Episode 30: Nancy Steiner: You Can Decide Who You Want to Be
Nancy Steiner had a successful career in network news and as a documentary film producer. But after a near-fatal health crisis, Nancy took stock – was she really doing with her life what she was meant to do? She decided to become a certified Life Coach, helping others to do their best and succeed at their chosen project. Nancy takes us through the process of her transformation into a Life Coach, what that means, who she works with and how she helps them. But she also talks about her exciting years as a news producer for The Today Show, when she worked with Katie Couric to bring to the public facts about colon cancer screening after the death of her husband. Couric’s and Nancy’s brave broadcasting of their own colonoscopies have encouraged others to be screened and so have saved many lives.
Nancy also shares how she and her second husband have blended families, bringing step-children and even ex-spouses into the fold. Nancy has a remarkable approach to marriage and relationships that benefits everyone, especially children.
Topics include:
Life behind the scenes in the fast-paced world of network news, especially when a catastrophic event of historic proportions occurs.
Why colon cancer screenings are so important: If you are screened, you are saved.
Nancy’s work and “The Couric Effect:” How The Today’s Show segments on colon cancer have saved lives.
The near fatal health crisis that brought about a reassessment of life purpose and goals
The road to becoming a life coach through certification
The difference between coaching and psychotherapy
Divorces and blending families
The importance of putting the children first
Resources:
Nancy’s article for Maria Shriver’s newsletter
Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching
Guest Bio:
Nancy Steiner comes to coaching by way of a career as a journalist and as a wife, mother and stepmother of a blended family with five children. She is a life coach certified by iPEC, the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching. In addition to individual clients, she is a mentor/coach at The Harvard Business School, where she helps student entrepreneurs. She is also coaching a group of women ages 60-plus seeking comfort and joy through a safe and supportive place.
For 38 years, she focused on producing documentary films and non-fiction network television. She has produced profiles about civil rights activists and organizers, performing and visual artists, writers, politicians – essentially, people whose lives offer stories from which others can benefit.
Transcript:
Betsy Bush:
My guest today is Nancy Steiner. Nancy had a long, an exciting career as a network news producer, traveling the world and working on stories that had an impact on people's lives. Perhaps most famously, she worked with Katie Corick on the today show to bring the message of colon cancer prevention to millions of viewers. Then there was a moment when she decided that her next version would be as a career and life coach. And I wanna hear all about that Nancy Steiner. It is so great to have you on the latest version. Welcome.
Nancy Steiner:
Thank you so much, Betsy, for having me. I'm really excited to be here with you.
Betsy Bush:
Oh, that's great. I have to say I would've loved to have had a career like you had, although looking back on it, it sounds very intensive. A lot of traveling, a lot of high pressure situations, which not everyone can deal with. I think myself included. So what was that like to have that kind of exciting career in network news? When network news was really the top of the game?
Nancy Steiner:
Well, it was fantastic. And I have to say that almost every single day I was there. I felt so lucky to be there. I never felt like it was work. I felt like it was fun. I adored my colleagues that that particular time that you're referring to at the today show, we had an amazing group of producers and we had tons of fun together. We did travel the world together. The pressure was unbelievably intense, but you know, when you're young, don't think about it that much. Yeah. I just felt like, I can't believe they're paying me to do this <laugh> and there were times that were very, very challenging and terrifying, but you get through them and it really helped me. It helped me with parenting. It helped me with the rest of my life in terms of organizing things and knowing that every day is gonna bring me things I never expected.
Betsy Bush:
You know, I, I joke with my guests and sometimes with my listeners that the nice thing about a podcast is it's not live radio because I find live for radio live broadcasting. Terrifying. Can you remember any moments when I'm sure there were many, right. You're on the air or you're not ready or something.
Nancy Steiner:
Well, here's a funny one sort of <laugh> just to give you a sense of the pressure. So at the today show, I don't know if this still happens, but at the today show, there was a rotation called set writer that each of us had to be on the, this rotation. And that meant that for one week, every couple of months you had to take the 5:00 AM shift and be in the office in case any news broke mm-hmm <affirmative> and you had to shift guests, rebook people, you know, and get new guests. So it was my turn to be set writer. And I had always said to my boss, please don't ever give me any story about NASA because the space program is just not anything that I'm interested in. And I'm sure there are lots of other NASA producers who would love that opportunity.
Nancy Steiner:
And I also said, please, Don ever give me anything that has to do with fashion. <Laugh> because fashion on television to me has always been kind of weird and awkward, and I never wanted to do that. I was very committed to the ideals that I had and the stories that I wanted to get done. So one day when I was set writer, I walked to check out like sign out in my boss, his office and say, see you tomorrow. And he said wait a second. There's a launch happening. Let's watch the launch. So I said, okay, you know, I had my, literally had my bag with me to go and sure enough, the shuttle blew up.
Betsy Bush:
I remember that day. So, well, I can imagine everything. The news studio just blew up and everything changed in a moment.
Nancy Steiner:
Right. And he turned to me and he said, I need the history of the space program and in two and a half minutes for tomorrow morning. And I thought, why a minute you have 22 producers out there and I, you can't argue. You can't say what <laugh> no, you can't say no. So I had to then put my bag down, go back to my office and head down to the editing room. And I stayed for complete another, you know, 24 hours mm-hmm <affirmative>. So I had been there since 5:00 AM. Don't forget that part. Right. And I had to look at every single launch that had existed in order to do the history of NASA. You have to know which are the most important launches to include. So in order to know what the most important watches are, you have to look at all of them. I was in the editing room with my editor up until I wanna say three minutes before air getting this thing done and we got it done. But that was the worst.
Betsy Bush:
It's a young person's business. Would you say being able to you pull an old minder like that?
