Show Transcript

0:00:00 - (Bart Walsh): I found that my psychology was changing because I decided to not be the victim of something really horrible. The way I started to think changed. The way I started to feel changed. And then all of a sudden, my behaviors changed. And I look back on it now knowing what I know in the position that I am. And it was at that point I decided to make a choice to change my biology. Because when we start to think differently, we are physiologically firing new neurons in our brain to connect. We're creating new pathways in our brain.

0:00:36 - (Kevin Lowe): What's up, my friend? And welcome to Grit, Grace, & Inspiration. I am your host, Kevin Lowe. 20 years ago, I awoke from a life saving surgery only to find that I was left completely blind. And since that day, I've learned a lot about life, a lot about living, and a lot about myself. And here on this podcast, I want to share those insights with you. Because, friend, if you are still searching for your purpose, still trying to understand why, or still left searching for that next right path to take, we'll consider this to be your stepping stone to get you from where you are to where you want to be.

0:01:14 - (Kevin Lowe): What's up, my friend? How are you today? Welcome to episode number 229, friend. If you are not on my mailing list, I want to invite you to sign up today. It's my midweek pick me up, delivered to your email's inbox each and every Wednesday morning. It's my opportunity to take this podcast to another level, getting to send you a personal email right from me. I write every email in real time. No bots are involved.

0:01:45 - (Kevin Lowe): It's me sitting down to write a love letter to my audience. If you would like to receive this love letter, please sign up today at gritgraceinspiration.com/Insider or check out the link inside of today's show notes. Do you know one of the cool things about being the host of your own podcast is that you're the host of your own podcast. You get to make the rules. You get to do what you want to do. And today, ladies and gentlemen, I decided to stack the deck because I have an interview for you that is by far one of the most amazing interviews that I have ever done.

0:02:29 - (Kevin Lowe): This podcast is now some three and a half years old. We're at episode number 229, and yet I'm still being blown away by the people who I meet, the people who I get to have on this show. Today is nothing less than a pure gift. I got to sit down with a guy named Bart Walsh all the way in Australia. Yes, talk about some time differences. Aligning that schedule for us to record, but we made it happen. My interview with Bart Walsh is by far one of the most impactful interviews I've done.

0:03:11 - (Kevin Lowe): And it's because Bart is a man who has the most amazing story and he wasn't afraid to share the real bits of it all the good times and the bad. Because Bart, well, he's an amazing guy. He's had an amazing run as a gym owner, a fitness enthusiast, an amazing man, but he's endured the pains of life from loss, from life changing medical diagnosis, things that would bring people to their knees. But yet Bart Walsh, he's not given up.

0:03:52 - (Kevin Lowe): He ain't given up because he keeps pushing forward. My interview today. I pray that it touches you. I pray that something Bart says today leaves an impact on you like it did for me when I sat down to record this interview. Because Bart, he suffers from a life altering medical condition that's leaving his arms and legs useless. It's horrible. Yet when you listen to Bart, you can't help but be captivated by him in his power and his personality.

0:04:36 - (Kevin Lowe): And you can't help but think to yourself, how dare I feel sorry for him? How dare I think that I couldn't do it? Because you know what? That man is doing it. He's been through hell and back, and yet he is inspiring people like me every day. And, oh my gosh, I can't wait to bring it to you. Now, what's special about this and why I said I stacked the deck is because this week is big for me. It's big for this podcast.

0:05:09 - (Kevin Lowe): Because coming up on October 20, eigth in just a couple of days, is the 20th anniversary of the day that my life forever changed. That's the day that I became blind. It's the day that my life was saved with the removal of a brain tumor. Yes, it's been 20 years. And so when I knew that I had an episode coming up for this week, I knew I wanted it to be something really magnificent. I wanted to be sure that it meant something, that it would leave an impact like I hoped to do with my own story.

0:05:49 - (Kevin Lowe): And, well, I then met Bart Walsh and interviewed him and I realized that this was being saved for this exact week. My friend, turn up the volume, lean a little bit closer and enjoy today's interview.

0:06:11 - (Bart Walsh): I live in a state called Queensland, and I suppose the best way to relate this to you and your audience is queensland is probably the Texas of Australia. In terms of the states. Things are a little bit looser here. There's a lot of land. People drive a bit crazier up here. It's a great place to be, but I haven't always been here. I used to live in Melbourne, which is down south in Australia, and me and my partner lived in the city.

0:06:40 - (Bart Walsh): And we're deep in the heart of Know. There was hipsters everywhere, there was cafes everywhere. Melbourne coffee is quite profound in terms of its infamy and how good it is. So we were living that culture. But one day we sort of woke up and went, there is far too much cement here, there's not enough grass, there's not enough trees. And we decided to make the move up here. So we live in Queensland. We live in a place called the Sunshine Coast. Sunshine by name and sunshine by nature and sort of where we are. You drive five minutes and you're at the world's best beaches, and then you drive another five minutes and you're in the hinterland where it's just really dense, subtropical jungle. And we really love that dichotomy, that beach freedom, but also that bunkered down nature jungle.

