The Healing In Sharing
Welcome to The Healing in Sharing podcast. THIS is a space for brave, honest conversations about resilience, restoration, and the life-changing power of telling the truth about your story. Through heartfelt storytelling and meaningful dialogue, each episode opens the door for women to gently unpack their past, rebuild trust where it was broken, and rediscover the strength that has always lived within them.
This is a welcoming space where vulnerability is honored, growth is intentional, and healing is not rushed but respected. Together, we explore what it means to rise, to rebuild, and to step fully into the woman you were always meant to become.
Formerly I Need Blue.
The Healing In Sharing
When Your Body Forces You to Slow Down - Lindsey
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Lindsey Korell built a successful career by pushing hard, taking on more, and believing she could keep going.
Then a heart attack stopped everything.
What followed was not only physical recovery but also a deeper reckoning with the life she had created, the pace she had normalized, and how little room she had left for herself.
In this conversation, Lindsey shares what it looked like to rebuild from the inside out, rethink her relationship with work, and learn that rest is not something we earn after everything else is done. It is part of how we care for ourselves.
We talk about slowing down, creating structure that supports your life, recognizing your limits before your body forces you to, and what can change when you begin asking a different question:
Not “How much more can I carry?” but “What kind of life do I actually want to live?”
This is a conversation about wake-up calls, rebuilding, and choosing a way forward that leaves room for you, too.
Connect with Lindsey:
Connect with Jen:
🎙️ Subscribe to The Healing in Sharing
💛 Learn more: TheHealingInSharing.com
📞 Private listening support: Jen Lee Listens
📖 Book: Why I Survived 📖 Journal: You Are Stronger Than You Know
✨ Share this episode with someone who needs hope today.
The background music is written, performed and produced exclusively by Melissa Turri.
https://melissaturrimusic.com/
The Wake-Up Call Behind The Work
SPEAKER_00Lindsay Carell is a business owner, a former COO, and survivor who learned the hard way that you can't outwork your own limits. After a heart attack stopped her life without warning, she faced something harder than recovery itself. The realization that she had been running on empty for years and that the life she had built had no room left for her in it. That experience cracked everything open. And rebuilding herself first, everything else second changed how she thinks about work, rest, and what actually matters. Today, Lindsay shares what she has learned about facing a health crisis, that rest is not a reward, that structure is part of self-care, and that the life you want will not wait until you are ready to slow down. Lindsay, thank you for being my guest today, and welcome to the Healing in Sharing podcast. Jen, it's so nice to be here with you today. Absolutely. I am so glad that we were connected through a mutual friend. Um, you have a really valuable message to share today to women. Uh, we tend to overwork ourselves, get lost in the daily grind and kids, and schedules, and all of these other things. Um, and you are gonna share why we have to slow down and put ourselves first. And you abruptly realized that when you had a heart attack and you were forced to slow down. Take us into that moment real quick before we move into how you got some rest.
Denial And The Night It Hit
SPEAKER_01Well, first, that moment I was in complete denial uh because when that heart attack was happening, I was with friends celebrating pizza and sparkling wine and all the things that uh you don't normally do when you take good care of yourself. And I'm fit, I work out, and all of that, and I come home and in the middle of the night I'm woke up. The pain is it it you know, it's in my chest. If you've had a heart attack, you know it's like your breastbone is trying to snap itself out of your chest, and at that point, I'm healthy, I'm fit, I'm not overweight, I don't have heart disease, and I'm like, what the heck is this? This is terrible, this is terrible. The pain started going up my neck, and it ended up right under my jaw. And at that point, you realize you're in trouble. This is something that needs to be fixed immediately. I don't still don't know what it is. I'm still in denial. I have no idea that it's a heart attack because that doesn't even come into my thought process. I I own a business, I've got shit to do, I'm going. There's no room for a heart attack. What the heck? But I drove myself to the hospital, highly not recommended, and you know, got to go through the whole process of having the heart attack in the hospital and then staying in there for three days. And while I was in the hospital, I'm still in denial that this actually happened. Fortunately, I'm I am alive, I'm exhausted now. I was exhausted before, but now I am done, and there is no space, and all I can think about is how do I run my business? What is my business doing? There's nothing. I'm not there, there's nobody else. It's done. And then, of course, everything else comes in, how I'm gonna make money, you know? It's like it's that realization that not only did my body give me a wake-up call, but financially I'm getting a wake-up call too.