Nancy Steiner:
And yes, because if I had to do that today, I would really definitely need a nap in between. I don't know that the nap would've been productive because I had no time to get this thing done. But for that story, Betsy, there are at least I'm sure 10 others. I could tell you where I don't know why I never missed air. I don't know how it happened. I never did. I prided myself on always making air or always getting the person booked that nobody else could get that kind of stuff, which is very inside baseball and silly. But I also was committed to doing the stories that I really cared about. Live breaking news was my least favorite component of television news. And I tried to Finese my life there so that I could do longer format, more thoughtful and planned stories and series.
Betsy Bush:
But some people really thrive on that adrenaline rush you get with live news and the right.
Nancy Steiner:
I was not one of those people. I was one of those people who had to keep a list with me at all times of what I needed to do. If news broke call the satellite guy, call the woman, you know, in graphics, make sure that the other networks weren't chasing down the same people. I was chasing down, make sure that I was getting the footage from the library that I, you know, every single I had a checklist and it was, I, it had, I had it in my wallet. Yeah. It was never without it. And that's what it meant to be on top of live news.
Betsy Bush:
Wow. Do you think things have changed a lot since that time?
Nancy Steiner:
Yes. I think that, well, I don't wanna sound like, you know, <laugh> one of those people, I don't wanna be that person. Who's like, well, when we did it, it was so much better, but there were stories, you know, that we did that would never show up now. When I was at the today show, at one point we were broadcasting from Rome and I did a five minute story on Leonardo DaVinci. I did another five minute story on the sculptor, Henry Moore. The today show was like life magazine in its heyday. We were really trying to give an intelligent, sophisticated, enjoyable meal to you every morning that was laced with, you know, cutting edge news and guests who were brilliant and thoughtful and really had something to contribute to the national dialogue.
Betsy Bush:
And let's talk about your time when you were with Katie Corak it was really groundbreaking. This discussion of a type of cancer that was almost never mentioned because it involved a body part that nobody wanted to think about. But her husband, Jay had died at a very early of colon cancer and she was on a tear to raise awareness. And a lot of things happened on the today show air that informed millions of people about this type of cancer. And I think you played a special role.
Nancy Steiner:
Okay. So what happened was before Katie's husband, Jay had colon cancer, her boss, Jeff Zucker, who was 34 at the time mm-hmm <affirmative> had colon cancer. Wow. So Katie was already familiar with how colon cancer can ravage your body, how it can really, you know, how it can kill you. And so when Jay got it, it was particularly brutal for Katie because now the two most important men in her life had been afflicted with this horrible illness. And yes, she was on a tear has remained on a one ever since to educate people about proper screening for colon cancer, because <affirmative> in the words of Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing mm-hmm <affirmative> you never have to get colon cancer. If you are screened, you are saved. So anybody unlike breast cancer or lung cancer or any other major cancer, you can save your life just through screening.
Nancy Steiner:
And very few people at the time, Katie did this work, which was in, started in 1999. Very few people knew about that. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> nobody really understood that a colonoscopy can save your life. That it's one stop shopping. You go in, you get screened. If they see a pile up, they take it out. Bingo, bang, you are alive. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. And if you don't get that screening, you can die. Yeah. And colon cancer is really significantly fatal. It's the number two cancer killer. Wow. And most people don't realize that over 52,000 people die every year. Wow. Because they weren't properly screened.
Betsy Bush:
That's like a thousand people a week.
Nancy Steiner:
Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So Katie decided that for people to understand this, she would go on national television and have a colonoscopy herself. Hmm. And she called me, I was at home. I had left NBC two years early and actually Jeff Zucker called me her boss and said, will you come and do this with Katie? And I said, absolutely sure. I was at the time working for a documentary company. And I took a leave of absence and produced Katie's colonoscopy. And because so many people saw it, she changed the course of the illness and the journal of American medicine to this day, call it the ke effect because she told America, get screened and save your life.
Betsy Bush:
That is incredible. What a worry, what a story.
Nancy Steiner:
Well, it really resonated for me. And here's why I discovered during the course of the production of the first series, I ended up doing a couple of them, like three. I think that my grandpa died of colon cancer at 52. And my mother had always called it rectal cancer. And I didn't even know that that was part of like where your colon is. I don't think I really ever thought about my colon until I <laugh>
Betsy Bush:
Few of us do actually. <Laugh>
Nancy Steiner:
Right. And so, but anyway, I thought, okay, so my grandpa was 52. I'm 41. I think I was. And I better get screened and sure enough, because you should get screened 10 years earlier than your relative who may have had colon cancer. So if your mother was 50,
Betsy Bush:
It's highly hereditary, right. It does run in families, very her
Nancy Steiner:
Hereditary. Very. So if you have an immediate relative who had colon cancer, you need to be screened 10 years before the age of the person who had it. So I got screened and sure enough, there, it was a pre-cancerous poly, it was removed and you can make a case that I could have died because you don't know when you have a poly. Right. That's it. It's
Betsy Bush:
Not like you feel it that's it.
Nancy Steiner:
And then I did another series for her where somebody's life had been saved from having seen Katie's colonoscopy. Wow. So we did that story. He was fantastic. He was a teacher out in long island. He was wonderful. And it was work that I was very proud of. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>
Betsy Bush:
And I guess we could mention that it isn't necessarily easy to get screened for colon cancer. I think we can just, we can say this now and then kind of move on because it is a fairly, you know, you need to have health insurance to get screened because it's a procedure where you prep for it and then you're yeah. Put under anesthesia and it's a high tech sort of thing. And if you don't have insurance that will cover it. You're very unlikely to have the preventive men. And, and I think it's, it's a real track covered
Nancy Steiner:
Much more now than it ever was. Yeah. When Katie did it. And then I discovered I had this polyp, she asked me if I would have a colonoscopy on the today show live, hers was taped. I said, I had to get screened again because of my precancerous pop. So I said, I would, and I did. And I wanted people to understand that you don't have to be Katie Kerick to afford a colonoscopy and get one mm-hmm <affirmative>. And it's not as bad for me anyway, is going to the dentist. You know, so many people, people have this terror of having colon cancer screening and it's because they put you, you know, they give you this lovely medicine. <Laugh>, it's not painful the prep the night before. Isn't fun, but it's a hell of a lot better than having colon cancer. Yep.