0:07:31 - (Bart Walsh): We love that natural side of sort of where we live. And so I suppose Queensland north, Melbourne South and then Australia is enormous. If you haven't had a look at a map, it's huge. If you want to take a four and a half hour flight across the other side of the country into Western Australia, that's where you find Perth and Fremantle and stuff like that. So it's a huge place, mate, and I'm lucky enough to have lived at least in a couple of beautiful pockets of it.

0:07:55 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah. Well, that's incredible. Now, I was kind of curious growing up. Whereabouts did you grow up and what was kind of life like for you as a kid growing up in Australia?

0:08:07 - (Bart Walsh): I grew up in a place called Laceby. It's a place that no one will ever know because the population is about six and most of it is my family. But I grew up a country boy and so the nearest speed town to us was a place called Wangarata. Beautiful Australian town names. And the way I described my childhood is quite know. I had some beautiful, loving parents that were teachers that did everything they could to make sure that I was happy and joyful.

0:08:39 - (Bart Walsh): I had two older sisters and a younger brother. We got along really well. All of us have our heads screwed on the right way. And, for example, I didn't know what the word divorce was until I was probably about 17. Nothing about my childhood, I think I could be considered a bad thing. And because of that I learned some very strong morals and some very strong lessons from my father and my mother and the people that we were surrounded by.

0:09:04 - (Bart Walsh): But the beauty of growing up in a country town is that you have perspective, you have space. It's funny, a lot of my friends who grew up in the same town, they couldn't wait to get out of there and leave and do something else. But fast forward 10, 15, 20 years and they've all moved back. And I think that there's a great correlation between growing up in a country town and then retiring and having a family in a country town, too. So I'm really blessed to have that perspective, I think.

0:09:36 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah. Now amazing. Now, was this a country town? So I'm assuming not on the coast?

0:09:44 - (Bart Walsh): No. So in victoria, the northern part of Victoria, so the northern part of the southern state of Australia. It's a small little pocket. I'm trying to think what might be a United States sort of Midwest ish feel to it in terms of Australia. So down in Victoria that's my okay.

0:10:03 - (Kevin Lowe): Okay. I love now now, growing up as a kid, were you into mean we all have passions and hobbies throughout know for you growing know, did you have any hobbies or passions that, you know, were drawn?

0:10:24 - (Bart Walsh): Did there was sort of two that spring to mind that were the most powerful and influential. One was Australian Rules football. We call it AFL down here, which I still believe is one of the most beautiful sports in the world in terms of athleticism and flow. And it's very different to other sports out there. So I grew up playing that, almost worshipping it, watching all the pros play on the weekends and following my team.

0:10:50 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah, explain that to me a little bit. I've never heard of that. I've heard of we have football here in America. I've heard of rugby, but I've never heard of this.

0:11:00 - (Bart Walsh): No Aussie rules, football or AFL. It's a game played with a similar shaped ball to a gridiron or a rugby ball. It's just maybe a little bit more round. And it's a free flowing game. So you can kick that ball anywhere. You can handball that ball anywhere. The ground itself is about 100 and 7180 meters long and the shape of an oval. And the reason I love it is that it's free flowing. You start the game, there's no timeouts until quarter time or half time and three quarter time.

0:11:34 - (Bart Walsh): It requires an amazing amount of athleticism. You need to be strong and you need to be stable, but you also need to be enduring. And so during the game, the athletes, they run the equivalent of about 16 or 17 km, which is almost a half marathon every single game. So you got to have all of these athletic elements that's really hard to obtain, but it's a very dramatic sport in certain circumstances. So every weekend there's at least one game that the pros play, where it comes down to the last second and the crowd roars and there's this beautiful theatric connotation to it, which I really love.

0:12:15 - (Bart Walsh): And speaking of theatrics you asked other Hobies, right? My other hobby was acting, which is a really interesting juxtaposition to football and a really interesting thing for a young boy to be doing in a small country town.

0:12:30 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah, where did that the acting I mean, I can imagine sports you're a young boy, but acting where did that even come from, do you think?

0:12:40 - (Bart Walsh): I think it came from my grandfather on my mum's side, Brian. So when he was younger, he was actually the star of the local television station afternoon show. So every afternoon he had sort of a variety show that he did with a number of different characters, and he was dressed up as a sailor. He himself had a character. And so I think that the theatricality comes from that side of the family for sure.

0:13:08 - (Bart Walsh): Now that I'm a bit older, and I can sort of look back on why I like things and why I did certain things and partially reason of why I like Australian Rules football. I love occasions where people come together and feel something different. The atmosphere changes. It's a potential to change a paradigm. It's a potential to change a life. And everyone's feeling this OD feeling that they wouldn't get anywhere else because of that instance. And that's why I love live theater, because you can make people feel things and see things differently through an art or through an act. And I think it's hard to replicate that feeling in sort of any other medium.