SPEAKER_00So when the doctor came in and said, You have had a heart attack, were you still in denial, or did immediately your brain go to no, no, I can't. I have all I have a schedule, I have all these things I need to do.
SPEAKER_01He's you know those whiteboards in the hospital, he's drawing a picture of a heart and he's drawing the artery on there, and he's telling me where it's broken, and it's like I can't even see it. I am so far up the Nile on that boat, you know. It's like, no, that no, that didn't happen. There, there's no way that this could happen to me. I I'm bit, I take care of myself, I tell myself I take care of myself. It it honestly took another week before I could actually say, Oh, it was a heart attack, and I believed it.
SPEAKER_00Wow. And it's one thing when you actually can say it, and it's a completely different thing, a foreign thing, when your behaviors now have to shift.
SPEAKER_01What did that feel like?
Recovery Rhythms And Business Safeguards
SPEAKER_01Even if you have a mild heart attack, it's exhausting. I am so fortunate that I owned my own business and I could actually take the time that I needed to heal. I found that I really only had maybe a one to two hour window each day that I could actually do something. You think before when you and I were talking, it's like I I would wake up at my normal time, 5:30, 6 a.m. I needed a nap by 9.30. I had to go back down for nap. And then I needed another nap at 2.30. So it's like when when your day is scheduled around your nap time, I thought, and there's no way I would ever think I would say this at my, you have to get really intentional about what's in your business and what are you doing during those very small windows that you can function well. And you know, look at is it is it business today? Is it grocery shopping? Is it something else? That is when, even though I had been putting those structures in place before I had the heart attack, it was driven home. That the structure needs to be there now, the contingency plans need to be there now, because these are things that you can't plan for. You absolutely can't plan for the heart attack, you can't plan for a car accident, you can't plan for any of those things. So those pieces already need to be in your business. If you're just starting out, you're just setting it up, these are things that you need to think about. It's like, where is this structure going to be? And AI is a gift to all of us that we can start putting some of these structures into place easily and relatively cheaply if we're just starting out.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so that's a really good point. The whole AI thing. I'm surprised at how many people um they don't use it or they're resistant to it for their own, you know, personal beliefs. But you are so right. Anything we can do to renegotiate, if you will, how we spend our time is valuable to us and our health. Now, I love pizza, wine, and naps. All good things, all good things. Yes, I took a nap Saturday and Sunday, and then I wake up refreshed. But it's so important to listen to our bodies. We don't listen to the little tap on the shoulder eventually. There's gonna be a big awakening and a big sign that says, Hey, you know what? It it's it's time. So you went into something extremely unfamiliar when it came to slowing down for a little while.