Betsy Bush:
Yep. So you had a, after you left network news, you went on to a documentary film career, right. And then you had an aha moment if I can call it that, was it surrounding this moment when you made this discovery of your own potential illness, or tell me about that.
Nancy Steiner:
What happened was I worked for about 15 or more, I think years at a company called cohart productions and produced series. And one-offs for cable ventures, mostly HBO and then PBS and Bravo. And I had a lot of fun there. And then what happened was I had done a number of pieces outside of Kohar productions for the council on foreign relations, which is a global think tank. And I did pieces on global diplomacy. And after doing 52 of them, at one point I was trying to move a televis forward and my colon ruptured out of nowhere. Wow. It broke, oh my God. After I, I had had diverticulitis, if people don't know dive diverticulitis is when you have little pockets in your colon and they get infected. Mm. And when they get infected, they're very, very painful. And so normally you get put on antibiotics and it's cleared up only my D diverticulitis wasn't responding to the antibiotics.
Nancy Steiner:
It was an acute case. So I had to be hospitalized. And while I was in the hospital, my colon broke. Wow. And there was an sepsis right next to it, knocking at my door, said that sepsis could have come right in and killed me. Hmm. So I had an emergency surgery that lasted like four hours and woke up with a bag attached to my lower colon that would allow my big colon to have a break. Hmm. So I had to use the bag, oh my gosh. To do any bathroom activities. Wow. For six weeks. And I was in the hospital for a couple of weeks, came home, had the bag, then went back for another surgery and then came home for another six weeks to recover. So I had 12 weeks of downtime, six of which I had this thing attached to me. And I decided that it was time to think about the rest of my life.
Nancy Steiner:
And it was then that I had a great big aha moment and decided that I wanted to do something where I knew for sure I was impacting people's lives. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> because life is so precious. And I learned hard and furiously that it can be shaken up and reformed at any moment. Moment. When my colon broke, it was as though somebody had stuck a hot poker right into my gut, and it was a pain that was alarming. And it let me know that nothing is for certain, the only thing we know is constant is change. Right? So my colon got taken care of. And then I decided time to take care of the rest of me, my series, isn't moving forward. The way I wanted to go. I'm about to turn 60. I wanna have an immediate impact. What do I do?
Betsy Bush:
So what did
Nancy Steiner:
You do? I talked to my therapist and he said, he's just the best therapist that ever lived.He said, you're a coach. You've always been a coach. You might as well get paid for it. And by the way, here's a coaching out that you ought look at called IPEC. So I looked at a lot of coaching outfits and at first I was very skeptical a life coach, what is a life coach? It just sounds like something you do if you can't teach gym.
Betsy Bush:
So, so, you know, I see a lot of this, I don't know on LinkedIn or on my, you know, social media feeds that a lot of people are both turning into coaches or turning to coaches for help. So help me figure out what this is all about.
Nancy Steiner:
Okay. So first of all, anyone can become a coach, but you would never wanna work with a coach who wasn't certified da da, da. Right? Right. I have a master certification. That means that I received a very rigorous coaching education. It took me 14 months. It was incredibly intense, incredibly challenging to change my entire orientation to the world. I hear every conversation differently. I hear myself differently. I'm a much different sort of listener than I was before. And I thought I had pretty much nailed that as an interviewer for film and television. Hmm. I thought that I could sort of glean everything I needed to glean from any interview because I had done so many and with so many different kinds of people and I was wrong. I also thought that life coaching was sort of, you know, not there be not consulting. So what was it?
Nancy Steiner:
And I was very, very skeptical of it. And I was wrong about that. So life coaching to answer your question is helping people move themselves forward in the best possible way they can with pragmatic tools that I give my clients to help them understand themselves better, why they're stuck and if they're not stuck and they just wanna get to the next level, how to get them there. And I don't offer answers or solutions. I ask questions that enable them to come up with their own solutions. It's completely empowering. And unlike psychotherapy, which digs very deeply into your past coaching is all about figuring out your present and your future. So I like to say that, and many people say this, I didn't come up with it. <Laugh> coaching is like the windshield and your, and you're looking through the windshield and where you wanna go. Hmm. And therapy is like looking in the rear view mirror and figuring out, huh? How did I get to be who I am? So there's some of that in coaching, but the focus is really on the present and the future. And it's news. You can use, it's really helping people forward the action and make absolute progress that is undeniably effective in their lives.
Betsy Bush:
What kind of, I'm assuming you've got a lot of people in the, I say 45 plus or 50 50 plus crowd who are coming to you and saying, I need to make a pivot. I need to reboot something isn't working for me. I'm stuck. What are the kinds of issues people are bringing to you in that age group?
Nancy Steiner:
Okay. So I have sort of three columns of clients right now. I'm coaching at Harvard at the business school, a class of about 80 budding entrepreneurs. And at the end of each class, they can sign up for short coaching sessions. So I work with those kids and they're definitely under 34 <laugh> and they're wonderful and full of crazy, amazing ideas. Wow. For new businesses then I'm coaching about, oh, I don't know how many, but probably about 10 individuals who I encourage to, to move the themselves forward for whatever reason. And they really run a gamut. In terms of age, I have a woman who's 33 and I have a woman who's 72. They are doing all different kinds of things in their lives, changing careers, managing the careers. They have. I work with men. I have a team of enviro venture capitalists who are trying to make the world a better place by investing in companies that believe in climate change, you know, solutions. I have a video editor. I have the woman who runs our nation's most effective pig rescue. Oh, <laugh> in bucks, county, Pennsylvania, an amazing place called Ross mill farm. And she would want me to publicize this.
