Summary: “…that’s what a bucket list does, it gives you a check list and says yes, I did this. I took control over that and I made it happen!” – April Capil The Bucket List Life Podcast #63 - Author/Speaker April Capil Our next guest on episode #63 of The Bucket List Life Podcast with Kenyon Salo, is a cancer survivor, an author and a YouTuber who used a bucket list to climb her way back to a new normal after being diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer at the age of 35. Statistics told her that she had a 1 in 3 chance of not making it 5 years without a cancer reoccurrence. She made a list of 40 things she wanted to complete before she reached the age of 40 which included a road trip across the U.S., running a NY Marathon, and perfecting her own chocolate chip cookie recipe. In five years she beat the odds, completed her list and found ways of helping others along the way. Let’s meet the inspirational April Capil. Highlights of their podcast conversation: 3:55 April takes us back to when she was diagnosed with stage 3 triple negative breast cancer in 2008. She had gone to multiple doctors that told her women often had lumps and she even got a negative reading on a mammogram. A doctor finally did a biopsy. When she woke she found out that she had stage 3 cancer. She was devastated because she had just moved to Hawaii to start a farm and had a small internet sales business - she had her life planned. She had to have chemotherapy while she watched her small business collapse. Her self-talk was defeating as she told herself she had missed her one shot at happiness. “I dug myself out of that hole by changing the story I was telling myself.” 6:55 April tells us “I built a sort of ladder.” She made a list of 40 things she wanted to do before she reached 40 because she was told there was a high chance of a reoccurrence. She told herself “If I have 5 years then I am going to ring in 40 with a bang!” She spent the next 5 years doing all the things she was saving for “later” and she did check them all off! 9:10 As motivation, every year, on the anniversary she was diagnosed with cancer, April would look at her bucket list to see how she had progressed and what she had left. As a way for us to continually spark our excitement to check off our own bucket list items she suggests we pick an ordinary date “Use what ever targeting date you want, Cinco de Mayo? Alright if I am doing 5 amazing things a year then on Cinco de Mayo I’m going to celebrate those 5. You have to give yourself credit and you have to celebrate your accomplishments.” 11:10 No one knows if they are going to have a tomorrow. Sometimes it takes people going through a frightening experience to motivate them to reach for their dreams. Why do they wait? April sizes it up “I think that’s it’s scary to live in a world that’s unpredictable, so we tell ourselves that it is and we will always have time.” 14:15 April tells us about her books, ‘Recipe for Lemonade’ and ‘After Lemonade’. The first talks about how to keep yourself together when you are going through a crisis. The second is how to put the pieces together “after Humpty Dumpty has fallen of the wall.” In her second book she asks you to think about these 3 thought-provoking questions” * What do I not want to leave this earth without doing? * What do I notice I keep saying “I always wanted to do that.”? * What are the dreams you thought got taken away from you and make a goal to get that back. 17:50 “If you are afraid of something, the way to face it is to turn it into a gift of service.” April’s fear was having people see her with no hair, eyebrows, eyelashes with bags under her eyes, while she was going through treatment. So she faced it head on, went on YouTube and made a video on how to do your make-up during chemotherapy. 21:00 April says that she thinks as human beings it’s hard to think we are alone and to feel like we have no control over something.