0:13:49 - (Bart Walsh): So it definitely came from my mom's side. But I love that shared experience of emotion.

0:13:57 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah. Oh, my gosh, yeah. I love that so much. Incredible. Now I'm kind of curious because we talk about this and I'm thinking to myself, I can just picture this, and I can picture life as a kid. And you kind of painted this picture of this small town when life is kind of simple and we don't realize maybe how good we have it at the time, until, like you said, how seems like then people end up coming back around. Later in life, they return to hometown.

0:14:32 - (Kevin Lowe): But you, I would assume, maybe college age. Did you move away?

0:14:37 - (Bart Walsh): I did. So in Australia, we go through grade one through six, and then we go to secondary school and we do grade seven through twelve. And then after grade twelve, the world you always start. You can go to uni, you can get into the workforce, you can do whatever. And so I decided that life's pretty short. Let's get this university degree out of the way early. And I went straight to university, and I ended up following the theatric feeling in my gut.

0:15:07 - (Bart Walsh): My parents always encouraged me to do what I love, and they supported me on that. And so the day I came to them and said, hey, I want to be an actor. I want to go to acting school, they didn't give me the lecturer, but there's no money there. Maybe you should consider doing something else. They just said awesome. Hey, we support you. Let's get you there. And so it's similar in where you are, Kevin, but getting into acting school is a bit different to applying to a different university degree because you have to go in and do auditions.

0:15:37 - (Bart Walsh): Okay? They pick you for the course, you apply, but in the end, they pick the 30 or 40 people they take every single year. So there's sort of an emotional and practical investment before you even do the course. And I was lucky enough to get into an acting course, a three year acting course in another country town, a bigger country town in the south of Australia called Ballarat, an old gold mining town.

0:16:06 - (Bart Walsh): And yeah, I suppose the next three years at acting school were certainly very memorable. That's for.

0:16:15 - (Kevin Lowe): Mean that's that's really cool. So acting school, you're in college, did that go anywhere? Because the acting business, that's a tough industry. What happened following.

0:16:34 - (Bart Walsh): Then? Did a degree. And look, I think that there's a part of me, Kevin, that wishes that everyone did a part of an acting degree because you do some really strange things that, again, give you a weird perspective on life. You learn how to move again, you learn how to speak again. You learn the craft. You learn the craft, which really, if you break it down to it, is speech and movement. And every human can do that. So there's a part of me that really wishes everyone had a little bit of an exposure to that sort of.

0:17:04 - (Kevin Lowe): Woo woo.

0:17:07 - (Bart Walsh): Side of acting. But at the end of third year, you do a thing called a showcase. And that showcase is your lecturers and your university invite all the top agents from where we were in Melbourne to come and watch us showcase our wares. And if you're lucky, at the end of that showcase, you have a chat with an agent afterwards and then they put you on their and it doesn't happen very often. And I was lucky enough to get a pretty decent agent off the back of that.

0:17:38 - (Bart Walsh): And then sort of the games started, mate. We were going in for auditions for commercials, really strange commercials, lots of live theater auditions, TV auditions. And I was lucky enough to get on a few pretty decent gigs. There's a soap opera over here called Neighbors, which is akin to The Bold and the Beautiful, which I'm sure you're more familiar with.

0:18:02 - (Kevin Lowe): Yes, my grandmother knows it well.

0:18:07 - (Bart Walsh): And I was lucky enough to have sort of a three or four episode arc on that, which was pretty cool and a little role in an ABC show over here. But it's funny, you spend all this time working towards something and then when you start to get it, sometimes the expectation doesn't match with what's in your head. And filming doing TV shows and doing movies is great and some people it really works for, but I don't have the love for it.

0:18:38 - (Bart Walsh): And I didn't at the time either. I was trying to pretend I did, but I didn't. It's really boring. It's really artificial. You spend most of your day just sitting in a trailer waiting for your line, and then you got a two minute opportunity to execute that line the right way and then you move on. And there's something about that creative process that didn't link with me. And so I'm sort of glad I transitioned out of that the way I did.

0:19:07 - (Bart Walsh): But it's just funny sometimes how your expectations don't match reality. The dream. It's like never meet your heroes. Sometimes it's good to have that distance and that illusion, I suppose.

0:19:18 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah, absolutely. Well, I can't help but make a slight comparison. Just my brain is I thought, oh, my gosh, he found himself in American football, where they play a snap and then we do a commercial break and everybody sits on the sidelines for five minutes and then we get back up and we do another round. No, he wanted some Australian football and he wasn't getting it.

0:19:45 - (Bart Walsh): That's a great analogy. That's very true. I like the freedom, I like the flow. I don't like to be obstructed. That's great.

0:19:52 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Here you are in this thing that you've worked for and you're having success in it, but as you just explained, you're having these feelings that it's not quite what you thought. What do you do with that, then? I mean, what happens then?