Betsy Bush:
<Laugh> consider it done. <Laugh>
Nancy Steiner:
It really depends. You know, a lot of coaches have niches mm-hmm <affirmative> and we're told in coaching school to have a knee. And I couldn't come up with one. I kept thinking, oh, maybe I should coach journalists who are shifting careers because magazines don't exist very much anymore. Newspapers are folding and they're all gonna need to figure it out. Or maybe I should coach writers, cuz I'm married to one or maybe I should coach artists or people who have all kinds of ideas that are unrealized. But the niche thing was just not happening for me. And finally I decided, why do I have to have a niche? Mm-Hmm <affirmative> why can't I just coach anyone with whom I feel an authentic connection. And so that's what I've done. And it's worked, I'm coaching a group of women as a group and they are late fifties, sixties, little seventies, and they are fantastic women.
Nancy Steiner:
And we talk about all different kinds of stuff. That's just, they set the agenda. I'm about to start a group for mothers of young children and I'm in a blended family of five kids. So I mean, I have a blended family. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, I'm not from one I remarried after I got divorced, I had a non acrimonious divorce and my husband had a non acrimonious divorce. And so between the two of us, we have five children who get along very, very well. And my husband's ex-wife and I are very close. We do our holidays together. I call her my stepsister, my ex-husband and I are very dear friends. And that has all taken a tremendous amount of work. And at one point I thought I should be a blended family coach, cuz I've lived it. And the, the point is that, because I think I'm a people person and I love all different kinds of people, but I couldn't narrow it down.
Betsy Bush:
I did want to ask you about your experience successfully blending your family because this does not always work out well. Right? I didn't come from one, but I had friends who had very difficult relationships with the, not only the stepparent, but the kids that came with the stepparent. And I think the successfully blended family is more a rarity than it is a commonplace. And I'm wondering if you have some general advice for people who are in difficult situations, maybe older parents who are looking at their adult children, getting divorced, forming new relationships, you know, with new children, with the hope blended family thing. I'm wondering if you have some general advice that would be of use.
Nancy Steiner:
You know, my, my general advice for blending a family would be the same general advice I would have heading into a divorce if they're children. And that is that the children come first. They didn't ask for any of this regression in divorce is all about blame and shame and can really be very detrimental and damaging for children. So my feeling or my philosophy is that the children's needs Trump everyone's needs. And when you're blending a family, you have to sort of look at who these little people are or so little and figure out how to make them feel safe and welcome in your world. And if you can reach out to their biological parent and say, let's make a pact or in this together, that's what I did. I reached out to my step children's mother. The first time I met her second time I met her and said, we can do this differently.
Nancy Steiner:
We don't have to scratch each other's eyes out. I have no designs on your children. I have my own. And even if I didn't, I wouldn't want to make you feel uncomfortable. So about being with your children, it's very important to make sure that you are considering everybody's needs and fears. It's not easy, but it's really worth it. If you can do it. When I reached out to my husband's ex-wife, she said to me, she's really funny and she's really amazing. And she said to me, well, I don't know if I wanna share clothes was right away, but okay. <Laugh>
Betsy Bush:
Like a, like a real sister, right? <Laugh>
Nancy Steiner:
Yeah. And you know, that relationship, my relationship with her is one of the most important to me in my life when I was sick, she was the only person who came to see and wanted to help me change the bag. <Laugh> so, I mean, when I tell you that we're close, we have really been in the trenches together and I adore her and I respect her and she's brilliant. She's beautiful. She's a dynamo. And I'm lucky. I feel so lucky to have her in my life and I love her children. And she's okay with that.
Betsy Bush:
You know, there should be more families like yours. I think of so many children who, you know, get the short end of the stick in a divorce situation. When there are parents who use the kids as, as a bargaining chip or put the kids through something that is unreasonable because they want their, I don't know. I <laugh>, I'm not in that situation, but I've seen it. And
Nancy Steiner:
You know, it happens all all the time. Yeah. And you know, it's frustrating for me to see, because I know what's gonna go wrong. I know who's gonna be the most damaged and it's not them. It's their children. And I'm working with a client right now. Who's has an ex-girlfriend whom he impregnated. And she is causing all kinds of trauma and damage to the children who they had, you know, together. I sometimes wish I could be coaching her to say, you know, stop, you are doing damage in ways. You can't see, you can't possibly imagine because you get so caught up in the swirl of your own anxiety and emotions that you can't find the forest through the trees. Yeah. You know, if you think about your child, trashing, your ex to your child will only make it difficult for your child to have healthy relationships later in life.
Betsy Bush:
This is so important. And you know, I came from a generation where there were divorces. Practically every friend I had were from divorced families. And you do see that generationally, the quality of the relationships and the quality of the adult that comes out of OUS divorces like that, who wins in a case like that.
Nancy Steiner:
The other thing I would wanna add to this is to tell your children the truth, but don't tell them everything. You have privacy, you have boundaries, you have intergenerational cutoffs and limits your children. Don't need to know about your sex life. Your children don't need to know who said what to whom in an argument, it's none of their business. And if it just didn't work out between you and your husband, and there wasn't a lot of fighting, you know, there's a really easy way to explain that to your children. You know, daddy and I love each other very, very deeply, but we don't have the kind of love that's gonna hold a marriage up so we can be friends, but we can't be husband and wife. That's exactly was the sort of explanation that my children received. So look, it's easy for me to say, I didn't have a terrible ex-husband.
