."
So the way that first transformed into doing it on a more scalable model, is I would have these immersion retreats, these weekend retreats. So people would arrive on a Friday afternoon. Before they arrive, they had a set of blood tests, that we would get as a baseline. They had a set of an intake form and questionnaires. And then we had complete control over everything that happened in their lives from Friday at 4:00 PM, until 10:00 AM on Monday. You'd be amazed at what you can cram into those days.
A week after they would get home, we would look at their labs again, and you would see the utter transformation. And you would see even the transformation of the person physically during the weekend. People then bought into it. They got to experience that quantum healing, that paradigm shift in real time, that I was so fortunate to have in my youth. Then suddenly, we had 20, 30 people experiencing that in a weekend, and then going home and buying into, okay now, how do I keep this momentum going? How do I keep kicking the can down the road?
And that's where it started to create a world of its own. It was from those weekends because I was giving them sips of water through a fire hydrant of information, that they basically requested, you've got to turn this into a book. And that's what was the birthing process of the Metabolic Approach to Cancer, with my co-author, Jess Kelley. And Jess, why I brought her onboard, is she joined our team as a nutritionist, in our office. And she also did a lot of our immersion weekend retreat, so she got to see it first-hand. And she got to see that the foundation of this methodology and this process was through the way we fed ourselves, through nourishment. And her being so skilled at it, being a nutritionist, she was an incredible nutritionist.
But frankly, until Jess' own father was diagnosed with stage four, a score of a glioblastoma multiforme, a most aggressive form of brain cancer there is. You're lucky if you get nine to 12 months. This is the cancer that just recently took Senator McCain's life. You kind of know that you'll live that expiration date, and if memory serves, he lived to be 24 months into this process because of input from his daughter. That is a pretty big success story there, and he actually died just a few weeks before our book went to the final book, the aspect went into publication. So the book is dedicated to Jack and his journey. But that experience made Jess a great nutritionist, into a fantastic nutritionist, because she then also had her own experience with it, talk about her own quantum shift.
Jess is also an incredible writer. She had a lot of good information, but I had a lot of information but didn't have the time or the bandwidth to download it. So Jess and I have a beautiful synergy in the way we work together and write together. And I can literally just "glop", and then she fixes it pretty, and puts it all together. So together, she basically took my 25 years of information and helped organize it. We knew we already had the structure because I'd already taught the Terrain Ten courses for some time. So we already had all the content, she just helps me make it into a book format. It's been shocking because I pretty much read it for my patients and for myself, so I didn't have to say the same thing over and over again.
I thought, my aunt and uncle, and my mom and maybe my husband would be the only people who ever bought the book. Little did we know that it went, wildly surprisingly popular, especially for a first-time, unknown author and practitioner. I mean, known within small communities, but not on a scale where I'm getting to today, which is really surreal. So, it's exciting. We have over 25,000 copies sold. It's out now in German and Polish, and any second, it'll be out in Spanish and Korean. It goes out on a book on tape here. It's due out this month, as an audio. So I'm really happy to see that it's not just well received within my own community, and the country around us, but also in the world. It makes me really happy.
Kyle Gray:
That's really exciting. And I'm just so fascinated by your story and your team's story. What I want to say, mostly for those listening, I appreciate your heavy reliance of moving your process forward first, which I think is another element of storytelling. But what's really inspiring in here is what you were saying, like it's rare that cardiologists have experienced this.
And story is not just something that is necessary for your marketing, or for your connection, but it's undoubtedly had a big impact on people. And it really created the human connection that so many practitioners, so many business owners, and so many entrepreneurs want to create with their audience. And I think that's stunning, but it's also, you used it as almost like an internal compass, an internal guide that attracted the right people in the quantum level and beyond way, to really build the team who resonated with you. I think that that's just an amazing testament to story.
So going along with this, you've built this book and you've created something called the Terrain Ten methodology. Which just before the call, we were talking about this as you're almost, your secret recipe, the recipe that people don't just want a random thing, they want exactly this thing, and they can only get it with you. That is a really powerful and unique way to use storytelling and to stand out in a crowded marketplace. Whether you're a practitioner, no matter what, how, or who you serve. So I would love to know a little bit about how you developed this process and how you created it, just this nice package around it, that people could really understand and resonate with really quickly.
Nasha Winters:
Well, as a naturopathic doctor, I'm trained to think more vitalistically, and holistically anyway. So it's not like, yes, my colleagues and I, we can specialize, but ultimately, we learn things to understand that it's just a web and it's all deeply interconnected.
