You're listening to I Choose Me with Jenny Girl. Welcome to I Choose Me, the podcast about the choices we make to redefine what it means to evolve and thrive on our own terms. From reluctantly agreeing to an on air mammogram that ultimately saved her life, to weathering a very public departure from network television to finding love and partnership. Amy Robach exemplifies what it means to be a role model for choosing Me, I'm so thrilled to have her
with me today. Hi, hello, beautiful. When's the last time I saw you? Was it jingle Balls?
Was it? I feel like we saw you for a fleeting boat. Yes, but it was like and I thought we would see you again and then we never did.
No, it was literally a drive by.
Yeah, that's exactly.
It is so funny. You are beautiful, you are glowing. I think, oh, love looks great on you.
Thank you.
You know. I was thinking life changes so much and love looks so different at our age, and it will when we're eighty two. What does love and connection look like at this stage for you compared to when you were younger?
Yeah, well I understand it now. I think I did not know what love was. I was in love with my career, I was in love with ambition. I really didn't focus on giving and actually loving someone until I found the right person. And it's amazing when you realize you didn't know what you didn't know until you actually
find it. And for me, love is about respect, It is about trust, and it is about friendship and compatibility, and just for me, it's just so beautiful to want to be with someone and never wanting to leave their side. It's just it's I've never had this experience before, so this has been it's I saved the best for last.
Well speaking and not leaving each other's side. You guys are always together, your life partners, your business partners, you do the podcast together.
Some people pull it unhealthy. Yeah, you know, it's funny. We spent eight years being each other's really really good friends, and I'd say the last two years of that were being each other's best friend and missing each other and always wanting to try to hang out and just chill and go do our thing, and never being able to actually figure it out until we ended up in our romantic relationship. And now it's kind of like almost if we're making up for lost time.
That sounds so fun.
We have fun almost every day. We try to make it a priority.
Okay, so aside from work, how do you guys find a couple time?
You know what? It sounds funny because we already gethered twenty four to seven, and yet we will look at each other and say I miss you, and we have tried to. We have our spots. On the weekends, we always try to go to a brunch just the two of us, and we try to make a rule no talk about work, and I'm usually guilty. I'll start saying something like it is hard and we have to make an effort. So we usually go to any big horror
movie that's coming out. That's like a date afternoon for us because we get up really early, so date nights are like date late afternoons for us.
And wait, did you say horror movie?
Oh yeah, we're obsessed with horror movies. Okay, any horror movie. In fact, that was initially in terms of our friendship, something that connected us immediately because we didn't know a lot of other people who liked them, and when we found that we both loved I mean upset why why? Why are you obsessed with them? Since I was in second grade and sneaked to my neighbor's house and saw Poltergeist,
I have been hooked thrill. I think what it is is you get to experience heart pounding fear and like a thrill, a high and adrenaline rush without actually being in danger. And I don't think I knew that initially what attracted me to horror movies, but I do think it's this excitement and this you get to experience fear without being threatened. Actually, and there's this, I see it. I get excitement about that.
Yeah, so you guys connected over your love of horror.
Movies one hundred percent. That was one of our I think the first thing were like you two, and then we just started listing like like deep cuts and then you know, if someone is a true horror fan, like, okay, you're legit. Yeah.
I definitely wouldn't connect with somebody based on my horror film knowledge.
I get scared. So yes we are. We're slightly strange, and we've been judged for our love of horror movies. So yes, we had that in common.
Oh I don't want to who's going to judge you for what kind of movie you like my mom?
Oh why in the mom? Well would you get like any sort of pleasure out of that? I don't understand.
Yes, you said before you were driven by work and by achieving. Where did that come from? Did that come from your upbringing?
Yes, my parents were. My dad was cut off from his family financially, and not that they had a ton of money. And my mom came from nothing that in Harbor, Michigan, one of nine children, and my grandfather I think made fifteen thousand dollars a year as a home builder, not college educated, and the children of immigrants. So yes, they came from nothing. And then my mom got pregnant with me at eighteen and had two kids by twenty one. They were on food stamps and built themselves up slowly
but surely. But I saw the struggle. I was in a household where we were always worried about money, and my mom and dad really invested in my brother and I in our education and not they actually couldn't afford college, but invested in the support of getting good grades and accomplishing and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. And so they sat as sound and said, we have no money for college, so you got to get all you got. You have to get an academic scholarship or you'll, you know,
you'll have to take out loans. And so it was motivating. And so I just think that mindset of I got a hustle, I got to make this happen, and it just it moved me. It stayed with me, it's never left me. And that my dad. I watch my dad get his master's degree, become an amazing microbiologist. So you know, I saw people because they were so young when they had me. We grew up together, all right. I mean my parents were empty nesters at thirty seven.
Oh my god, that sounds amazing.
My friends were having children at forty two, forty three, and there's nothing wrong with that, but it's just so funny because my grandmother was a grandma at forty.
It sounds amazing because I mean I had kids young too. Now I was twenty three, I had my first daughter, so and I love loved every second of being a young mom. And like you said, I fully just grew up with my kids along the way.
So that you know, I think seeing them struggle and seeing them work their way out of struggle was a lesson that didn't have to be talked to me because I witnessed it.
Right at fifty I know you're at the same age as me. At fifty three, I'll say my age, but I won't say your age.
I'm oh, I just turned fifty three. I forget it.