0:20:16 - (Bart Walsh): Thankfully, I was still doing some live theater, some live Australian Rules theater, and so that sort of kept my spark alive. If you're an actor and you're not getting consistent work, you have to succumb to a lifestyle and lean into a lifestyle that's a bit different, it's a bit bohemian. And at the same time, I was really struggling with that because I didn't want to live for the next ten years, maybe having a show here and then not having work for a while and working at the supermarket in between gigs. I wasn't ready to make the commitment to live that lifestyle. So there was a couple of things working against me. I loved the live theater stuff, I loved that creative process.

0:21:05 - (Bart Walsh): Didn't really like the film and television stuff and wanted a better quality of life in terms of what I do between gigs. And so, to be honest, mate, I didn't really make a decision until a decision was made for me. And this sort of happened in 2014, so almost ten years ago now, and it was one hot Australian summer in Melbourne. I used to do a bit of volunteering for a youth leadership organization here, and we just finished a conference and we came off that conference, I was on the tram, and all of a sudden I felt a lump under my jaw.

0:21:44 - (Bart Walsh): And me being a typical 23 year old male, thought absolutely nothing of it. In hindsight, maybe not the best thought pattern there. And then within the next two months, that lump grew to the size of a baseball, so it was about 10.2 CM in diameter, and I knew something wasn't right. And so the first doctor I went to said, yes, that's not supposed to be there. Let's cut that sucker out and let's move on.

0:22:16 - (Bart Walsh): And then the night before that surgery, I got a call from his office saying, hey, the doctor forgot he had a day of leave. He's going on holiday. We won't be able to do your surgery. And I said, that's okay. I wanted a second opinion. Anyway, it seemed weird that we're not testing it and we're just going to cut it out. So I got a second opinion, had a biopsy, and the results came back is that that lump was a pretty aggressive sarcoma, a type of cancer, and it was diagnosed as a malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumor just under my jaw.

0:22:50 - (Bart Walsh): And so I didn't quite know how to comprehend that news. And I think in the end, I didn't comprehend it. And again, just like a typical 23 year old male, I swept that under the carpet and said, everything's going to be okay. Let's just plow ahead. And the choices were in front of me, surgery and then radiation therapy or alternative treatment. And so I listened to my doctors, and they said, the first step we need to do is to get it out. When it comes to this sort of cancer, we need to get it out and then do the radiation rather than do it the other way around. Do the radiation and then cut it out. Because it was growing so fast, they wanted to just get it out of there as fast as they could. I was about to go into a surgery, and they were telling me that the extent of this surgery, they said, look, we're going to have to take your jaw out.

0:23:34 - (Bart Walsh): And with that comes the bottom row of your teeth on your right hand side. We're going to need to take a bit of your throat. In fact, it looks like we're actually also going to need to take your voice box. And so here's a boy who spent the last three or so years in acting school honing his voice, honing his sharpening, his tools, per se, and then all of a sudden, it's going to be taken away. And in that moment, I remember very vividly, I got a notebook.

0:24:06 - (Bart Walsh): And for the next 24 hours, I wrote down every single thing that I ever wanted to say. And I filled that notebook in 24 hours. And I must have repressed it because I can't remember the absolutely profound things I'm sure I wrote in there, because within 24 hours, the doctors called back and said, hey, that thing about your voice box, don't worry, we found a way to operate. We can move around it. We can take a margin from somewhere else. It's okay.

0:24:32 - (Bart Walsh): And then, obviously, I'm speaking to you today. My voice box is okay. But once I heard that news, I threw that book out and never thought of it. But for those 24 hours, it was a really interesting mindset because I knew I believed at that point that there was going to be my last words were going to come up in the next week or so, and writing down every single thing that you ever wanted to say to anyone was strangely cathartic.

0:25:01 - (Bart Walsh): And then after that point, the surgery and the radiation therapy felt a little bit easier. And so they did the operation. They took my jaw out, they replaced it with a bone in my leg and tissue from my quad. And so if you look at me today, I've got a big patch of skin on the right side of my face, and I'm missing a lot of teeth, and my speech is a little bit slurred as well. And then after that surgery, which was quite major, I had six weeks of radiation therapy. And I think radiation therapy, psychologically was the worst part, because what they do is they make a mask of your face out of this really strange plastic material.

0:25:41 - (Bart Walsh): And every time you go into radiation therapy, you lie on the table and they pin this mask to the bed beneath you. It's so you don't move. Sort of looked like Hannibal Lecter in a way.

0:25:52 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah.

0:25:52 - (Bart Walsh): So every time you go into radiation therapy, which is every day, and you're getting it somewhere intricately on your face, they pin you to the bed, and then all of a sudden you get claustrophobic. You can't swallow. Right. You get really anxious, and then they beam radiation into your firm for X amount of time, and then you're up and leave. And psychologically, that whole process for six weeks was really tough. And the byproducts of radiation therapy are also very tough, both short term and long term. At the time, I was healing from a big wound in my leg. I was healing from a big wound in my face. But the radiation therapy brings on all these sorts of ulcers in your mouth, which makes swallowing really hard.