SPEAKER_01You know, when you have a major event, you go through that time where it's like, why am I even here? How am I still alive? Why am I still alive? Is there a reason I'm still alive? Having that time to actually think about okay, I'm still on earth because there's something I need to do. I'm here for the people that I need to be here for. And my priorities radically shifted around. You know, my my family is number one, you know, my friends, they're close second. The people that are important in my life, I I am much more intentional about the time that I spend with them and and the things that I do with them. And of course, taking care of myself, because that is I do not want to have number two. That is not gonna happen. So it's like just being very intentional about what it is, and then as you build your business, being intentional, how does this fit in with where I am, who I am, and what I'm going to do? Because if I am intentional about how I build this business, can I help other people build their businesses intentionally so that they can get out of it what they went into it for? I did not build a business to be controlled and ruled by it 180% of the time. I built a business because that'll that'll bring me money and that'll give me unlimited free time. Okay, so we're all delusional when we start. Most of us start businesses because we have a gift and we're amazing at that gift and we want to bring it to the world. And we get started on that, and then we realize oh, we have to do things that we don't love, like social media. That is one thing I do not love and I am not good at because I am an operations wonk, and I love doing that kind of thing. To do the marketing and the social media part, that's what AI is for. I'm gonna make that a do.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you can get burned out keeping up with social media and everything else. I completely understand. Um, you have said the word intentional quite frequently, and I love it. Big component of being intentional is being present. I have to imagine before the heart attack, being present meant you were there physically, but your mind was probably going in five different directions. And would you say now that with the heart attack, being present is you are actually present without the distractions?
SPEAKER_01Yes, I'm embarrassed to say that yeah, a lot of times I was thinking about what am I gonna say next, or oh my god, what do I gotta do next week? I was always that one, what's the next step? What's where's the next thing? Where's the next thing? And to have the gift to actually slow down and spend that time with your friends. My friendships have gotten so much deeper because I'm so much more intentional about calling them up and saying, let's go meet for a cup of coffee, or let's go have dinner. And before I wasn't that I wasn't that intense, it was time, it was a lot of time that I could be doing something else. I could be working on my business or creating something or getting smarter, or you know, the the the myth of you know sitting online to learn something, one more thing. I don't know if that makes me smarter anymore.
SPEAKER_00Oh, you go down the rabbit hole, I call it.
SPEAKER_01That's a plus and a minus for me for sure. But but just intentionally spending the time, the one-year anniversary of my heart attack just passed. That was last week. And I purposely reached out to a very dear friend to spend an evening with her talking about everything but the heart attack, but but life and where we wanted to go and and what we wanted to do and what we still wanted to accomplish in life. I don't know if I would have done that before. You know, I would have come in, it's like, oh, I've got an hour, let's have a quick bite, let's let's do that. And now it's like, I no, I really want to sit down and let's let's talk about things we agree about and things we don't agree about, and you know, how do we make this place a better place?
SPEAKER_00So
Presence, Priorities, And Real Time
SPEAKER_00I love that you had the conversation about accomplishments, uh, and it kind of leads me into another question, which is what was your purpose before the heart attack, and what was your purpose after?
SPEAKER_01They're still the same, but much different this time. When I started this business in January of 2025, it was to put space, specifically women's business owners. So my market is small business owners, you know, three to 15 million. They've got they've got a handful of employees and they've been in business for a while, but they're still on the hamster wheel, just churning it away. Um, they're like me, they're like, I'm the one that does the best about it, I know the most about it, I can do it the fastest, the easiest, whatever, right? My intention was there because my parents are older and I wanted to have a little more time to spend with them, or if they needed me, that I could go and take care of them for whatever they needed at that time. That was my intention in building this business. And I wasn't as intentional about building my side of the business. And then I had the heart attack, and everything that I had been saying about being intentional about where you put the structures in, it hit me like a ton of bricks. It's like, wait a minute, I have been helping people put structure in their business. Um, I've kind of neglected my business. I got that tap on the shoulder, two by four to the head, whatever you want to call it. It was like, this is what you're supposed to be doing. You're supposed to be doing it for your business so that you have that flexibility to go forward and help others when you are needed.
SPEAKER_00What a moment to have that realization of I'm helping others, but I have not helped myself. And in as women, especially, you know, we're caregivers and everything else, is a lot of times we're more comfortable in that I'm going to give, give, give rather than actually self-reflect and give to ourselves.
SPEAKER_01It's so true because it's like I have plenty of time to do it for me. Let me help you first. And then all of a sudden you don't, you're out of time. The first thing that I that I put in was is social media. It's still too dependent on me, but everything runs through through AI. It it is all done on Sundays, all of my posts are done, runs automatically, right?
