A Feature Years in the Making
I’m honored to share that my story was recently featured in Formidable Woman, that traces the path from a single, life-altering accident to founding The Look Up Mindset Podcast. If you’ve followed my work as an author, TEDx speaker, or podcast host, you’ve heard pieces of this story before. But seeing it laid out from someone else’s perspective, someone who took the time to really listen, hit differently. Here are a few of the moments the article captured, along with why I still tell this story every chance I get.
“I Call This My ‘When All Balls Drop’ Moment”
The article opens with the accident that changed everything: while taking out the trash in Hudson Valley, New York, in my early thirties, a thousand-pound tree limb fell forty feet and broke my C7 vertebra. That alone would have been enough to upend a life. But the timing made it so much heavier: the accident coincided with discovering my husband’s infidelity, and together they forced me to walk away from a successful marketing and PR career in the travel industry.
“I call this my when all balls drop moment.” — Heidi Siefkas
What the article gets right is that this wasn’t a single loss, it was a convergence of losses: my health, my marriage, and my career, all at once. And that convergence is exactly what pushed me to rebuild my life intentionally instead of trying to restore the one I’d had before. It was the basis of my first book, When All Balls Drop—The Upside of Losing Everything.
A Second Heartbreak, a Deeper Resilience
The piece doesn’t stop at that first accident. It also walks through the loss that tested me even more: in December 2022, while I was living on Maui, my partner Brian Treptow, a medevac pilot and my soulmate of twelve years, was killed when his aircraft went down in the Pacific Ocean during a rescue flight. This loss proved even more impactful than the trauma that came before it.
“The tree taught me resilience.” — Heidi Siefkas
That line means more to me now than it might have a decade ago. The tree was the first lesson. Brian’s death was the one that made me actually live what I’d been teaching.
Turning Pain Into the Look Up Mindset
The article traces how those two experiences became the foundation for what I now call the Look Up Mindset: choosing perspective, staying present in the moment, and actively looking for the upside in situations I never would have chosen. Formidable Woman also highlights the very real, very unglamorous tools that got me there, community support, journaling, reflection, therapy, and mentors who’d survived their own hard chapters.
“Nobody gets through this thing called life alone.” — Heidi Siefkas
That belief is also why The Look Up Mindset Podcast exists. The article describes it well: a show built around true stories of resilience and life transformation from people across every kind of background, from Pamela Reader’s account of surviving the Maui fire to Dr. MBK’s journey through immigration and building a career from scratch. If you have a story of your own, the article even points out that I’m always looking for more guests through the submission form on my website.
Stories Matter, and So Does What’s Next
One of my favorite lines from the piece is one I say often, because I believe it completely.
“Stories matter. Stories connect us.” — Heidi Siefkas
Formidable Woman also looks ahead to where this work is headed: speaking engagements and a continued focus on helping individuals and leaders build real resilience, not the Instagram kind, using both personal experience and research.
Read the Full Feature
This post only scratches the surface. The full article covers even more of the journey, from the TEDx stage to the podcast mic, and it’s worth reading in its entirety.
👉 Read the complete feature on Formidable Woman:
Heidi Siefkas, TEDx Speaker and Host of the Look Up Mindset Podcast — Formidable Woman
And if this story resonates with you, or reminds you of your own “when all balls drop” moment, I’d love for you to subscribe to The Look Up Mindset Podcast and share it with someone who needs it today.
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