0:26:35 - (Bart Walsh): It changes your taste. So my perception of food was very different for a long time. And healing from the psychological wounds from radiation therapy and the physical wounds from this surgery, it took quite a time, I suppose. And so within the space of about four months, my world changed. Kevin at the time, I didn't know how to deal with it, but looking back on it now, I think I have a bit more of a grasp of what was going on with wisdom through age, per se.

0:27:08 - (Kevin Lowe): Wow. How did you get through it? Because, I mean, that not only just the treatment itself, not only just the surgery, but that, I know is just so taxing on your body, physically and mentally. How did you get through it?

0:27:25 - (Bart Walsh): I think I've boiled it down to one day. It was a time where I finished my radiation therapy. My body was healing enough that I could walk reasonably well. And I just said to myself that day, let's take a step forward and let's choose to not be the victim of this. And so what I then did was literally took a step forward and I walked. And then for the next must have been four, five, six weeks, I walked every day for about four to 8 hours. I'm an active guy. I like to move.

0:27:57 - (Bart Walsh): And because of that choice, I found that my psychology was changing because I decided to not be the victim of something really horrible. The way I started to think changed, the way I started to feel changed. And then all of a sudden my behaviors changed. And I look back on it now, knowing what I know in the position that I am. And it was at that point I decided to make a choice to change my biology.

0:28:24 - (Bart Walsh): Because when we start to think differently, we are physiologically firing new neurons in our brain to connect. We're creating new pathways in our brain. And the more we express that pathway, the easier it is for us to access that pathway. I always thought of decision making and mental health as sort of this non physiological thing. But the fact is, if we choose to do something and we express that positive choice, it makes it easier for us in the future to choose that again.

0:28:58 - (Bart Walsh): And so, because I made that simple choice years and years and years ago, I started to digest what was happening. And as I mentioned, I decided to not play the victim. I decided that I didn't want to just roll with the punches. I wanted to start punching back. And then from me taking that one step forward, I found this love of fitness. I always had a love of physicality and a love of fitness. And part of being an actor is looking a certain way.

0:29:29 - (Bart Walsh): And so I got into fitness to look a bit better, look more pleasing on the screen. But I never understood the power of fitness until I made this choice. And so walking for four to 8 hours every day for six weeks, all of a sudden turned into lifting weights. And then all of a sudden lifting weights turned into expressing my body through ways. The doctor said I couldn't express my body and I was feeling better, I was looking subjectively better. And because of that, my confidence was a lot better. And because my confidence was better, I found it easier to talk about this situation.

0:30:06 - (Bart Walsh): And that's always been and still is my downfall today. Being able to talk about tough things or things that I think only relate to me with someone else, I find really difficult because I don't want to burden them with this negativity and these morbid conversations. But because I was exercising, because I was changing my biology through these thought patterns, I found it a lot easier. And I think with a lot of traumatic experiences and I'm not alone here.

0:30:35 - (Bart Walsh): You never really fully work through them. You're always sort of understanding it and digesting it and working with it. There's never a finite point in my life where I'm going to go, I'm over that. Now that happened, I've fully digested it. That's not the case. And I don't think. That's good for lesson learning either. Whenever we encounter adversity, there's an opportunity to learn something and feel something new.

0:30:58 - (Bart Walsh): And if we either just brush it under the carpet or think that we're over it, we're blinding ourselves from future growth. And so when it comes to this trauma and working through it, mate, it's still an ongoing process. And it's the same with I know there's a lot of listeners out there that are struggling with some sort of anxiety or depression or some sort of mental issue, and it's a spectrum, and we all lie on that spectrum somewhere.

0:31:25 - (Bart Walsh): But if at some point we say, yes, I've fixed that anxiety, I'm good to go, I can guarantee you it's going to come back at some point. So, mate, it's a work in progress.

0:31:37 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah. And I can agree and understand wholeheartedly because literally earlier today, before we started this recording of our podcast interview, at some point today, I was standing in my kitchen. I think I was eating lunch. And I've been blind now for almost 20 years at the time of this recording, and yet I was standing at the kitchen counter eating my lunch and I had the thought process about my life, about the life that was.

0:32:19 - (Kevin Lowe): And in many ways, I compare it to a loss. Just like you. It was a loss. It was a loss of the life that you were living in. The same with me. It was the loss of my eyesight, the loss of what could have been. And just as you said, it's exactly what I thought was it's a loss. And it never leaves you. It gets easier with time, but it's always there because that hole in your heart and your soul, it's always going to be there. It's a part of us.

