043: Care4Me - An Assignment Bigger Than Me with LeAnn Thieman

When faced with a harrowing decision, LeAnn Thieman turned to her higher power to ask for guidance. In that moment, clarity and confidence enveloped her and she knew going to Vietnam to save orphaned babies was what she was supposed to do. In the midst of a war zone, LeAnn helped to care for and save thousands of children from an uncertain future by assisting their travel to a new life in the United States as part of the Operation Babylift project.

Today, LeAnn uses her unique experience to help healthcare workers take care of themselves through her Self Care for Health Care program. Through her work as a speaker and author of 14 of the Chicken Soup books, LeAnn shares her inspirational insights to help others to find a life balance through mindful practices.

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Transcription (5,188 More Words)

Welcome:	Welcome to the Everyday Mindfulness Show. The off the cuff exploration of every day ‘ah-ha’ moments and life experiences. Join a cast of over 70 uniquely brilliant individuals. Each week Mike Domitrz and an eclectic mix of cast members and special guests. We’ll engage in mindful and lively conversations about everything from meditation to spirituality to personal passions to successes and failures to relationships to the stuff that makes up the moments of our daily lives. Let’s get started with your host, author, speaker, provocateur and a bit of a goofball, Mike Domitrz.
Mike Domitrz:	One of our sponsors this week is the Can I Kiss You? book. If you listen to this show, you know that is actually my book. Came out in 2016. Went number one for teen and young adult dating on Amazon new release. You can get that on Amazon. You can get that at DateSaveProject.org. The book is Can I Kiss You?
	Yes, I’m your host Mike Domitrz and thrilled to be here with our special, special interview today with LeAnn Thieman, a friend who I’ve known now for several years. We got to spend … What? We had a night where I was in their town. We got to hang out and talk. Just an incredible individual with an amazing personal life story. Leann, thank you so much for joining us here today for a one on one with Everyday Mindfulness Show.
LeAnn Thieman:	My joy to be with you. Thanks.
Mike Domitrz:	For everyone watching right now or listening because we do one on ones, you can also watch these on YouTube. Either way you can find all about LeAnn and our show at EverydayMindfulnessShow.com. We’ll have links to Leann and anything we’re discussing today. So know you can always go there.
	Leann, right now I really want to jump into everyone learning about you. I first learned about you through the National Speaker’s Association, and you’re personal story. We’ll back up to that in a moment. I’d like to start with what do you do today because that was years ago, as people learn about your personal story that ignited it all. What are you doing today?
LeAnn Thieman:	Today, I work full-time as a speaker and author. I have been lucky to right 14 of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books. So I do a lot of writing. Three of them for nurses. I speak full-time to healthcare, and I’ve developed a year long program now called Self Care for Healthcare and speak in rightful time to healthcare givers care for themselves while they’re taking care of everybody else.
Mike Domitrz:	Very cool. You specifically teach them how to apply mindfulness to their lives to do that, is that correct?
LeAnn Thieman:	Absolutely.
Mike Domitrz:	Yes. So we’re going to get to that a little bit later. Now, we’re going to jump back. For everyone who is never met LeAnn, your personal story is amazing. Can you take us back to that story and let our viewers and listeners learn about that journey.
LeAnn Thieman:	Well, yes. All of this began actually at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. I was a volunteer for an organization called Friends of Children of Vietnam. I agreed to go to escort six babies back to their assigned adoptive homes. But by the time I got there bombs were dropping outside the city. President Ford had okayed Operation Baby Lift, and I got accidentally thrown in to literally helping to put hundreds of babies into open cardboard boxes, strapping them in a cargo jet, and flying them to the United States and eventually to their homes. In the midst of that chaos, the little boy we thought we would adopt in two or three years picked me. I came back with our son.
Mike Domitrz:	Which is awesome. So now how old is your son today?
LeAnn Thieman:	Oh, my baby is only 42.
Mike Domitrz:	There you go. So 42. For anybody, if you ever get a chance to see Leann speak, you’re going to want to do it because you have the images. You have the pictures. I think people hear that ‘babies in cardboard boxes’ they don’t really understand. We literally mean a plane full of cardboard boxes with babies sitting in them.
LeAnn Thieman:	Right.
