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Divas That Care Network
The Art of Confident Reinvention
What happens when life shatters everything you thought you knew about yourself? Rosemary Barnes takes us on a remarkable journey from Ukrainian farm upbringing to becoming an international speaker, bestselling author, and confidence coach—navigating through unimaginable personal tragedy along the way.
Rosemary's story begins with her dual life: weekdays in the city attending school and lessons, weekends on the farm where her family instilled the values of hard work and responsibility. This foundation shaped her into someone others always saw as dependable, even during her brief rebellious phase. But it was through facing life's most devastating challenges that Rosemary discovered the true nature of resilience and reinvention.
With unflinching honesty, she shares the heartbreaking loss of her son to a fentanyl overdose and her daughter's earlier struggles with crystal meth addiction. These experiences forced her to confront painful questions about parental responsibility while weathering harsh judgments from others. Through this crucible of grief, Rosemary discovered a profound truth: "Being human means you make mistakes. Being human means you will be judged incorrectly." Her hard-won wisdom reminds us that self-forgiveness is essential when navigating life's darkest moments.
Today, through her company Confidence Stages, Rosemary helps others overcome their confidence barriers and find their authentic voice. Drawing on her background as a classically trained singer and educator, she specializes in helping people master public speaking—"If you can learn to conquer that great fear of speaking in public, what can you not take on?" Her approach transforms this common fear into a gateway for broader personal empowerment.
Rosemary's parting wisdom resonates with universal truth: "Nothing is permanent. The only thing you can count on throughout your entire life is that everything will change." Rather than resisting change, she encourages us to embrace it as "an opportunity for adventure"—a perspective that doesn't diminish our suffering but offers a path forward when one seems impossible to find.
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welcome everybody to another session episode of phoenix butterfly and diva style. Oh my gosh, on the divas that care network. You guys, I'm so excited to bring you the most incredible woman today, this super, and I really hope that. I know that you're going to have a lot of takeaways from today. So please have your pen and papers ready and let me introduce you to Rosemary Barnes.
Speaker 1:Rosemary is an international speaker, international bestselling author and executive presentation trainer, leading others to speak, to engage and speak to succeed. She holds degrees in education, music and drama from a number of Canadian universities and is certified as a professional speaking coach. Through sessions on bridging the generation gap, Hang on everybody. Through her company Confidence Stages, she offers keynote addresses and breakout sessions on bridging the generational gap in the 21st century and personal, professional and corporate confidence and reinventionvention, among others. As an executive presentation trainer, Rosemary works with content, presentations and delivery skills and uses her voice production expertise to empower all speakers to connect with their audiences with maximum impact and influence. She has presented in theaters, lecture halls, boardrooms, classrooms, conferences and my favorite, in the shower. You rock, Rosemary.
Speaker 2:Welcome to our show Hi Amanda, Thanks for having me on the show. It's great to be here.
Speaker 1:That's wonderful. Could you share a little bit more about yourself to our listeners?
Speaker 2:A little bit about me, oh dear, how do I compact all these years of experience into a few quick words?
Speaker 1:How would people relate with you?
Speaker 2:How will people relate with me? All right, I am long before yoda existed. Uh, to do, do not, there is no try. I was taught all my life do it, do it right or don't touch it at all. So apparently my parents were yoda before yoda existed.
Speaker 2:I was raised half on the farm and half in a city. I was born in Alberta, lived there all my life until five years ago when my husband and I moved to beautiful Vancouver Island and it's gorgeous. But I'm in Alberta, I'm a prairie girl, I'm the daughter of Ukrainian farm folk and that great, honorable tradition. The benefit that I got was during all week I could go to school in the city, go to ballet lessons in the city, go to piano lessons in the city, and then on the weekends, as soon as dad got home from work at five o'clock on a Friday night, we would just pile into the family car and barrel off down the highway to the farm where we would do a whole week worth of work in two days. And then dad would try desperately to get us back home for Sunday night's wonderful world of Disney at 6 pm. He couldn't always make it, but there you go. My life was never full of sitting around. I was never a sit-around girl, except that I did love to read.