0:32:59 - (Bart Walsh): Absolutely. Yeah. I think we also need to understand that there are going to be periods where you are going to make lunch one day and all of a sudden everything comes crashing down upon you. And simply being aware that there's this great ebb and flow with life and understanding that that thing is going to come back and bite you at some point. Whether it bites hard or small, it's going to come back.

0:33:25 - (Bart Walsh): But sort of how you calm that thing down and how you deal with it and how you move on with the respect of it, that I think is really important.

0:33:37 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah, absolutely. So here you are. The fitness thing is really transforming your life. Was there any part of you that ever thought about going back into acting?

0:33:54 - (Bart Walsh): I wish I could say yes, but the truth is not really. And after this thing happened to me, this whole big thing, I changed, as I'm sure you yourself have changed as well, Kevin. And I think before this happened to me, I was all for the attention. I was doing things for the attention of others. And I look back on myself and it's not that I regret who I was, but I know that this situation changed me for the better. And all of a sudden I didn't want eyes on me.

0:34:30 - (Bart Walsh): I didn't want to be the center of attention anymore. And that might be due to some self esteem issues or self body image issues or something like that, but I didn't want that attention anymore. And then all of a sudden, my focus came to helping others and my vocation, my mission then changed from trying to be the star of a television show or a movie to wanting to help others, wanting to show them and allow them to feel what I have felt with the power of fitness and looking after your body.

0:35:05 - (Bart Walsh): That became my sole mission.

0:35:09 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah, I love that so much. So talk me through it. How does that lead you to go from there? I mean, where does that go?

0:35:22 - (Bart Walsh): Yeah, I decided that I wanted to be a personal trainer. I did my personal training certificates after my rehab from my surgery and radiation therapy. And there was a moment there because I was a pretty skinny guy. I had some speech issues at the time which I'm slowly working through. I had essentially a new jaw and a new way of walking. And I felt very self conscious about being in an industry that, let's face it, is a lot about aesthetics and how you look.

0:35:54 - (Bart Walsh): But I took the plunge and managed to learn all I could about being a personal trainer and for many years was quite a successful one. And I learned the industry, I learned the craft. All the while, I was exposing myself to every corner of the fitness industry, from Spartan races to weightlifting to CrossFit, to Pilates to bar classes. I loved all of it. And I sort of became fitness agnostic at that point.

0:36:23 - (Bart Walsh): I'm not tied to one style of fitness. I love it all. And so I decided that the only way for me to help more people other than the clients I was serving, was to get into management and by proxy, help more people by helping their trainers. And so for a while there, my role was to help trainers be successful in their own personal training business, which I found great joy from and learned a lot of lessons from.

0:36:51 - (Bart Walsh): And then once I sort of made the move up here to Queensland, the stars aligned and I became the head coach of Jets Australia, which is quite a large franchise down here in Australia. We're also in the UK and Netherlands and Thailand and Vietnam and New Zealand. So we're sort of everywhere. And I'm lucky enough now to be in a position where, again, by proxy, by helping the members directly or helping the trainers indirectly, where I have a platform where I can help a lot of people.

0:37:23 - (Bart Walsh): And I feel very grateful and very responsible for the position I'm in at the moment. But I wouldn't change it for the world. So I worked my way up through the ranks, I understood my craft, and I'm sort of sitting here today in a studio below our head office with a big smile on my face, 630 in the morning before anyone else gets in, and I wouldn't want to be anywhere else, so I consider myself pretty blessed.

0:37:48 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah, amazing. Now, roughly, timetable, how long has it been today since that diagnosis of the lump in your neck?

0:37:59 - (Bart Walsh): Yeah, great question. So there was a lot of follow up appointments with cancer specialists, so the diagnosis was in early 2014, February, so it's not nine years ago, thankfully, as far as we can tell, that the cancer hasn't come back, which is great. They said if it did come back, it would be in my lungs. I'm not sure how that sort of works. Every time I went to get a checkup, they always did an X ray of my lungs just to make sure there was no lumps in there or anything like that. But from the cancer point of view, everything is hunky dory, which I'm pretty chuffed about. Which I suppose from a fitness point of view is just another tick in the box of the beautiful adaptive nature of my body. Because I'm here now, nine years later.

0:38:46 - (Bart Walsh): I'm missing 12. My leg bone. I've got my leg bones in my jaw. My jaw is what was my leg and I'm functioning pretty well. So it's a testament to the medical system and the beautiful adaptive nature of our bodies.

0:39:06 - (Kevin Lowe): Absolutely. I love that. Now, as we continue, though, on this journey, at some point in time, though, something would happen and I'm going to ask you to fill in the gaps for me, because your medical issues would not be over.

0:39:24 - (Bart Walsh): No. Here's another side story for you, a side quest, if we will. Ever since I was 19, I noticed that my legs were getting skinnier just below the knee, so from my knee to my toe, and it always baffled me because I do a lot of exercise and I do a lot of leg training in particular, and nothing ever budged. And in fact, they're getting progressively smaller and smaller and smaller. And it wasn't until two years ago that I decided, all right, we got to figure out what's going on. I know there's something wrong here and I know deep down it's going to be progressive, but I needed to understand what was going on.