Mike Domitrz:	You don’t have what we have today. They weren’t strapped in seat belts. It was get them out of here so we can get them to a safer situation.
LeAnn Thieman:	That’s exactly right.
Mike Domitrz:	You yourself were in that danger. So let’s go back to that time. How did you mentally deal with that? How did you handle that moment of stress because you had stress before you left. You found out right before leaving the situation had changed as far as the severity of it, if I remember right.
LeAnn Thieman:	That’s correct.
Mike Domitrz:	So you had to make the decision to still go when a lot of people would have said, “I’m out.” In fact, people said to you, “What are you doing, under all these circumstances, still going?”
LeAnn Thieman:	Right, especially since I had a wonderful husband and two little girls that were two and four years old. It’s important for people to hear, I never would have left them if I wasn’t sure I would be back. I realized that the bombs were falling outside the city, and the only way I can explain it, Mike, is you know that part of my story. I was scared to death and a part of my mindfulness is mind, body, and spirit. I turned to my spirit, my higher power, and after the Easter service, I just knelt sobbing. Actually then begging God for a sign I didn’t have to go. But instead I was just filled with this absolute courage and confidence and certainty. I’d go. I’d be back. I’d be safe. I was only expected to be gone about 10 days, and I knew I’d be back fine. So I left completely filled with confidence.
Mike Domitrz:	There’s something really vulnerable there is that you did get to a place where you were sobbing, thinking, “I’m not going.” Like, God just cleared me of the ability … I don’t need to go. We’re good. It was after the clearing that you were like, “Now, I know I need to go.” So that’s so unique that you allowed yourself to say, “No, I’m not going to do it.” And that brought forth the safety and the confidence and the comfort. I think that’s really powerful to think about. What if everyone said, “I don’t know if I should go.” Well, what would you say to yourself if you just said, “I’m not going to do this.” Where would you be at? What clearing could that bring you? That’s so powerful.
	So then you get over there, and it is happening, right? It’s happening around you. Was there ever a deterrent once you were there in that confidence? Was there ever a moment where you’re like, “Oh, no. This could be worse than I realize. I might not get back.”
LeAnn Thieman:	Well, Mike, I’m not sure you even know that part of my story. It was absolutely. I went completely filled with confidence. We’re expected to be on the first plane load out of the Vietnam. Our organization was number one on the list. We got bumped from the first place position and when I learned that, I argued and I fought and I nagged that we should be out first place position. We needed to go out first. We didn’t get that position. So instead we just loaded 20 babies into the bus to take them to the airport to put them on an Australian airline because we also had a chapter in Australia. As I stood on that runway, I watched that first plane, a load of orphans, crash after take off. When that plane crashed, so did I. I lost complete faith, complete confidence. I thought I made a terrible, terrible decision. I thought I may never get out of there. Indeed, my faith and my courage and everything was shaken.
Mike Domitrz:	Well, yeah. That’s understandable. So you had 20 babies. You see the plane crash. For everyone listening right now, I think it’s really important for perspective. I mean, everyone of those lives to you is an invaluable life is lost. How many did you save after that? What was the number?
LeAnn Thieman:	Actually half of them survived.
Mike Domitrz:	So half of them survived.
LeAnn Thieman:	So, just to be clear, we took the babies to the Australian airliner and it wasn’t our plane or our babies on that plane. There were 400 …
Mike Domitrz:	Ah.
LeAnn Thieman:	There were 400 other volunteers and babies from another organization. Of those 400, 200 survived.
Mike Domitrz:	Okay.
LeAnn Thieman:	Not my plane or my babies.
Mike Domitrz:	I gotcha. But even so, you knew that could have been you. That could have been yours. But even so, it was just human life that you just saw lost. Even if it had nothing to do with the babies, its human life. How many babies? Was it 6,000 that you helped get out, the organization helped you get out?
LeAnn Thieman:	All together. All the organizations and actually there turned out to be about five or six organizations and 3,000 babies were rescued from Vietnam by the end of the war.
Mike Domitrz:	Yeah. So it’s amazing to think of that. Imagine if that moment when the plane crash happened, and you think, “Okay. I need to get home safely.” Everyone bailed, let’s just say that. 3,000 lives would have been left behind because of the fear of what happened to those 200. You all had the courage to keep moving. What was it that did it for you to take the next step forward? At that moment when you watched that plane crash, I know it might not have been right away. Maybe it was a day later, but what was the moment where you said, “No, we have to keep going.”