Speaker 2:And my mother and since I am a do or do not kind of person and sometimes I leap in without looking to see how deep that water is. So when I got involved in a good book, nothing and nobody was going to pry me away from that book. Much to my mother's absolute chagrin, rosemary quit reading about other people's lives and go live your own. So it was go do run all that sort of thing. So I think I'm one of the few remaining people that know how to get a chicken from the coop and onto the dinner table.
Speaker 1:Right, that's a unique skill.
Speaker 2:It is a unique skill. Now, being absolutely honest, hardworking people. My family knows how to do two things very well my parents, my brothers, my sister. They know how to love and they know how to work. They haven't the slightest inclination what relaxation leisure resting looks like.
Speaker 2:It wasn't part of my existence. So one of the things that I had to get over was that I don't have to have the same work ethic that my parents do, even at 90, they still live part-time in the city and part-time at a farm. At nine years old, they're still planting a garden with enough potatoes to feed me. I have grandchildren. They're still making sure I have enough potatoes, but that's a value that I inherited as well. But it took me a long time to realize that I didn't always have to be working to be worthy.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's a good one no-transcript.
Speaker 2:sitting around doing nothing was bad, which meant the opposite was good, and I was a good girl. I was a good girl. I would never have dreamed of getting myself into trouble, at least not until the teenage years. And even then. Even then I decided okay, that's enough of this good girl stuff. I am going to. I am going to be a rebel. It's my rebel years and I can do something rebellious. I know I can, and so I was trying my darndest to make sure that I was not being Miss Goody Two-Shoes all the time. It put me into a real tailspin when a couple of friends of mine once turned to me in the midst of my rebellious period and said you know, we can always count on you to take care of us. You're such a mother. And I was gobsmacked because there I was in mid being as naughty as I knew how to be, and they were telling me how. There I was in mid being as naughty as I knew how to be and they were telling me how good I was.
Speaker 1:Way to go.
Speaker 2:Rosemary, yes, yes. Now, that's not to say I was always a good girl, but the point is that I was raised to be responsible and I bloody well am. Even in the midst of my biggest irresponsible phase, everybody else still looked at me as the responsible one. So I guess that's just the hat that I wear and that's it. We've had a lot of hats on this head over the course of life, some of them good and some of them bad.
Speaker 2:I have had to learn to be resilient. I have had to learn that when you're everything, everything changes. You cannot hold still on anything. Time itself will change it, if nothing else. When something new happens. If you're in charge of that, it's called reinvention. If you're on the reactive side of that, it's called change. So, and opportunities for new, different, better are all around us. If you instigate them, it's reinvention. If all you can do is bounce around reacting to it, we call it change. So that's why I'm writing my third book, which is called Confident Reinvention Personal, professional and corporate transformation. We have to do it all the time. We have to reinvent ourselves all the time, due to time and tide and circumstances and woes, and goodness knows, there isn't a person alive that hasn't had to bear some sort of unexpected or unacceptable change.
Speaker 1:So what triggered in your life to allow you for this to be important?
Speaker 2:For learning to survive reinventions, even when they're thrust upon you.
Speaker 2:Yes, what challenges have you overcome? The latest, of course, is the most painful, and that was that July of two years ago. The phone rang and it was my daughter telling me that my son was dead, her brother. The two of them had a really wonderful relationship. They called each other doppelgangers. They completed each other's sentences. They were better together than they were apart.
Speaker 2:My daughter is an earth mother. She certainly didn't know it when she was growing up, but now that she's a mom with two kids, my daughter is an earth mother. Anything that is broken or hurting or sad finds its way to her door and she takes it in and she comforts wherever it needs to be. When my daughter's brother was born, she was two and a half and she was instantly his mom. He was a very sick little baby and the only one that could stop him from crying half the time was his sister. I couldn't make him stop. His dad couldn't make him stop. We would stand on our head and wiggle our feet in the air. That didn't work either, but somehow our daughter could connect with him and ease his pain, whatever it was that was eating at him so badly, and they were like that till the day he died.
Speaker 2:Wow, it was as horrible as you think it is to bury a child. It is all that and thousands of times worse. It's two years and I still am weepy just at the thought of losing my son. So I'm breathing and I'm composing myself. Part of me died with him, but there's a huge part that had to go on living Grief.