Nancy Steiner:
I didn't behave in a way that was a terrible ex-wife during our divorce and separation, we were very considerate of one another. That is not always the case. So somebody out there who's got a really threatening, difficult, you know, potentially dangerous divorce. And there are many of them could say to, oh well that's all and well and good. But what I would say to that person is you can decide any minute of your life, who you wanna be, including in a divorce, and you can decide the kind of my other, you wanna be. You can decide what kind of fostering of relationships you wanna give your children, save your anger for your private moments. Do not share those moments with your children. It will only hurt them and break their hearts
Betsy Bush:
Incredibly important advice. And I hope every one of my listeners who might be facing a difficult breakup or divorce takes this to heart because it's so important to protect your children. Again, they're innocent bystanders in all of this and do what you can to keep it that way. That's
Nancy Steiner:
Right. Yeah. I used to think, listen, nobody in my family, my immediate family had ever been divorced. So I was the first and that's not really a medal you wanna wear mm-hmm <affirmative> and I had no experience with this. And I used to think when my ex-husband and I decided to split that my children would never laugh again. That my really funny little bunny rabbits would never be funny again, that they would never fall in love because the example they had didn't work. Well, let me just say that I could not have been more mistaken. Hmm. But that took, we work. And my ex-husband and I made very conscious decisions about how we were gonna move these girls forward and protect them and preserve their innocence and preserve our integrity as parents.
Betsy Bush:
You know, Nancy, I'm going to leave that there because I want that to resonate with my listener. I'm not sure I expected our conversation to go this way, man. Have we covered the waterfront right? From colon cancer to divorce and blended families and extremely wise advice. And I can see why you are such a good and successful life coach.
Betsy Bush:
My guest today is Nancy Steiner. Nancy had a long, an exciting career as a network news producer, traveling the world and working on stories that had an impact on people's lives. Perhaps most famously, she worked with Katie Corick on the today show to bring the message of colon cancer prevention to millions of viewers. Then there was a moment when she decided that her next version would be as a career and life coach. And I wanna hear all about that Nancy Steiner. It is so great to have you on The Latest Version. Welcome.
Nancy Steiner:
Thank you so much, Betsy, for having me. I'm really excited to be here with you.
Betsy Bush:
Oh, that's great. I have to say I would've loved to have had a career like you had, although looking back on it, it sounds very intensive. A lot of traveling, a lot of high pressure situations, which not everyone can deal with. I think myself included. So what was that like to have that kind of exciting career in network news? When network news was really the top of the game?
Nancy Steiner:
Well, it was fantastic. And I have to say that almost every single day I was there. I felt so lucky to be there. I never felt like it was work. I felt like it was fun. I adored my colleagues that that particular time that you're referring to at the today show, we had an amazing group of producers and we had tons of fun together. We did travel the world together. The pressure was unbelievably intense, but you know, when you're young, don't think about it that much. Yeah. I just felt like, I can't believe they're paying me to do this <laugh> and there were times that were very, very challenging and terrifying, but you get through them and it really helped me. It helped me with parenting. It helped me with the rest of my life in terms of organizing things and knowing that every day is gonna bring me things I never expected.
Betsy Bush:
You know, I, I joke with my guests and sometimes with my listeners that the nice thing about a podcast is it's not live radio because I find live for radio live broadcasting. Terrifying. Can you remember any moments when I'm sure there were many, right.
Nancy Steiner:
Well, here's a funny one sort of <laugh> just to give you a sense of the pressure. So at the today show, I don't know if this still happens, but at the today show, there was a rotation called set writer that each of us had to be on the, this rotation. And that meant that for one week, every couple of months you had to take the 5:00 AM shift and be in the office in case any news broke mm-hmm <affirmative> and you had to shift guests, rebook people, you know, and get new guests. So it was my turn to be set writer. And I had always said to my boss, please don't ever give me any story about NASA because the space program is just not anything that I'm interested in. And I'm sure there are lots of other NASA producers who would love that opportunity.
Nancy Steiner:
And I also said, please, Don ever give me anything that has to do with fashion. <Laugh> because fashion on television to me has always been kind of weird and awkward, and I never wanted to do that. I was very committed to the ideals that I had and the stories that I wanted to get done. So one day when I was set writer, I walked to check out like sign out in my boss, his office and say, see you tomorrow. And he said wait a second. There's a launch happening. Let's watch the launch. So I said, okay, you know, I had my, literally had my bag with me to go and sure enough, the shuttle blew up.
Betsy Bush:
I remember that day. So, well, I can imagine everything. The news studio just blew up and everything changed in a moment.
Nancy Steiner:
Right. And he turned to me and he said, I need the history of the space program and in two and a half minutes for tomorrow morning. And I thought, why a minute you have 22 producers out there and I, you can't argue. You can't say what <laugh> no, you can't say no. So I had to then put my bag down, go back to my office and head down to the editing room. And I stayed for complete another, you know, 24 hours mm-hmm <affirmative>. So I had been there since 5:00 AM. Don't forget that part. Right. And I had to look at every single launch that had existed in order to do the history of NASA. You have to know which are the most important launches to include. So in order to know what the most important watches are, you have to look at all of them. I was in the editing room with my editor up until I wanna say three minutes before air getting this thing done and we got it done. But that was the worst.
Betsy Bush:
It's a young person's business. Would you say being able to you pull an old minder like that?
Nancy Steiner:
And yes, because if I had to do that today, I would really definitely need a nap in between. I don't know that the nap would've been productive because I had no time to get this thing done. But for that story, Betsy, there are at least I'm sure 10 others. I could tell you where I don't know why I never missed air. I don't know how it happened. I never did. I prided myself on always making air or always getting the person booked that nobody else could get that kind of stuff, which is very inside baseball and silly. But I also was committed to doing the stories that I really cared about. Live breaking news was my least favorite component of television news. And I tried to Finese my life there so that I could do longer format, more thoughtful and planned stories and series.
Betsy Bush:
But some people really thrive on that adrenaline rush you get with live news and the right.
Nancy Steiner:
I was not one of those people. I was one of those people who had to keep a list with me at all times of what I needed to do. If news broke call the satellite guy, call the woman, you know, in graphics, make sure that the other networks weren't chasing down the same people. I was chasing down, make sure that I was getting the footage from the library that I, you know, every single I had a checklist and it was, I, it had, I had it in my wallet. Yeah. It was never without it. And that's what it meant to be on top of live news.