LeAnn Thieman:	Well, actually I asked if I could leave because I was so afraid. I thought I’d never see my family again. When they tell you there’s no plane out except on an Operation Baby Lift plane, that sort of reframes your thinking. Then you walk into that building where there’s a hundred bawling babies. We all need you. So we just through ourselves right back in to the work again. In the meantime, a reporter called all the way from Iowa, across the ocean, from my husband. They asked if I had a message for him. When I could tell him I wasn’t on the plane and that I was safe and he knew I’d be okay and I was coming home, that lifted my heart again and the squalling babies through us right back into the work again. I had to go back to my prayer. I figured the God that sent me there would see me through it. So I remembered that. That I was there on purpose and I was on an assignment bigger than me. The good Lord would get me through it, and indeed he did. And gave me a son because three days after the plane crashed, there’s my boy.
Mike Domitrz:	Right. That is so powerful. Obviously your son you have shared this discussion over the years. How does he … He was too young at the time, I assume, to remember anything. He was an infant. How does this impact him? How is he said he looks at his life or at the family situation knowing everything that took place to get him free?
LeAnn Thieman:	You know, the interesting thing is Mitchell’s first t-shirt said ‘All American Boy’. That’s exactly how he was always viewed himself. He’s not very attached to Vietnam. We took him to a couple of camps to learn about that, and he said, “Nah, it’s okay. Doesn’t relate to me a bit.” So he’s just quite content. He’s never wanted to explore that very much. I took him to a reunion of the 25th anniversary of all these other grown ups and kids that I brought out. Wasn’t that totally cool? He said it was great to meet them. He did feel sort of a unique connection to them then. But he’s kind of gone along his whole life …
	You know, Mike, we sort of raised our kids a little differently. My husband happened to be a psychologist, and he said, “We’re not going to set Mitchell apart as being different. You’re German. I’m part French. He’s part Vietnamese. We’re all the same family, and it was all the same.” So we never really emphasized that a lot.
Mike Domitrz:	Right. You raised him to be himself.
LeAnn Thieman:	That’s right.
Mike Domitrz:	Yeah. That’s awesome. Brilliant. Now you have a new child, along with your two other daughters. Did you immediately go right back into nursing at that point?
LeAnn Thieman:	Yes. I’ve always been fortunate. I was a nurse at the bedside for 30 years. Always worked two or three days a week. Worked part-time and raised my family full-time. I went on and did that for all the years afterwards.
Mike Domitrz:	So at what point did you recognize or somebody helped you recognize this story needs to be heard?
LeAnn Thieman:	Well, you know, when Mitchell was a senior in high school, there was a number of people who kept telling me, “You need to write this story, Leann. You need to write this story.” I didn’t know how to write, but I knew it was time because even he didn’t know it. He didn’t know. As a matter of fact, there was a time in Vietnam I had to choose whether I was going to leave or stay for him. I stayed for him. There was so many of those things he didn’t know. I knew it was time to write the story.
	So I just took every writing class and course and mentorship and workshop and seminar and writers groups and magazines and books until I learned how to write a true personal story. I wrote our story never guessing the world would care. I thought once maybe if I even staple it in the upper right hand corner and hand it to my family that was its mission. But actually there was a much greater mission to all of it. I immediately I got the book … Well, not immediately. I had 21 rejections from publishers, and on the 21st it was sold. Then I had five movie options. None of which came to fruition. I began writing two stories for other people and Chicken Soup for the Soul. It changed my life completely.
Mike Domitrz:	Wow. Talk about a shift. I mean, that’s just from one paradigm to another. I’m going to go back a little bit because I realized I failed to ask an important question there. You come back with seeing everything you say. How do you get your mind in a place you can move forward without that trauma keep taking you back there? How did you move forward with that?
LeAnn Thieman:	You know, maybe the fact that I’m a nurse and I had to learn to cope with loss and try tragedy and how you plow through it. You know, you deal with it. You turn to your self care, to your mindfulness, to your prayer, to your family, to your support, and you move forward. I’ve always been able to do that. I had a family to care for. I had this perfect, beautiful little family to care for and a fabulous husband and a career that I loved. I wept through it. I wrote through it and plow through it and go on.