But the other part of my training was in Ayurvedic medicine. I spent 13 years training and mentoring with some really big names in that world. And in Chinese medicine, I have a doctorate in renal medicine as well. So those ancient modalities, those medical systems, because they are just that, the systems are very pattern-centric. And so, for instance, in Chinese medicine, you have these 12 organ systems, and two of them are paired together. And if you have issues, say in the liver, gallbladder meridian, it usually means a whole collection of certain symptoms or patterns. If you have something in the heart and small intestine meridian, that usually means something.
So I resonated so much with that concept of these patterns. Because that actually simplified my brain, very complex situations. Because I never got that easy, like, "Oh, I have seasonal allergies, fix me," kind of patient. I always got the train wreck. I always got the person who had 14 different autoimmune conditions, along with their cancer, along with major trauma, has certain, layer, like the life lasagna. You're talking about Lasagna earlier, but the person who came in, it's like, "Oh my gosh, where do you start?" That's where I believe these systems-centric medical fields wired my brain in a way that started to see things as patterns and understand things.
So, you know when you softly gaze at one of those posters that had all the wiggly lines, and it's just was like, wiggly lines until your eyes slightly cross and get lazy? And then all of sudden you see a dolphin jumping out, you just suddenly see it, there's perspective within. That's what happens to me when I look at somebody's, their Terrain Ten questionnaire, which is a combination of 10 questions for 10 different patterns that have seemingly been the main patterns that I see over and over again in chronic illness and cancer.
So then when people take that 10 question questionnaire, and they do their Terrain Ten questionnaire, and they fill out the answers, they already have a sense of, wow, these three things are my priorities. I didn't realize that these were big deals for me, but I answered the most questions in these areas. So already the patient has bought into recognizing their own internal pattern. So I have that information. And then the labs that I request, are unique to what they would typically get in an oncology office, or even in any functional medicine office, or any just good GP office.
They go way above and beyond just your basic, "Do you have high enough white blood cell count to get your next chemo?" We're looking a little bit deeper with the blood test. That's basically validating for me, instinct because I've got really good instincts, intuition if you will. But also patterns from their questionnaire, it's like, well, is this lab showing that this pattern is really present right now? The blood labs are what tell us, is it happening right now at this moment? And then from that information, we have a starting point. We have priorities. We know where to start the process. Because no matter where you start, frankly, you're going to impact the whole, that's just the nature of vitalism and has a systemic approach.
But to be able to focus in on, let's say blood sugar, is their primary concern, we start to change the rest of the dynamic. And so for instance, within that, I just think of us as just a bucket. We are just a bucket, and that bucket represents our mitochondria. Those are the organelles within our cells that are our locomotive, they are our energy source. And they depend on the information and the food and the nourishment we give them to help drive our little locomotive bodies down the road, right?
And so, over time, that bucket gets filled with life, right? And that could be things from your epigenetics, things that you had passed down 10 generations before you, your microbiome, your inflammation, your blood sugar balances, your hormonal balances, your stress chemistry and circadian rhythm, your blood circulation, angiogenic potential, your mental, emotional health, your immune system health, and I can't believe I am missing one other big one. Let me just go take a peek, make sure I don't ... Oh golly, of course, I'm missing the big one, your toxicants exposure, your environmental toxicant exposure. All of those things go into the bucket. And we all have a different threshold of our bucket. And within our bucket, our ingredients are going to vary from person to person.
The way we process stuff through our bucket is going to vary from person to person. So there's no one way, in anybody's given bucket, we have to explore what's inside that bucket in every single person. And the methodologies I have found are what creates that extremely bio-individualized precision medicine approach, where we get really good results. We are not taking a shotgun approach. We're not taking a guessing approach. We know exactly what needs to be done, we get it and we do it, and we move on to the next priority.
Kyle Gray:
That's beautiful, and on top of that it creates something that's personal, immediately personal, to that patient or the prospective patient, but it's also like a checklist for you. It's something that you can go through every time. You don't have to think about, "Okay, do we do this and that and this?" You don't have to make any roadmap. It's the same thing every time. Better yet, the most scalable part of this is that you are now training people and certifying people in the same system, in the same methodology, which really does take your business to the next level.
What I would love to know is how that fits in now with currently what you're doing. Are you working with a lot of practitioners now to spread this methodology, and how do you certify them?
Nasha Winters:
Well, right now ... Historically I had done a couple of weekend immersion courses for physicians. peoples' lives, they're so busy and they already have so much in their brains and they already have a way of doing things. That didn't land quite the way I wanted it to. So, I backtracked and started realizing that my colleagues are gleaning as much from reading the book as their patients because it's helping them start to organize their brains. So the book itself is starting to become kind of like the prerequisite course. It helps them go like, "Okay, here's the landscape and what we're gonna talk about."