Betsy Bush:
Wow. Do you think things have changed a lot since
Nancy Steiner:
That time? Yes. I think that, well, I don't wanna sound like, you know, <laugh> one of those people, I don't wanna be that person. Who's like, well, when we did it, it was so much better, but there were stories, you know, that we did that would never show up now. When I was at the today show, at one point we were broadcasting from Rome and I did a five minute story on Leonardo DaVinci. I did another five minute story on the sculptor, Henry Moore. The today show was like life magazine in its heyday. We were really trying to give an intelligent, sophisticated, enjoyable meal to you every morning that was laced with, you know, cutting edge news and guests who were brilliant and thoughtful and really had something to contribute to the national dialogue.
Betsy Bush:
And let's talk about your time when you were with Katie Corak it was really groundbreaking. This discussion of a type of cancer that was almost never mentioned because it involved a body part that nobody wanted to think about. But her husband, Jay had died at a very early of colon cancer and she was on a tear to raise awareness. And a lot of things happened on the today show air that informed millions of people about this type of cancer. And I think you played a special role.
Nancy Steiner:
Okay. So what happened was before Katie's husband, Jay had colon cancer, her boss, Jeff Zucker, who was 34 at the time mm-hmm <affirmative> had colon cancer. Wow. So Katie was already familiar with how colon cancer can ravage your body, how it can really, you know, how it can kill you. And so when Jay got it, it was particularly brutal for Katie because now the two most important men in her life had been afflicted with this horrible illness. And yes, she was on a tear has remained on a one ever since to educate people about proper screening for colon cancer, because <affirmative> in the words of Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing mm-hmm <affirmative> you never have to get colon cancer. If you are screened, you are saved. So anybody unlike breast cancer or lung cancer or any other major cancer, you can save your life just through screening.
Nancy Steiner:
And very few people at the time, Katie did this work, which was in, started in 1999. Very few people knew about that. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> nobody really understood that a colonoscopy can save your life. That it's one stop shopping. You go in, you get screened. If they see a pile up, they take it out. Bingo, bang, you are alive. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. And if you don't get that screening, you can die. Yeah. And colon cancer is really significantly fatal. It's the number two cancer killer. Wow. And most people don't realize that over 52,000 people die every year. Wow. Because they weren't properly screened.
Betsy Bush:
That's like a thousand people a week.
Nancy Steiner:
Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So Katie decided that for people to understand this, she would go on national television and have a colonoscopy herself. Hmm. And she called me, I was at home. I had left NBC two years early and actually Jeff Zucker called me her boss and said, will you come and do this with Katie? And I said, absolutely sure. I was at the time working for a documentary company. And I took a leave of absence and produced Katie's colonoscopy. And because so many people saw it, she changed the course of the illness and the journal of American medicine to this day, call it the ke effect because she told America, get screened and save your life.
Betsy Bush:
That is incredible. What a worry, what a story.
Nancy Steiner:
Well, it really resonated for me. And here's why I discovered during the course of the production of the first series, I ended up doing a couple of them, like three. I think that my grandpa died of colon cancer at 52. And my mother had always called it rectal cancer.
Nancy Steiner:
Right. And so, but anyway, I thought, okay, so my grandpa was 52. I'm 41. I think I was. And I better get screened and sure enough, because you should get screened 10 years earlier than your relative who may have had colon cancer. So if your mother was 50,
Betsy Bush:
It's highly hereditary, right. It does run in families, very her
Nancy Steiner:
Hereditary. Very. So if you have an immediate relative who had colon cancer, you need to be screened 10 years before the age of the person who had it. So I got screened and sure enough, there, it was a pre-cancerous poly, it was removed and you can make a case that I could have died because you don't know when you have a poly. Right. That's it. It's
Betsy Bush:
Not like you feel it that's it. Yep.
Nancy Steiner:
And then I did another series for her where somebody's life had been saved from having seen Katie's colonoscopy. Wow. So we did that story. He was fantastic. He was a teacher out in long island. He was wonderful. And it was work that I was very proud of. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>
Betsy Bush:
And I guess we could mention that it isn't necessarily easy to get screened for colon cancer. I think we can just, we can say this now and then kind of move on because it is a fairly, you know, you need to have health insurance to get screened because it's a procedure where you prep for it and then you're yeah. Put under anesthesia and it's a high tech sort of thing. And if you don't have insurance that will cover it. You're very unlikely to have the preventive men. And, and I think it's, it's a real track covered.
Nancy Steiner:
Much more now than it ever was. Yeah. When Katie did it. And then I discovered I had this polyp, she asked me if I would have a colonoscopy on the today show live, hers was taped. I said, I had to get screened again because of my precancerous pop. So I said, I would, and I did. And I wanted people to understand that you don't have to be Katie Kerick to afford a colonoscopy and get one mm-hmm <affirmative>. And it's not as bad for me anyway, is going to the dentist. You know, so many people, people have this terror of having colon cancer screening and it's because they put you, you know, they give you this lovely medicine. <Laugh>, it's not painful the prep the night before. Isn't fun, but it's a hell of a lot better than having colon cancer. Yep.
Betsy Bush:
Yep. So you had a, after you left network news, you went on to a documentary film career, right. And then you had an aha moment if I can call it that, was it surrounding this moment when you made this discovery of your own potential illness, or tell me about that.
Nancy Steiner:
What happened was I worked for about 15 or more, I think years at a company called cohart productions and produced series. And one-offs for cable ventures, mostly HBO and then PBS and Bravo. And I had a lot of fun there. And then what happened was I had done a number of pieces outside of Kohar productions for the council on foreign relations, which is a global think tank. And I did pieces on global diplomacy. And after doing 52 of them, at one point I was trying to move a televis forward and my colon ruptured out of nowhere. Wow. It broke, oh my God. After I, I had had diverticulitis, if people don't know dive diverticulitis is when you have little pockets in your colon and they get infected. Mm. And when they get infected, they're very, very painful. And so normally you get put on antibiotics and it's cleared up only my D diverticulitis wasn't responding to the antibiotics.