Mike Domitrz:	You said there you wept through it. So you allowed yourself to cry, which is an important part of mindfulness.
LeAnn Thieman:	Oh, my. Yes. I cried a lot. It was heart wrenching, heart breaking.
Mike Domitrz:	Yeah.
LeAnn Thieman:	When I wrote my book, I would … A friend stopped one day and my eyes were all red. She said, “What’s wrong?”
	I said, “I’m writing my story.” I would type a little bit and put my head on the desk and sob. Type a little bit more and cry some more. It was part of the journey. I think probably part of the healing 18 years later.
Mike Domitrz:	I can’t imagine because I know when I talk with survivors in sexual violence, so many say that when they wrote, when they journaled, it was such a freeing. It wasn’t that they were reliving that time. It was to let go. In their case, to let go. Not let go, but to move forward. To be able to acknowledge those feelings and move forward. There’s no letting go. There’s no it’s no longer there. It’s moving forward and acknowledging the hurt that they felt, the feelings they felt, and that’s okay they felt it. Writing allowed that. Allowed them to speak without fear of judgment, without concern. Did you have to give yourself that kind of freeing of what I’m going to write here could be difficult, but I’m just going to say it. Wherever it goes, it goes.
LeAnn Thieman:	Sure. There are parts that I wrote that I will never publish. I believe that I encourage people. I speak a lot of caregivers and so forth and talk about forgiveness and letting go. I think there are times when we do have to let go. I encourage sometimes people to write things and then often destroy it. Sometimes they have a healing fire and burn it. But is that catharsis, is that the release of it? When you write it helps you sort things in your own mind and in your heart. It allows you to, I think, get to a place where you can sort of release it.
Mike Domitrz:	You mentioned there that during that time and throughout your life, you’ve allowed yourself to cry. You’ve allowed yourself to write. You also said to really use your mindfulness. What are specific skill sets you use for mindfulness on a daily basis or at certain times in your life because some people use it when they need it and then they don’t use it for a while. Then they come back to it and that’s their use for mindfulness. For you, how does that present itself?
LeAnn Thieman:	Well, I actually what I believe in and what I write and speak about now is caring for your mind and body and spirit every day. Sometimes we make chunks of time. I’ll pray on Sundays or I’ll exercise on a Saturday and I’ll eat right on my day off. What I remind people to do is that even if it’s in 15 or 30 minute increments to care for your mind, your body, and your spirit and to pay attention to doing so every day. I remind people physically. I remind them to eat and to exercise and to sleep. We have a sleep deprived nation and to be mindful at the end of the day. I tell people set an alarm to go to bed, not just an alarm to wake up. Be mindful of how you’re spending your time. So you get the food and the nutrition and really do you not have 15 minutes to take the stairs instead or to walk around the block just once.
	I have four mental balance tools to be mindful. My first one is breathing. We need to stop not only in stressful times but for every day to just stop and breath slow, deep, and easy from the abdomen like they teach in child birth and yoga. So that’s one of my first mindful breathing is the first one. The second one I remind people to be mindful of what’s on your mind. To mind your mind. I’m a big believer in positive thinking and letting go of the negative thoughts. Encouraging the positive ones. Remind people to be mindful to laugh because that’s my third one and my fourth one. This is the hugest one, seems to be, is forgiveness. To be mindful of the resentments and the sorrow and the burden that you allow yourself to carry if you fail to forgive. Then, of course, I remind everybody to take 15 minutes a day, just 15, to connect with whatever higher power they believe in. That’s my mission in life is to share those mindfulness practices and simple strategies with people.
Mike Domitrz:	Do you have an acronym for it?
LeAnn Thieman:	Actually I do have an acronym that is CARE4ME. The C is to connect with your higher power. The A is to ask for what you need to better take care of yourself. The R is to rest and sleep. The E is to eat right. The 4 is four times a day stop and breath. The M is to mind your mind. The E, for me, is exercise at least 15 to 40 minutes a day.
Mike Domitrz:	Love it! CARE4ME. That’s perfect. That’s awesome. Where do you find that people struggle with that and what are ways you help them put that back in their lives or keep it constant, consistent?