0:40:02 - (Bart Walsh): And being a fitness professional and seeing your legs the size of broomsticks, it's a whole lot of body image issues come flooding to you, a lot of self confidence issues. So I finally saw a neurologist two years ago. She was quick to diagnose a condition called Charco Marie TUS, or hereditary Motory sensor. Peripheral neuropathy. Got to love the beautiful medical terms.

0:40:25 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah.

0:40:26 - (Bart Walsh): And basically, that condition is an umbrella condition and it sort of covers a lot of genetic issues or genetic problems in a number of genes. And the condition itself mainly affects males, usually in the third decade of their life. So I think it's something to do with after puberty is fully finished, that's when you start to see the effects of it. And what it means is that I'm slowly losing the use of my peripheral nervous system.

0:40:52 - (Bart Walsh): And so it starts distally, so it starts right at the top of your toes and right at the top of your fingers. And then as you progress with age, those nerves just start to deactivate and start to start to waste away. And so if you look at me today, you can notice it. My shins are the size of broomsticks. My quads are quite strong because they're compensating for the lack of musculature, and I can't really feel anything below my knee. And so the prognosis of this condition is hard to tell.

0:41:24 - (Bart Walsh): It's progressive, so it'll continue to get worse. My balance is very poor, and I can tell because as I do a lot of exercise, I'm beginning to see balance issues in the way that I exercise, and they're progressively getting worse. And the condition will progress to a point. To what point, it's hard to tell. Some people who have this condition either have to wear stints on their legs or perhaps move in a wheelchair.

0:41:51 - (Bart Walsh): So there's a point in my life, I know, within the next five to ten years, where I'm going to need some sort of support just to walk around, and what that support is, I'm not sure of. And it's also included stuff like driving. So I'm starting the process of getting hand controls in my car so I don't have to use my feet, because it's quite dangerous not being able to feel your feet and operating pedals.

0:42:17 - (Bart Walsh): I knew it was coming. I knew there was something wrong with my body aside from the cancer, but I didn't know it was this. And so, just like with being diagnosed with cancer, I know I'm still dealing with this news, even though I like to think that I'm on top of it, but I know I'm not. And what sickens me the most is the thought of me losing my physicality makes me sick to my stomach, because that's my identity, that's my income, that's my vocation.

0:42:49 - (Bart Walsh): Fitness is what a fitness. And spreading the power of fitness and the knowledge of fitness is why I'm put on this earth. And the thought of losing that is unthinkable to me. And so I know as years pass and I digest this condition a little bit more and we notice the degradation of this system, of this condition, I know I'll adapt and I'll know I'll understand it. But in terms of dealing with that process, I'm still very early on, because.

0:43:22 - (Kevin Lowe): It'S like right now, you're losing the thing that healed you, the thing that saved you, was the fitness. The thing that propelled you into this new direction out of cancer. And now the cruelty of life is trying to take it from you very slowly. But of course, in time, you'll remember, though, that the body's only as strong as the mind. And you'll come to a point, just like you did before, when you'll realize that you can keep going and you can keep making an impact maybe even greater than you have because of what you've gone through and what you're going through and what you're showing to people that it can't stop you.

0:44:14 - (Kevin Lowe): It only brings out new, amazing parts of you. And listening to your story, I can tell you one thing that Bart Walsh is not going to be stopped by his physical body because you got the power of your mind that has gotten you to where you are today. And I think that's a pretty darn amazing thing.

0:44:35 - (Bart Walsh): Thanks, Kevin.

0:44:36 - (Kevin Lowe): Now, we've talked a lot about your career side of life, but you're also a family man. You've got a wife and a kid. Talk to me a little bit about being a dad, being a husband.

0:44:53 - (Bart Walsh): I have a lot of friends that have just became dads, myself included, and all of them have in the past said the same thing. Oh, it changes you. It changes everything about you. And I never fully understood it until it happened to me. And I used to suffer because of my past. I used to suffer from a lot of anxiety and a lot of mental thought process and issues. And as soon as he came along, that all stopped because my perception of what's important and my perception on the world changed fundamentally. Because as bad as it sounds, nothing matters but him.

0:45:34 - (Bart Walsh): Nothing matters. Those small little things I used to stress about, I don't stress about them anymore because it's totally irrelevant to his welfare and his happiness. And I love being a dad because of that perspective and because of what they teach us. They teach us this other side of patience. It's incredible. And my wife, Jane, she watching her raise. This little boy has just filled my cup so much.

0:46:08 - (Bart Walsh): She steps up to the plate every single time and doesn't complain. And I know she's not the only mom out there that does that as well. Our little boy just turned one. I think two weeks ago. He's just started to walk. He's weaning off his milk. He's eating more solid foods, his personality. He's not just a little potato. That's just goo goo gagas now. He's a human. He's a little boy. That whole process went so fast. But I'm enjoying that process so much again, not just because of him, but because of what he's teaching me and what perspective he's giving me on the world. Mate, I love being a dad.