Nancy Steiner:
It was an acute case. So I had to be hospitalized. And while I was in the hospital, my colon broke. Wow. And there was an sepsis right next to it, knocking at my door, said that sepsis could have come right in and killed me. Hmm. So I had an emergency surgery that lasted like four hours and woke up with a bag attached to my lower colon that would allow my big colon to have a break. Hmm. So I had to use the bag, oh my gosh. To do any bathroom activities. Wow. For six weeks. And I was in the hospital for a couple of weeks, came home, had the bag, then went back for another surgery and then came home for another six weeks to recover. So I had 12 weeks of downtime, six of which I had this thing attached to me. And I decided that it was time to think about the rest of my life.
Nancy Steiner:
And it was then that I had a great big aha moment and decided that I wanted to do something where I knew for sure I was impacting people's lives. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> because life is so precious. And I learned hard and furiously that it can be shaken up and reformed at any moment. Moment. When my colon broke, it was as though somebody had stuck a hot poker right into my gut, and it was a pain that was alarming. And it let me know that nothing is for certain, the only thing we know is constant is change. Right? So my colon got taken care of. And then I decided time to take care of the rest of me, my series, isn't moving forward. The way I wanted to go. I'm about to turn 60. I wanna have an immediate impact. What do I do?
Betsy Bush:
So what did?
Nancy Steiner:
I talked to my therapist and he said, he's just the best therapist that ever lived.He said, you're a coach. You've always been a coach. You might as well get paid for it. And by the way, here's a coaching out that you ought look at called IPEC. So I looked at a lot of coaching outfits and at first I was very skeptical a life coach, what is a life coach? It just sounds like something you do if you can't teach gym.
Betsy Bush:
So, so, you know, I see a lot of this, I don't know on LinkedIn or on my, you know, social media feeds that a lot of people are both turning into coaches or turning to coaches for help. So help me figure out what this is all about.
Nancy Steiner:
Okay. So first of all, anyone can become a coach, but you would never wanna work with a coach who wasn't certified da da, da. Right? Right. I have a master certification. That means that I received a very rigorous coaching education. It took me 14 months. It was incredibly intense, incredibly challenging to change my entire orientation to the world. I hear every conversation differently. I hear myself differently. I'm a much different sort of listener than I was before. And I thought I had pretty much nailed that as an interviewer for film and television. Hmm. I thought that I could sort of glean everything I needed to glean from any interview because I had done so many and with so many different kinds of people and I was wrong. I also thought that life coaching was sort of, you know, not there be not consulting. So what was it?
Nancy Steiner:
And I was very, very skeptical of it. And I was wrong about that. So life coaching to answer your question is helping people move themselves forward in the best possible way they can with pragmatic tools that I give my clients to help them understand themselves better, why they're stuck and if they're not stuck and they just wanna get to the next level, how to get them there. And I don't offer answers or solutions. I ask questions that enable them to come up with their own solutions. It's completely empowering. And unlike psychotherapy, which digs very deeply into your past coaching is all about figuring out your present and your future. So I like to say that, and many people say this, I didn't come up with it. <Laugh> coaching is like the windshield and your, and you're looking through the windshield and where you wanna go. Hmm. And therapy is like looking in the rear view mirror and figuring out, huh? How did I get to be who I am? So there's some of that in coaching, but the focus is really on the present and the future. And it's news. You can use, it's really helping people forward the action and make absolute progress that is undeniably effective in their lives.
Betsy Bush:
What kind of, I'm assuming you've got a lot of people in the, I say 45 plus or 50 50 plus crowd who are coming to you and saying, I need to make a pivot. I need to reboot something isn't working for me. I'm stuck. What are the kinds of issues people are bringing to you in that age group?
Nancy Steiner:
Okay. So I have sort of three columns of clients right now. I'm coaching at Harvard at the business school, a class of about 80 budding entrepreneurs. And at the end of each class, they can sign up for short coaching sessions. So I work with those kids and they're definitely under 34 <laugh> and they're wonderful and full of crazy, amazing ideas. Wow. For new businesses then I'm coaching about, oh, I don't know how many, but probably about 10 individuals who I encourage to, to move the themselves forward for whatever reason. And they really run a gamut. In terms of age, I have a woman who's 33 and I have a woman who's 72. They are doing all different kinds of things in their lives, changing careers, managing the careers. They have. I work with men. I have a team of enviro venture capitalists who are trying to make the world a better place by investing in companies that believe in climate change, you know, solutions. I have a video editor. I have the woman who runs our nation's most effective pig rescue. Oh, <laugh> in bucks, county, Pennsylvania, an amazing place called Ross mill farm. And she would want me to publicize this.
Betsy Bush:
<Laugh> consider it done. <Laugh>
Nancy Steiner:
It really depends. You know, a lot of coaches have niches mm-hmm <affirmative> and we're told in coaching school to have a knee. And I couldn't come up with one. I kept thinking, oh, maybe I should coach journalists who are shifting careers because magazines don't exist very much anymore. Newspapers are folding and they're all gonna need to figure it out. Or maybe I should coach writers, cuz I'm married to one or maybe I should coach artists or people who have all kinds of ideas that are unrealized. But the niche thing was just not happening for me. And finally I decided, why do I have to have a niche? Mm-Hmm <affirmative> why can't I just coach anyone with whom I feel an authentic connection. And so that's what I've done. And it's worked, I'm coaching a group of women as a group and they are late fifties, sixties, little seventies, and they are fantastic women.