Speaker 2:No one can ever know what you're feeling when, when someone says to you I know how you're feeling, right, no, you don't, no, you don't. You may have some inkling, you may have had a very similar experience, but no one can ever know how you're feeling. And it is absolute arrogance to walk up to somebody and say I know how you're feeling. You can't Just like you can't know what someone tastes. What tastes delicious to you may taste completely foul to somebody else. Right, perfumes that you think are the best smell ever created to someone else may be pure poison and create asthma attacks and severe allergic reactions. Right, you can't know. You can't know what is happening for someone else.
Speaker 2:So, first and foremost, you have to learn, when you're in this state of grieving, to forgive other well-meaning people when they say things like I know how you feel they are, only it's an awkward situation. You don't really know what to say. You don't know how to comfort. You would love to give comfort. You don't know what to say, so these ridiculous things come out of our mouth. So, first and foremost, when you're grieving, not are you in the throes of anger and denial and all of those things, but now you also have to be accepting and forgiving of all the people that want to help you. Yes, there is no right way to grieve. The only thing that I can say is you have to grieve the way you have to grieve, and however long that takes it takes, however short it takes it takes, and you have to give yourself full permission to do that.
Speaker 1:Would you find it takes a lot of self-love to do that, to really honor yourself.
Speaker 2:Well, it really was, in my case, a huge amount. Okay, the deep and dirty nasty secret of this whole thing is that my husband and I have had two children. Our daughter decided that in her teenage years that becoming a drug addict would be a good thing to do, so she was addicted to crystal meth and doing all the things that that world entails. She was actually living on the street for a while. Her story of reinvention is an absolute success story. It's wonderful. It's wonderful. It's wonderful to have seen her throw her life absolutely away and then watch her pick up the pieces.
Speaker 2:She couldn't find all the pieces, thank goodness. So she created new ones and she is a success story personified. My crystal meth, angst-filled daughter is now my effervescent bubble of joy, just like she was when she was a child. And her two children can you hear it in my voice? I'm just going. You are my bubble of happiness. People, that whole little family people, that whole little family.
Speaker 1:She is thrilled to scrub her toilet because she's got one.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's amazing your perception shift? Hey, absolutely. So there was my daughter and I was left feeling like not very much of a mom. My husband and I were looking what did we do? What could we have done? What should we have done? We were supporting her to the point of enabling her. The hardest thing I've ever had to do in my whole life was drive my daughter to a woman's homeless shelter and force her out of the car. Homeless shelter and forced her out of the car, especially when I had to drive around the block a couple of times to wait for the Johns that were outside the door trying to pick up these sad ladies to go away so that I could safely kick my daughter out of the car.
Speaker 1:I don't mean to laugh, but I know it was awful in that you know I want to care for you but enable you in the best way that I can.
Speaker 2:That's right, and so we were actually enabling her by giving her a warm bed and a loving home so that she could carry on and do all the things she was doing that were illegal, illicit, immoral, all those wonderful things with which she was passing her time, to the point where someone told us you know, it's your fault, it's your fault that your daughter is a drug addict, it's your fault that your daughter has had three abortions and don't even ask me how I feel about abortions but to be told point-blank. And then you walk down the street and people are talking about these young people. Where are their parents? And I could just only say to myself I'm right here and I'm swimming as fast as I can.
Speaker 1:That's right. You can do the best you can right.
Speaker 2:Then we got her safely. We didn't. She got herself safely onto a track of recovery and a new life and rebirth and all those wonderful things that have happened to her since and all those wonderful things that have happened to her since. And it was then that our son fell off the rails. We didn't know for his whole life. Now you have to understand.
Speaker 2:Both my children's IQs were way astronomically high in the genius level. Smart people, smart, smart, smart people, frighteningly smart. And put them together smart, smart, smart people, frighteningly smart. And put them together Holy Hannah cakes, they, they. You know what the two of them did for fun, they read the dictionary and found cool words, I mean.