LeAnn Thieman:	Well, two things mostly because I speak to nurses and people in healthcare, but this applies to just about everybody is sometimes we are so busy taking care of other people, we don’t take good care of ourselves. We treat ourselves in ways that we would never treat somebody that we loved. We would never deny someone we love food and nutrition and sleep and yet we do that to ourselves sometimes. So that’s the first thing.
	The second thing I remind them of, the biggest reason I hear the obstacle for them is I don’t have time. So there’s a whole chapter on my book on time. How do we choose to spend our time? Time is the only thing, if you think about it, everybody in the whole world has the same amount of. So how we spend our time is up to us. I think we let other people, we let employers and other people and society, dictate our time. Now I kind of challenging people on the amount of time they spend on social media. If you took just 15 minutes of that time to take a walk or to turn off your electricity and go to bed, that’d be mindful in those ways.
Mike Domitrz:	That’s powerful. What are stories that you’ve heard over the years of people applying that to their lives? So they get to see you speak, they apply it to their lives, and then a transformation occurs. They’re coming back and going, “Man, I have to share with you the difference.” I know you get those. Can you share some examples for our listeners to see the difference that can occur?
LeAnn Thieman:	Gosh. Everything is little as I feel better. I lost a little weight and I feel so much better. To powerful things of I think you saved my life. I get letters like that. People that realized that they … Sometimes you’ve heard of that story the frog in boiling water.
Mike Domitrz:	It’s the idea that if a frog jumps into a lukewarm water, it’ll stay there. You just slowly turn it up, it’ll boil from death because it slowly got burned up there. But if it jumped into water that was boiling, it jumped right out because it would know that this is so messed up, dangerous and harmful. But you don’t notice that when you’re slowly brought up in it. Yeah.
LeAnn Thieman:	I think that’s happening in people’s lives. They’re in boiling water and don’t realize it. When I gently point that out to them and empower them to make some changes, then they realize, “Gosh, you know what, I was having this tightness in my chest. I didn’t know what it was. I thought it was just stress. It was, but it was also the early stages of heart disease.” So to find out some of those changes.
	Another part I talk about is too late living your priorities. Now just giving lip service to the number one priorities in your life, but spending your time on what you say is the most priority in your life. I get lots of feedback from people about better relationships of now you know instead of doing … They maybe take a walk with their loved one or spend more time with the people they care about. Sometimes you can do that at the same time you care for yourself. You can go for walks and read together and do spiritual things together so that you can care for your mind, your body, and your spirit, which makes you just a happier, healthier person with even better relationships.
Mike Domitrz:	Yes. I think you know a good friend of mine. I think you know at least of him, Sean Stevenson. Sean always says look at where somebody’s spending their time, that tells you the real priorities. Not the ones they talk about.
LeAnn Thieman:	Exactly right. That’s exactly what I say. You tell me your priorities, show me your calendar.
Mike Domitrz:	Where are you making it happen, right? Are you spending the time with your loved one, with your spouse? If you say, “My relationships is everything.”
	“Oh, how much time do you two spend with each other every day?”
	“We get about 30 minutes at the end of the day.”
	“Well, I thought you said it was everything. Where was the other 13 in a half hours?” Or whatever time frame you could have potentially … Even if you had three hours at home at night together, why didn’t you spend two hours together and do the other hour? You got to choose there.
LeAnn Thieman:	Right. Exactly right. My number one priority is to live my number one priority. I think that’s important for people to pay attention to. Again, to your point, just to be mindful of because sometimes that happens and you don’t even realize it was happening. That’s what can really be a detriment to whole families.
Mike Domitrz:	Well, I think what you just said there is so important because I think when somebody either watches this or listens, they think, “Oh, LeAnn never falls into this.” But you do. You have your moments. I do, at least. I shouldn’t say you do. I absolutely fall into this even though I know there are times where you get out of balance. We all do it. That’s the part of being compassionate to yourself saying, “Oh, okay. I’m doing it.” Not with judgment or anger, but call it out loud so I can shift now.