0:46:50 - (Kevin Lowe): Oh, man. Talk about just like the circle of life where you give life and then he reminds you about life. This child that you've created is now there to remind you what living is.

0:47:13 - (Bart Walsh): That's very true. He means a lot to us, not just because of who he is, and I think I don't share this story very often, Kevin, but he's actually our second child. We had a beautiful little boy about a year and a half before we had Lysander, and his name was Aurelian. He unfortunately passed away about 30 minutes after he was born, so we went through an entire journey with him. At the 20 week scan, we knew something was wrong and the doctor sort of gave us a choice to finish his journey there or to see his journey through.

0:47:51 - (Bart Walsh): And obviously we chose the latter. And so from the 20 week mark to the 36 week mark to where he made it, we knew his chances of surviving were very slim, but we wanted him to have his own journey and we wanted him to see his journey through. And we're lucky enough to say that we got to meet him. He got to meet his mum and give her a little kiss and got to meet his dad and give me a little cuddle before he very gently passed away afterwards.

0:48:21 - (Bart Walsh): And so Lysander, our one year old, who's with us at the moment, you can tell that there's a little angel on his shoulder. You can tell that there's some esoteric energy that's guiding him and looking after him. And I grew up Catholic and so I've always had an understanding of this omnipotent presence of God or the universe or whatever you want to call it. But again, I never understood its real power until this whole journey happened.

0:48:53 - (Bart Walsh): So being a father to me is so much it's so important to me, and to be a good father is even more important. But it's only exemplified by the journey we went through. And I want to say as well, I don't share this story too often, only because as soon as I do share it, I know it can trigger a lot of things for a lot of people. And my recommendation is, if you have gone through some sort of situation like this or you're dealing with a situation like this, the best thing that I have done is to learn how to talk about it and learn to talk through it.

0:49:32 - (Bart Walsh): And it might seem really petty, but it takes me back to the start of our conversation, Kevin, where as soon as we start doing a new pattern, it becomes easier to do that pattern because our brain is changing. And if we can come to terms with telling this story when appropriate, and everyone has a totally different story, the better you get at telling that story and the better you get at digesting and working through that story, mate, I love being a dad to two beautiful little boys.

0:50:04 - (Bart Walsh): I am jazzed for the rest of my life because of that experience that's happened to me, man.

0:50:10 - (Kevin Lowe): I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for you being so willing to be so open, so real, so raw to share something so personable. Your journey is like so many. It has the ups and it has the downs. And when you share stuff like that, I can't help but just hope and pray that that right person, that right Father. That mother is listening today and they can be reminded that I'm not the only one, that I can find comfort in knowing that here, this guy on this podcast today has been there.

0:50:57 - (Kevin Lowe): And right now he's given me a little glimmer of hope that there is light on the other side of the darkness. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. Bart, I just want to thank you for sharing your entire journey with me and my audience today. It means the world to me, and it's a true honor to have you on my podcast.

0:51:23 - (Bart Walsh): No, it's my pleasure, Kevin. Thank you for having me.

0:51:26 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah, absolutely. Bart, for anybody who wants to follow you, I don't know, do you do social media? Do you have any resources, anything podcasts of your own, anything that we could direct somebody to? And of course, any of that, I will be sure links are put in the show notes.

0:51:48 - (Bart Walsh): Great. Yeah, you can follow me up on Instagram. I'm not very good at it, but I'm on there a little bit. Walsh fit walshfit. And if you're keen to level up your fitness and learn a little bit more about the philosophy we're trying to teach here at Jets Australia, have a listen to the personal best podcast powered by Jets Australia. It's a two times a week podcast. We touch on subjects that are very applicable to people going through common fitness and health issues, and we like to do it in a pretty lighthearted way. Me and my co host, Jacob, we have a lot of fun, but there's some really great applicable information that you can find on that podcast. Personal best powered by Australia.

0:52:31 - (Kevin Lowe): Amazing. We don't have to just end it here. We can continue to have you in our ears in our life, because once we get a little bit of you, we want some more of you because you're an amazing man.

0:52:45 - (Bart Walsh): Nice.

0:52:46 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah, dude. Thank you so much. And for you listening today, I know today's interview, maybe it has you kind of got the emotions going. Maybe at one moment you're smiling, the next moment you're tearing up. And you know what? That's awesome, because that's life. And that's how life is. And getting to have an interview like this today, to get to share it with you. That's why I do this podcast, is to bring you people that are just like you, to remind you that you're not the only one and to be that glimmer of hope on a dark day.

0:53:27 - (Kevin Lowe): To remind you that if they can do it, So can I. My name is Kevin lowe, host of Grit, Grace and inspiration. It is your turn to get out there and take on the day!