Nancy Steiner:
And we talk about all different kinds of stuff. That's just, they set the agenda. I'm about to start a group for mothers of young children and I'm in a blended family of five kids. So I mean, I have a blended family. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, I'm not from one I remarried after I got divorced, I had a non acrimonious divorce and my husband had a non acrimonious divorce. And so between the two of us, we have five children who get along very, very well. And my husband's ex-wife and I are very close. We do our holidays together. I call her my stepsister, my ex-husband and I are very dear friends. And that has all taken a tremendous amount of work. And at one point I thought I should be a blended family coach, cuz I've lived it. And the, the point is that, because I think I'm a people person and I love all different kinds of people, but I couldn't narrow it down.
Betsy Bush:
I did want to ask you about your experience successfully blending your family because this does not always work out well. Right? I didn't come from one, but I had friends who had very difficult relationships with the, not only the stepparent, but the kids that came with the stepparent. And I think the successfully blended family is more a rarity than it is a commonplace. And I'm wondering if you have some general advice for people who are in difficult situations, maybe older parents who are looking at their adult children, getting divorced, forming new relationships, you know, with new children, with the hope blended family thing. I'm wondering if you have some general advice that would be of use,
Nancy Steiner:
You know, my, my general advice for blending a family would be the same general advice I would have heading into a divorce if they're children. And that is that the children come first. They didn't ask for any of this regression in divorce is all about blame and shame and can really be very detrimental and damaging for children. So my feeling or my philosophy is that the children's needs Trump everyone's needs. And when you're blending a family, you have to sort of look at who these little people are or so little and figure out how to make them feel safe and welcome in your world. And if you can reach out to their biological parent and say, let's make a pact or in this together, that's what I did. I reached out to my step children's mother. The first time I met her second time I met her and said, we can do this differently.
Nancy Steiner:
We don't have to scratch each other's eyes out. I have no designs on your children. I have my own. And even if I didn't, I wouldn't want to make you feel uncomfortable. So about being with your children, it's very important to make sure that you are considering everybody's needs and fears. It's not easy, but it's really worth it. If you can do it. When I reached out to my husband's ex-wife, she said to me, she's really funny and she's really amazing. And she said to me, well, I don't know if I wanna share clothes was right away, but okay. <Laugh>
Betsy Bush:
Like a, like a real sister, right?
Nancy Steiner:
Yeah. And you know, that relationship, my relationship with her is one of the most important to me in my life when I was sick, she was the only person who came to see and wanted to help me change the bag. <Laugh> so, I mean, when I tell you that we're close, we have really been in the trenches together and I adore her and I respect her and she's brilliant. She's beautiful. She's a dynamo. And I'm lucky. I feel so lucky to have her in my life and I love her children. And she's okay with that.
Betsy Bush:
You know, there should be more families like yours. I think of so many children who, you know, get the short end of the stick in a divorce situation. When there are parents who use the kids as, as a bargaining chip or put the kids through something that is unreasonable because they want their, I don't know. I <laugh>, I'm not in that situation, but I've seen it.
Nancy Steiner:
You know, it happens all all the time. Yeah. And you know, it's frustrating for me to see, because I know what's gonna go wrong. I know who's gonna be the most damaged and it's not them. It's their children. And I'm working with a client right now. Who's has an ex-girlfriend whom he impregnated. And she is causing all kinds of trauma and damage to the children who they had, you know, together. I sometimes wish I could be coaching her to say, you know, stop, you are doing damage in ways. You can't see, you can't possibly imagine because you get so caught up in the swirl of your own anxiety and emotions that you can't find the forest through the trees. Yeah. You know, if you think about your child, trashing, your ex to your child will only make it difficult for your child to have healthy relationships later in life.
Betsy Bush:
This is so important. And you know, I came from a generation where there were divorces. Practically every friend I had were from divorced families. And you do see that generationally, the quality of the relationships and the quality of the adult that comes out of OUS divorces like that, who wins in a case like that.
Nancy Steiner:
The other thing I would wanna add to this is to tell your children the truth, but don't tell them everything. You have privacy, you have boundaries, you have intergenerational cutoffs and limits your children. Don't need to know about your sex life. Your children don't need to know who said what to whom in an argument, it's none of their business. And if it just didn't work out between you and your husband, and there wasn't a lot of fighting, you know, there's a really easy way to explain that to your children. You know, daddy and I love each other very, very deeply, but we don't have the kind of love that's gonna hold a marriage up so we can be friends, but we can't be husband and wife. That's exactly was the sort of explanation that my children received. So look, it's easy for me to say, I didn't have a terrible ex-husband.
Nancy Steiner:
I didn't behave in a way that was a terrible ex-wife during our divorce and separation, we were very considerate of one another. That is not always the case. So somebody out there who's got a really threatening, difficult, you know, potentially dangerous divorce. And there are many of them could say to, oh well that's all and well and good. But what I would say to that person is you can decide any minute of your life, who you wanna be, including in a divorce, and you can decide the kind of my other, you wanna be. You can decide what kind of fostering of relationships you wanna give your children, save your anger for your private moments. Do not share those moments with your children. It will only hurt them and break their hearts.
Betsy Bush:
Incredibly important advice. And I hope every one of my listeners who might be facing a difficult breakup or divorce takes this to heart because it's so important to protect your children. Again, they're innocent bystanders in all of this and do what you can to keep it that way. That's
Nancy Steiner:
Right. Yeah. I used to think, listen, nobody in my family, my immediate family had ever been divorced. So I was the first and that's not really a medal you wanna wear mm-hmm <affirmative> and I had no experience with this. And I used to think when my ex-husband and I decided to split that my children would never laugh again. That my really funny little bunny rabbits would never be funny again, that they would never fall in love because the example they had didn't work. Well, let me just say that I could not have been more mistaken. Hmm. But that took, we work. And my ex-husband and I made very conscious decisions about how we were gonna move these girls forward and protect them and preserve their innocence and preserve our integrity as parents.
Betsy Bush:
You know, Nancy, I'm going to leave that there because I want that to resonate with my listener. I'm not sure I expected our conversation to go this way, man. Have we covered the waterfront right? From colon cancer to divorce and blended families and extremely wise advice. And I can see why you are such a good and successful life coach..