What has happened this past year of getting so, so, so over the top busy was that I didn't have time to really do a training program, though it's been worked on behind the scenes with my colleague, Dr. Christina Compton, and our new business venture that we have gone in together I'll talk about here in a moment, but in the meantime I still have patients that are booked through the end of the year that need to still be seen.
What I do on Wednesdays is I do what's called doc-to-doc consultation. A doctor schedules an appointment with me to review their patient's case. The patient, for the most part, pays the doctor to do this, so basically I do a one-hour training session with the doctor, with the information we have, to start to train their brains into my methodology. I thought I would have kind of a one and done with a few doctors, but I have many that are now ... Some of them see me two or three times a month with patients' cases. It's like having grand rounds that they are now having the ability to dive in, and what's the best part is within two or three sessions I'm like, "So, what do you see?" They are getting it. It's going in a way that is so gratifying. It's like, "Oh." Now it's a real time with real people, they're processing it through the way I do, and they're getting it and they're making even their own amazing conclusions out of it and taking it to that next level within their own practices, that now we have a good idea of what this course will look like and we're hoping to launch it in 2019, specific for practitioners
I have four practitioners that I am training hands-on right now that will be sort of taking over and helping me with my client load as we transition into this new model entirely after the end of the year. So I have four people that I also hope will become trainers, help me train people as well. Talk about that scalability. Right now I'm still the ... The program doesn't work without me. I need it to work without me in the not so distant future. That is the goal. I need to be obsolete as quickly as possible, and that's my legacy. That's where I am working on this piece, and in the interim, I'm training doctors in certain specific treatments and working on another book on specific therapeutic diets for different conditions, like cachexia or going through radiation or feeding tube. You know, getting really specific clinical-centric treatments for doctors to have more of a handbook with all of this as well.
Then our mistletoe book is coming out this year, which is 17 authors from seven countries, with their experience of using one of the most studied and profound integrative oncology treatments in the world. So we're very excited about that getting out there to help people open up their parachute brains, even more, to know that there's a lot more than just chemotherapy, radiation, and surgical interventions and that you can actually enhance those therapies with the approach that I take with my patients or the mistletoe or whatever is needed for that individual.
Kyle Gray:
That is so powerful. This systems thinking has benefited you in so many different ways. It's made it easy for your patients to grasp, it's made it easy for you to help certify other practitioners, and best of all it's helped you build the team that can serve you and frees you up to do more and think bigger.
One of the things that you're doing, you've mentioned this a couple of times, is you're sharing your story now from stages and different conferences all over the place. Yeah, for those who can't see, you just winced a little bit. I would love to know how speaking has really impacted your career. We've got a couple of different hints at that already. Do you have an approach to speaking? Do you have stages that you're like, "I really want to get on that stage," and you go out there? Or are you getting kind of organically invited to speak?
Nasha Winters:
It's really funny. First of all, I have the worst stage fright ever. Each and every time, like I just had to speak this weekend, I'm a mess and I have a huge one in Germany next week. I've got still like 12 more presentations at the end of the year, and I keep thinking, "Why do I keep doing this to myself?" I keep thinking it's gonna get easier each time, and it doesn't, so I got to figure on that one. What's happening is I've only really been presenting in the last two and a half years probably, so maybe six months before the book came out I was invited to have a couple little speakings gigs. You know, like 20 minutes here and there.
Actually, my first big speaking engagement was in 2014 in Germany speaking on my experience with mistletoe, because there were not many people really using it and I was having some pretty amazing experiences. So, that was horrifying, but I had 15 minutes and it was something that put me on a global map almost immediately. What I did in my presentation is I shared how I decided what to choose for treatments for people, and the doctors were blown away because I was basically giving them a preview of my methodology and they were hungry for more.
So even before the book got out, I started being invited for small gigs and I'd put in an abstract. There's a few that I've put in abstracts year after year after year of places that I would have thought I would've been invited to speak years ago that just kept saying no, and frankly I thought those were big ponds until I started getting invited to do speeches at Hopkins and Memorial Sloan Kettering and world venues and giant things where I never expected to be invited to speak.
So petrified, number one, but I forced myself to do it, number two, and I will tell you I do it my own way. I am not a person who's gonna get up there and read slides to you. I do not go through the clinical studies and read people abstracts. I can't do that. In fact, I want to poke myself in the eye when other people do that to me. So, I get up and I'm totally me, which you're seeing right now and this doesn't change depending on my audience. I would say for the most part that works for me.