SPEAKER_00So you found a way to streamline social media, which now gives you more time to focus on other things in your business.
Delegation Without Micromanaging
SPEAKER_00Share with me then how you work with women and help them discover efficient ways to run their business, allowing them to be more successful.
SPEAKER_01I help small business owners, uh, particularly women that are looking to put more space in their lives. Um, my typical business is like five to 15 employees. You've been in business seven, eight, ten years. I spend a lot of time really looking at what your day-to-day is. We do time tracking. Nobody loves time tracking, but spend time doing time tracking, and I figure out exactly where I'm not going to call it wasting time because you are probably very skilled at wherever you are wasting time, but where can we help you delegate to people that are already on your team, that are already very competent, already know what is going on with your business, and then make sure that we give them the permission so that they can actually do it. Because so often we delegate, but we don't give full permission, and then we come back and we micromanage. And that's not delegation. Um, uh, we'll teach you how to take a three-day break and then a seven-day break without your phone or your laptop, and and it might be terrifying for a moment, and you might love it. A big thing of my business is looking at owner dependency. You know, how dependent is your business on you. Just to put a fine point on it, if your business is dependent on you, then you're not growing, you're you're not going to be able to step out of it. And if you ever get to that point where you want to sell, it's going to be very difficult to sell if your business is dependent on you. I have a dependency, a short dependency quiz. It's called independentsnapshot.com, and that's independence with all ease. So you can find me there. But my company is daily principal, like the principal in your school, P A L.
SPEAKER_00Okay, thank you, Lindsay, for that information. If you have a business, I encourage you to go check out the Independent Snapshot, a short quiz to fill out. The first step to being successful is being aware of where your business is today. And Lindsay will help you dissect that and help you take steps. We, as business owners, need to let go of that perfectionism that we have as well. Do you know what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_01I have lots of conversations about getting from point A to point Z, and that there is nobody that is going to take the exact same path that you're going to take to get to point Z. Truly, as long as they get to point Z and it still meets your guidelines, your parameters, does it matter how they got there?
SPEAKER_00No, and that comes back to me. Just having like, okay, Jen, take take a step back and just let it go.
SPEAKER_01And Jen, what can you do with that time that you no longer have to do? Because I know there's so many more things that you can be doing that's working on your business and not in your business if you free up that time. And and yes, a lot of what I do is is psychology. I am not a psychologist, but sometimes I think I should be. But it is really talking through how do you let go? Because I'm guilty of it too. It's like I it's just faster, it's easier if I do it. If you start looking at, okay, so it took me 10 minutes to do it. 10 minutes today is fine, but let's start compounding that 10 minutes every single day. You know, how much time is that? What has that done for your week? That's six, that's an hour in a week, and then that's four hours in a month. If you start going out, that's how much time that you could be working on your business and not in your business. And that's a very 10 minutes, it seems like a very small amount of time for you to do something, but it it compounds and it adds up. And it's like if I can have get you to the point where you will delegate that 10-minute thing and give that person permission to screw up, because let's face it, they're not gonna do it the way you're you're going to do it. And that maybe looked at like a screw up in your mind, but it's gonna have to be one, you're gonna have to let go, and then two, I want to know what happens when somebody makes a big mistake. There's definitely the school of thought, you just get rid of them because they didn't listen, they didn't do whatever, they did it their own way, or Jeff Bezos actually had an employee that did this early on in Amazon. It cost him a small fortune, like $60,000, $70,000. This screw up was. And the first question to him was, Are you gonna let this guy go? And he was like, Are you crazy? This was the most expensive learning lesson ever. Why on earth would I give away that lesson when this person has made it? They have earned that, learned that lesson. No, leave them in there. It was expensive. We are keeping that person. That person will never ever make that mistake again. I was waiting for a client to come on and his assistant was on, and she was asking me, Do you like Zoom or do you prefer to be in person? And I'm like, I absolutely want to be in person because I want to know what you're doing with your hands. Because your hands tell me if you heard my message and if you're gonna do what I asked you to do. She she's like, Oh, you mean because I'm doing this underneath? And I was like, Yeah, you don't agree with what I just said, or you're not believing how I'm saying it because you are doing this, right? And she's like, Oh, that makes perfect sense.