Speaker 2:So then when we discovered that after our son graduated with a second university degree, the wheels fell off his bus, we had no idea that our son had Asperger's None. He had found his own coping mechanisms his whole life and he was so clever that he hid it beautifully. But when he got the Asperger's sufferers cling to structure. If their structure is fine and they can work within their little boxes, everything is fine. But when the structure of education came away from our son, his bus crashed, he became suicidal, he became an alcoholic. Then he started mucking around with drugs too, and he died of a fentanyl overdose.
Speaker 2:Now, what do you think that did to my husband and I and our confidence as parents? We were 0 and 2. It was. If anything is going to shake your confidence, it's that the children that you brought into this world and cared for and loved within an inch of their life. And you know, we were pushing them out of the nest gently, gently, gently, making sure they were prepared. We did everything we could to be the best parents we could, and one of them was a drug addict and the other one is dead. And one of them was a drug addict and the other one is dead.
Speaker 1:The confidence level takes a pretty big hit. So, rosemary, if anyone's listening to you that maybe is going through similar right, you said you can't duplicate a situation and you can't duplicate how a person feels. But if someone's listening to your story right now and they're like, oh my gosh, you know this has happened in my life or this is happening to someone I care about, what advice would you give them?
Speaker 2:The advice, oh my goodness, understand, especially when you're told that it's your fault that you enabled them. You made this be as bad as it is, and I heard that an awful lot. The thing to remember is that, first of all, nobody is perfect. We all make mistakes. For the most part, mistakes that parents make go away without anyone really making a big fuss of them. But no parent that I know and there are, I'm sure there are, but I don't know them. So I'm going to say nobody, as in the people that I know, nobody gets out of bed in the morning and says to themselves gee, I wonder how I can screw up my kids' lives. Today Nobody gets out of bed and says, gee, I wonder which strange person on the street I can make feel badly about themselves. Today Nobody does that.
Speaker 2:For the most part, people are very and this is the word of the day. For the most part, people are very and this is the word of the day solipsistic. Oh, I know it's a great word. Sol beings the sun and, in the ancient times, the center of the universe. Before they knew what the universe was, to the ancients the sun was the center of the universe and all other things orbited around its little self. To be solipsistic, then, is to place yourself at the center of the universe and all other things orbited around its little self. To be solipsistic, then, is to place yourself at the center of the universe, around all which, all other things rotate. All babies are solipsistic. They don't care if mommy and daddy are tired, hungry, sick. They want what they want and they want it right now. Everything is about me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, yes, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, yes.
Speaker 2:So when you're, the worst that a parent can do usually is to be solipsistic is to just simply not be aware of what's going on around everybody else, because they just, you know, that's the attitude, but nobody goes out of their way. To be ugly, that's the attitude, but nobody, nobody goes out of their way to be ugly. And yet, when there are people, when your children have gone astray, the same way as if your business is falling off the rails or if your latest, your latest endeavor isn't going as planned, you blame yourself hard enough anyway. Know that being human means you make mistakes. Being human means that you are going to be judged incorrectly. The only person you have to convince of anything is yourself, and what other people say and do usually comes from the kindness of their hearts. The thing is to look at yourself in the mirror and realize that you are a human being. You are no deity. You were not born to have all the answers. All you can do is the best thing you can do for the next five minutes.
Speaker 1:Right, and taking that concept, the next best thing we have a few more minutes I would love you to share with our listeners. What have you done in spite of this? You are super incredible and magnificent and, like you said, you have your third book on the go and ready to for all of us to read, and Well, what have I done?
Speaker 2:All right, I have tons of degrees because I am a lifelong learner. I thought all my life that I valued intelligence. In fact, it's not intelligence, it's curiosity. I find it amazing that someone can look at something and not be curious about how it was made or what its life cycle is, or what does this turn into? Or there's a pretty rock. In my mind it's that's a beautiful rock, let's look at it, let's appreciate it. A beautiful rock, let's look at it, let's appreciate it. And now let's pick it up and see what's underneath it. Uh, that's curiosity, and I value that. Curiosity to me takes the form of lifelong learning. Um, I haven't even decided what I want to be when I grow up yet now.
Speaker 2:I have worked. I have worked in business. I own my own business. I have worked for a major university in purchasing, I've done the boardroom, I've done, done the.