There are a few people that probably they don't resonate with it, but the one thing I've gotten really good about in the last few years is I'm not for everybody and I don't have to be for everybody. But the people I am for, they are one hell of a loyal tribe and they are a huge celebratory tribe, and frankly, that experience has actually been very healing in my history as well because I kind of thought I needed to make everybody happy or play small and make everybody comfortable. Or not be totally me and be out there in a different way. I just can't do it any other way, and that works well for me.
This year alone I've had 36 talks so far. I have 12 more to do. I've been on hundreds of podcasts. I've got two big ones coming up going live at the end of the month. One has a 3.3 million person reach and the other one has an over 300,000 person reach, so I'm kind of bracing myself for how that goes.
So it's weird because I was just on an airplane the other day and looked up, I was in seat 10 on the aisle, and up at seat seven in the aisle was a woman I caught out of the corner of my eye that she was reading my book. I went through such a weird anxiety. I'm like, "What is going on?" I was really nervous and I didn't do a thing. I just sat there quietly and was like ... I was watching her take notes and I was like, "Oh, my god."
So, we land and the woman across the aisle from her was like, "So, I see you're reading this book. What is it?" She bursts into tears. She starts talking about her mom just got diagnosed with cancer, she's trying to help her any way she can and this book is amazing. She knows it's gonna help her mom and herself and she's just gushing, and the other one's like, "I want to write it down." She took a picture of the cover of the book. Finally, I'm like, "Just say it. Just say it. Just say it," because I was terrified to do it.
I just said, "Ladies, I'm sorry to overhear what you're talking about here, but I wrote that book." I was really petrified of how it was gonna be received. I don't know why but I was, and both of them end up bursting into tears again. Then I end up bursting into tears and the people around us, it was like a giant crying snot fest.
We end up getting off the plane and we end up standing and visiting for 15 minutes. I was almost late to my connection just talking. They got a picture of me with the book and I signed the book for her mom. It was just this moment. It was like, "Oh my god. I am touching ... " I've had really nice relationships with my patients over the years, but now the scalability piece that is so exciting to me, is I get to touch people without having that one-on-one in a way that I didn't know could happen. I wasn't braced to realize how many more people I could reach in this way and get that message out there, which meant ... Because I always wondered how do I get all of this, everyone in the world to know this stuff without killing myself?
It was like a relief to realize that there is some information here that may help total strangers that I will never meet and never know, and that it will keep going long after I'm gone, and that if it helps one person I'll be ecstatic.
After this weekend, being in a group of almost 500 people and having 200 people come up to me to sign books and take photo ops and talk, I only knew a handful of the people and that was just another of these moments that are happening bigger and bigger. So the scalability is really key, Kyle, and I did not expect to need that or want that or expect to feel so darn good with it.
Kyle Gray:
Absolutely incredible. Just congratulations on everything that you've managed to achieve with your story and your process and just the impact that you've made is very, very impressive. I'm so grateful for what you've done and all the people you've worked with.
Dr. Nasha, this has been a total pleasure and I think anybody listening in can really glean some ideas of how do we create a system alongside of our story and how can we use that to teach, to help share our ideas, our complex ideas. You've distilled years and years and years of rigorous research into a simple, understandable program that about can say, "Oh, I instantly understand how this applies to me. Oh, I instantly understand how to take this to my patients. Oh, I instantly understand how to grow this." A truly inspirational example, so thank you so much for joining us.
Tell us where we can check out the book, where we can learn a little bit more about you, and if there's anything else. You mentioned so many exciting things happening. Where can we connect with you?
Nasha Winters:
Perfect. Well, right now until the end of the year, and it'll move over on its own so you don't have to worry about this, but right now you can find out more of all the podcasts and my events and whatnot on my current website, which is OptimalTerrainConsulting.com. Soon it's going to be morphed into a simpler website and information, Terrain 10, the number 10, so Terrain10.com. That's kind of the next phase, the next scalability of this program. On Facebook you can find me understand just Nasha Winters, but easier to find me under The Metabolic Approach to Cancer or Optimal Terrain Consulting, which is just gonna switch over to Terrain Ten here within the next couple of weeks. So it will look exactly the same, just a little different name to it. That's where I post a lot of what we're up to, information, where I'm speaking, little things from current research that's backing and validating what I'm sharing in the book and with my patients, ongoing kind of hints of what's to come and what we're up to these days. I'd love to see you all there.
Kyle Gray:
Thank you so much, Dr. Nasha. It's been a total pleasure. Let's get you on the show again when you've 10x'ed this one more time. Okay?
Nasha Winters:
Let's hope so.
Kyle Gray:
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