LeAnn Thieman:	Exactly right. Society is just has everybody in such a fast pace that we sometimes just get on that treadmill and that little hamster wheel and forget that we need to step off and take a breath and reconnect and pay attention. Just pay attention.
Mike Domitrz:	For you, LeAnn, are there books that you like to read that help you put you in that right place of mind? What are ways that you help yourself continually be in that realm of mindfulness, in addition to, obviously, the CARE4ME and doing that for yourself. Are you a reader? Are you something that is more inspired by film or by documentary, by music?
LeAnn Thieman:	Probably a little of all of that. I think I tend to be a positive thinking person, but I worked really hard. I’ve read a lot of works from everything from Deepak Chopra to Wayne Dyer to obviously all the Chicken Soup stories are very inspiring to me because I read so many in order to write the books. So yes, I do read a lot, and I pay attention to what I’m putting in my mind. I deliberately don’t watch horror shows and negative things too much. I try to keep that positive. I begin every day with 15 minutes. I practice what I preach. Sit down in my quiet space with the daily reading book, prayer book, meditation book, whatever every listener has. I start every day that way to get myself focused. I get up, and I do 15 minutes of stretches, and I hit the floor. I put the coffee on. Start hit the floor and the stretches and do some of my physical stuff. A little bit on the weight bench. Don’t be too impressed because it’s a little bit on the weight bench. But then I grab my prayer book, and I spend the first hour of my day I spend preparing for my day.
Mike Domitrz:	What do you think is the number one mistake people make on this journey of trying to be more mindful and more aware?
LeAnn Thieman:	Taking time to pay attention. I think is important when we talk about writing. Sometimes when you look at … So I ask people to make a wheel, a circle and divide it into 24 little parts. Then write in how you’re spending your time. Until people really log it or just write down everything you did in a day. Do that for a week. Write down everything you eat a day for a week. You look at that a go, “Gee. Who did that?” I often say to people, “Who’s the boss of you? Who says how much you eat, how much you sleep, how much you play, how much you pray, how much you breathe, how much you laugh if you forgive?” We have a lot more power to choose and I try to empower people to make those choices themselves.
Mike Domitrz:	I love it. That is awesome. Is there a book or two that you just love to share with people and say, “Have you read this?” Or you’ve read it multiple times that we can share with our listeners and viewers so they can dive into it themselves?
LeAnn Thieman:	Well, honestly this isn’t self serving, but the one book I recommend the most to people offer except for me so much is the book I wrote called Balancing Life in Your Warzones. Each chapter starts with a bit of Operation Baby Lift, but then the end of every chapter is when I stopped to laugh in Vietnam. The chapters on laughter when I stopped to forgive the plane crash. That’s on forgiveness. So I recommend if people want to take care of their minds, bodies, and spirits, they tell me that’s a good place to start.
Mike Domitrz:	I love it. We might show a link to that for everyone listening right now in the show notes at EverydayMindfulnessShow.com. It’s on Amazon and we’ll have a link to Amazon then for that. Of course, we’ll have a link to your website so everybody can contact you.
	I want to thank you, Leann, so much for joining us on this episode.
LeAnn Thieman:	It’s my joy and privilege to be with you. Thank you so much.
Mike Domitrz:	Oh, my pleasure. For everyone listening and watching right now, remember to check out all of our brilliant cast and special guest at EverydayMindfulnessShow.com. Until next time, may you enjoy everyday mindfulness in your life.
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	Have a joyful, mindful week.

Key Takeaways:

[2:46] During the Vietnam War, LeAnn was thrown into the Operation Babylift project.

[9:35] LeAnn’s son is an All American Boy from Vietnam.

[12:34] Writing and expressing her emotions helped LeAnn to heal after the experience.

[15:25] CARE4ME is LeAnn’s process for helping her, and others, to stay mindful every day.

[25:17] Recommended Reading: LeAnn’s book, Balancing Life in Your Warzones.

Mentioned in This Episode:

Balancing Life in Your Warzones, by LeAnn Thieman

Books by LeAnn Thieman

100 babies lay three and four to a cardboard box, strapped in a gutted cargo jet. Saigon was falling — and LeAnn was caught up in Vietnam Orphan Airlift. Believing we all have individual “war zones,” LeAnn’s poignant yet humorous presentations and books motivate people to balance their lives physically, mentally, and spiritually every day. She Authored Chicken Soup for the Nurse’s Soul and Balancing Life in Your Warzones, Self Care for HealthCare plus 12 more Chicken Soup titles.