Speaker 2:You know, when you're this old, you got lots of miles on you and the one thing that I can say is that confidence can be shaken, confidence can be destroyed, but confidence can always be reinvented. Confidence can always start growing again, and from the most unlikely places. Remember that there is the Sun, is going to come up tomorrow. So what have I done? Well, I was a mmm. Have you ever heard the sacred gifts? No, the sacred gifts, your core power, your core, strength, your core, what you were put on this planet to do, et cetera.
Speaker 2:Well, my major one is I'm a teacher Now. I was a school teacher for a while. I taught drama and I taught theater to a professional theater group and I taught English in high school and music and I taught all those lovely kids to play the saxophone and the flute and the baritone and all those things, and so I actually was a formal teacher. In fact my license is still intact. But now I teach other things. I teach confidence, I teach resilience, I teach reinvention. My company is called Confidence Stages, because my company exists to help you overcome your confidence barriers, no matter what stage you're in or on, and so I teach people to speak in public, to give presentations that get the big. Yes, because public speaking is the greatest fear, second only to death. Jerry Seinfeld says that if you're forced to go to a funeral, 95% of the people would rather be in the casket than having to give the eulogy. My thought is, if you can learn to conquer that great fear of speaking in public. What can you not take on?
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So what I do is I help people find the way to. I help them with content and structure of their presentations. I teach them with presentation skills, I teach them delivery skills, I teach them room control, how to handle the audience participation things. And my special little piece of the pie is I'm a trained classical singer. I told you I had a degree in music as well, and so the use of the voice for speakers is something that most people never get. And yet you can invite with your whispers and you don't have to yell to make sure that it's intense. How you use your voice, how you care for speakers, this is their moneymaker. How do you care for that? So that's what I do now.
Speaker 1:That's awesome and I do it with utter confidence.
Speaker 1:You've come so far. You are truly so far. You are truly an inspiration, and this time together has just absolutely flown by. I've been so enthralled with your journey and what you've gone through and just listening to you share your story and really feel your emotions and I really hope that all the listeners that are listening and really something's triggered inside them I know it is and to really allow them to take that next step in their life. And you really have shone a light for me too, that if you can do it, why can't anybody? And to, really picking up the pieces of your life and moving on is so important and so empowering. Picking up the pieces of your life and moving on is so important and so empowering and.
Speaker 2:I'd like to offer if, if, because I'm about halfway through writing my third book on confident reinvention and I'm including people's stories of reinvention in it. So if anybody would, any of your listeners would like to get ahold of me and share their story of reinvention. I'd love to take it down and see if it can fit in my book. They can reach out to me through Confidence Stages. My website is wwwconfidencestagescom, and I'd love for them to get a hold of me. That would be great.
Speaker 1:That would be beautiful. How long do they have before they? Because this is going to be on the network so it can be shared over and over through time, okay so today's date is the end of May of 2018.
Speaker 2:My manuscript is going to be finished by the middle of July of 2018. So between the next six weeks. If anybody would like to get ahold of me, please do.
Speaker 1:And if you don't get your story into a book and you still want to get ahold of Rosemary cause, you feel that she's impacted you in some way. I'm sure she would love for you to reach out to her as well, for her services. Absolutely Awesome, rosemary. Is there anything else you'd like to? One more tidbit of advice or anything that's coming to you.
Speaker 2:Yes, I would like to remind everybody that nothing is permanent. The only thing you can count on throughout your entire life is that everything will change. You can't control it. You can fight it and bring up all that negative energy, or you can look at every new change along your path as an opportunity for an adventure, a new one you hadn't seen coming yet. Keep the enthusiasm high for whatever is to come tomorrow. It'll surprise you.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's beautiful. Thank you so much, Rosemary.
Speaker 1:My pleasure Rosemary Barnes, and she's truly inspirational and magnificent, and if you were inspired or thought of anybody while you listened to her show today, you know you can share it on wwwdivas that care forward slash Amanda, and you will find her interview there that you're more than welcome to share and empower other people to really make those changes in their lives and maybe to get through. They're going through a dark place in their life and they just need some inspiration and some light, and I really do truly do feel that she is that light. So thank you so much, Rosemary, and find us on the Divas that Care Network, and thank you so much for listening and I look forward to talking to you again soon. Bye, everybody.