Nature, Stillness, And Screen Detox
SPEAKER_00I love when people tell me about where they find their joy.
SPEAKER_01I love being outside. Uh, you know, I just moved. One of the reasons I chose the place that I moved to is it's right on the edge of a green belt. So it's like I am instantly in the woods and can easily get lost in there. Um, I grew up in Montana, I grew up out in in the mountains, and it is such a break for me to be searching for the bird. What bird call is that? You know, is that my favorite cardinal or is it something else? I love spiders. And I live in Texas, so you know, there's giant spiders like this. The that I don't know, I don't want to touch them, I don't want to carry them home. But I love to see the webs that they make because they're huge, right? And they got zigzags in them. It's fascinating because it's something I can't do, right? It's like my brain, I'm not that creative kind of sense. I'm numbers person, so to be outside and to actually. Actually, see the little things that are going on in the woods. Can you turn your brain off long enough from what we're doing every day to actually see what's going on in the world around you? And I use that as my step back and my break to just refill my cup. And then it gives me the opportunity to stand back in front of somebody and see what they're doing. I was waiting for a client to come on and his assistant was on, and she was asking me, Do you like Zoom or do you prefer to be in person? And I'm like, I absolutely want to be in person because I want to know what you're doing with your hands. Because your hands tell me if you heard my message and if you're gonna do what I asked you to do. She she's like, Oh, you mean because I'm doing this underneath? And I was like, Yeah, you don't agree with what I just said, or you're not believing how I'm saying it because you are doing this, right? And she's like, Oh, that makes perfect sense. I want to be in front of you, and that's that's how I recharge in the woods because I start noticing all the little things, and that gives me the ability to see that when I'm talking to you or when I'm talking to someone else.
SPEAKER_00I love going outside, stand there and close your eyes, and then allow your other senses to pick up what you hear, what you feel. Love to walk barefoot. I grew up in Michigan, like we didn't really wear shoes in the summer, you just ran around barefoot, it was great. Florida has different types of grass now, it's a little bit harder. But all of those things also play into your physical health, taking the time to close your eyes and just taking the beauty that's around you, ground yourself. Did you do these things then years ago, or was this just part of your shift now?
SPEAKER_01I grew up on a um, my grandparents had a dude ranch. So I grew up in the mountains on the ranch. Um, my backyard was the national forest. I had a horse and I had amazing grandparents that were pretty much like, good luck to you, come home. Um, but we and we had guests, right? So we had guests from all over the world. My granddad was uh this master marketer because their business depended on people coming, you know, to see the glories of Montana. And he was very good at bringing people from the East Coast and from Europe over to Montana to see, you know, how it is to be an urban cowboy or a city slicker. You know, I love that movie, City Slickers, because I so identified with all those people in there. You know, when you're a kid and you have a horse and you think you know everything, you you end up lost and you have to figure out how to get back home. Fortunately, your horse is always going to know the way back home, but it's like then you start really paying attention to which direction is the stream flowing, you know, which direction is there is the moss on. You know, so it's like you've you can figure out the directions where you are in the woods, but you learn that as a little kid because you actually spend time in stillness in the woods. If I can leave my phone in my pocket, then it takes me back to when I was a kid and my grandmother would help us identify each of the different plants. You know, this one is edible, this one is not. You know, rose hips are great for tea. I have that in my background, it's like putting it back into practice, and that creates the stillness in my heart and my body to calm back down. And I notice when I really get upset, if I can just walk back outside, and that's why I love my new place that I live in. It it literally is five minutes, and I am walking in the woods.
