Kate Eckman - Television to a Vision For Life

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In today's episode, our guest is Kate Eckman. Her mission is to see the people truly she's with, whether her best friend, her parents, niece, or a stranger at the coffee shop. She feels that everyone needs to be heard. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">[0:55]</span> <strong>When you go back to stages in your life that became important to you, did you experience some form of that?</strong></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I had a forward-thinking profession. For 17 years, I was a professional swimmer. As a result, I grew up to be a jock. I used to be an athlete. Since I was excelling, I felt pretty well-regarded as an athlete. People notice you when you're good at something, and they want a bit of it. So what if you're not the champion? What about when things aren't going too well? And I've seen that in several customers or colleagues who were professional players before their careers ended. </span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">[2:29] I believe that we all make decisions that aren't necessarily in our best interests, depending on who we are. We can get dragged into social norms we don't believe in, and I haven't done so. And I guess it's perplexing for some people that I don't make the same choices as anyone else.</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">[3:52]</span> <strong>How did you kind of transition into what you do now?</strong></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I lost not one but two dear friends to suicide. And one of them was my ex-boyfriend. One was a best friend with who I was romantically involved on and off for ten years. So really, two of the loves of my life, and to call it a wake-up call is such an understatement. And I found myself in the middle of time square one morning, having a massive panic attack about six weeks after Sam died and just overcame with grief hadn't allowed me to fully deal with it because I had work to do and money to ma