SPEAKER_00Stillness, wow, that is like a foreign concept to us because we live in such a fast world, like Amazon right, click, and I got it tomorrow. Um, and being able to disconnect from your computer, from your phone, from all of these electronics that have a lot of control on our schedule and our life.
SPEAKER_01I know what I'm about to say is I I truly understand it may not exactly be possible for for everybody, but I'm a huge advocate for it, especially as we get older and we're sitting in the sandwich generation, and we have kids that rely on us, maybe parents that rely on us, or let's face it, we have all volunteered for so many things to help our friends, family, community that we have a lot of pressures on us. Saturday and Sunday come, choose whatever two days it is, and I try very hard not to open my laptop. I mean, it gets to the point where it's like it's Saturday and I know I need to do something, and my laptop doesn't get opened again until Monday morning. Unless it's something like I'm planning another dinner party, so you know I put the plier together for the dinner party, but that is not business related. The electronics can come out for for something fun, for planning something fun, but it it is not allowed to just open up my computer and start working on Saturday and Sunday.
SPEAKER_00I did not realize how dependent I was upon my computer until a Saturday came and I said, I'm not getting on my computer. My body is like, well, wait, but you have all you could do this, you could do that, you could do and I'm like, Nope, I'm not gonna get on my computer. Did not know that I had almost that addiction, if you want to call it, to my computer. It was really weird.
SPEAKER_01And society says, that's great, that's okay. You need to be productive, you need to be learning. I mean, how many different things can can we get on and learn? Like masterclass. I love masterclass, you know, that's an addiction in itself. It's like, oh, I can learn Neil deGrasse Tyson's gonna teach me about the stars today. I can't wait to go do it. I really think that is fueling some of our health issues, is that we're spending too much time on the screen. My eyesight isn't as good when I've spent too much time looking at the screen because I don't actually make that practice of looking up and looking, you know, 30 feet down or 100 feet down or looking out the window and trying to identify something on the tree. I'm not doing that. And my vision is is getting worse because I'm not having enough switching going on with my eyes. And this is what we need to switch our nervous system. My opinion, of course, I'm a business person, operations, but my nervous system needs that switch just to decompress what is going on. And if you don't spend any time outside, if you spend a lot of time on your computer, you probably even don't even realize how tight you are or how bound up you are because you've been sitting, you haven't been moving, your eyes haven't been looking further down the road, metaphorically and physically, you know, and physically.
Friendship, Help, And Final Takeaways
SPEAKER_00You know, your health scare, the heart attack is what forced you to change your behaviors. Now, sometimes we're forced, but it's much easier when we are given the option of changing a behavior, right?
SPEAKER_01I I think that you know, having I have amazing friends. I am so blessed that I have that group. And because I've been so intentional with building those friendships, I I think I have doubled my friend group in the last year. And and you know, they've always been on the periphery, but it's like I have doubled the number of people that I can call, and I know they will be there, that they will come and help me. And I think as we grow older and we spend so much time focused on our electronics, that to have that opportunity to be able to reach out to somebody and ask for help, and it it gives them something too, because we need to help each other. That gives us such huge satisfaction being able to help somebody else. And and I don't think we think about it enough. When somebody asks me to help because they trust me, and if it's something that that I can do and I'm good at, it's like, oh my gosh, I can't wait to help you. I can't wait to go help you with my skill set. It's it it's a just a totally different gift back to me that I can help you. And I think sometimes we don't ask because we're afraid of imposing on each other and we forget about the gift that it gives us when we're able to help someone else.
SPEAKER_00Lindsay, thank you so much for being my guest today on the Healing and Sharing podcast.
SPEAKER_01Thank you so much for having me here on your show. It's so nice to talk about such a range of topics, and they all come together in how dependent your business is on you.