I didn't want to like say it if you don't say it. Yeah, So at fifty three, do you ever step back and be like I just I'm tired of the hustle.
Oh yes, but the cool thing is right now, I teach and I are, we're our own bosses, and so we're hustling for us, and we're hustling in a different way. Initially it was rebuilding what we had lost, not just financially or but like credibility wise, like rebuilding our our trust and ourselves are our audience that we had built
and spent three decades building almost. I mean, my goodness, I had been in the business for twenty seven years, hustling, hustling, hustling, and you feel like in one one fell swoop unfairly all of a sudden, and everything you work for just crumbled. So you're fighting for your reputation, your credibility, and now we feel like we've built up a really cool audience where we get to tell the news with our perspective
and give folks updates. We've kind of created this little mini news network here out of our apartment, in our podcast room, and it's fun because the hustle now is for us. It's not for someone else, and I'm not proving anything to anyone else. Now, we're actually just doing what we love. When we get to do it together, that.
Makes a big difference.
It does.
Yeah, I can't imagine what that must have been like when.
It was hell. It was worse than it was, worse than cancer. It was the hardest, hardest year of my life. And I think anyone who has had who's been misunderstood, who's had a who's been judged off a false narrative that you can never reclaim, I've learned even though I was in the business of communication and certainly in the business of media, I did not realize what it was like once someone else tells your story, once it's already out there, you can never you lose control, you lose
your narrative, and you'll never get it back. So there's this acceptance that has to follow. That is really hard, and it's a part of what we all have to learn in life that we actually don't have control. And as long as we're so obsessed with making sure other people look at us the way we want them to or see us the way we think we should be seen, we're always going to be frustrated and angry because it's
never gonna happen. You have to let it go. You have to know who you are, respect you are, love who you are, and just be okay with that and have that be enough. Because if you're constantly seeking approval, which I have done for my entire life, I'm working on it, but I'm all of this pain that I have been through over the last several years has just broken me open in the most incredible way. But it's been painful.
Well, growth is painful, that's for sure. When you when that all happened, did you kind of like lose a sense inside yourself of who amy was like or what what like? Did you did the negative voices that you heard outside or even in your own head? Did they convince you?
Oh?
Yes, of like bad messages?
One hundred percent? Yes. Oh, I'm telling you I had to go into therapy and I had. I had been in it actually after both of my divorces, so it wasn't a foreign concept to me. But I am still actually in therapy just because I was so scared of I'm somebody who is a very positive person. I'm just naturally. I think I've got maybe even an annoying amount of positive energy that I was just born with. It's hard
to bring me down, it really is. I had never had any sort of negative thoughts about myself, not wanting to get up in the morning, not wanting to live, wanting to have another day of pain and doubt, and feeling like I was being chased. We were both being chased by the paparazzi every day for a year, like unrelenting, and it just became to a point where you actually feel like you just wanted to go away, You just want pain to end. And those thoughts scared me. I'd
never had them before in my life. But I started feeling incredible anxiety, and it was I had to deal
with it. And I think what happens is so many times your value and your sense of self is wrapped up in all the things that it shouldn't and it was wrapped up in my career, and wrapped up in my title, and wrapped up in what I thought people thought of me, my status that I thought I had in my career, in my profession, in my life, in my friend group, all of that just blew completely open and I had to actually recognize that I was putting my worth in something that was completely worthless.
You had to start at the bottom and work your way back up.
In a way, and I thought I had done that work when I had breast cancer. I had a you know, I had a year of hell of surgeries and chemo and uncertainty, and then all the years that follow you know, you're always worried about remission, sorry about recurrence when you're in permission, And so I thought that was that was my rock bottom. That's where I learned. You know what, just when you think you've you've did it, life will
remind you that you can still go lower things. Life course things can and I and I actually know that in a way that it's almost freeing because when when, honestly, if you could ask me what the worst possible thing would have been like to go through a divorce, to go through it publicly, to be publicly humiliated, shamed to have your face plastered across tabloids with the scarlet letter over you, having your teenage daughter see it all and have to live with it among their friends, losing your
crew job, losing your career. It all happened at the same time. It was about short of losing someone you love, and of course you could always go short of having something happened to a family member. It was like the perfect storm where everything that could have happened short of death happened. Isn't that interesting?
I can kind of relate to that because after my divorce my dad died, or just before my divorce, my dad died and my daughter got really sick. I thought she was dying, like it all poured down like a torrential rainstorm. And I honestly, I've had other times since then that have been challenging and have been, you know, not great, but that made me kind of realize, like, you can survive pretty much anything.
Yep, that's short.
I mean it's short of like losing a child. I don't know about that.
To me, that is every time and every time I see a story and I've covered obviously of those moments and had to speak to parents and grandparents who've just experienced it thin well, and I did. That perspective has
always stayed with me. I always appreciated that part of my job because it was always the ultimate perspective of at least my children are healthy, like I get that, and that Honestly, my children were what kept me saying because I knew, no matter how horrible I felt and how weak I felt, and how much I wanted the pain to stop, I knew I had to figure this out for them because I had to show them. I had to show them that you're stronger than you think. I had to walk the walk that I had been talking.
It's my cancer diagnosis. This is the biggest irony, Jenny. I was actually giving a motivational speech. It was Breast cancer Awareness Month. I was standing at a podium in Washington, d C. Talking to I don't know, five hundred and seven hundred and fifty people, giving them advice, telling them how to live better, when that tabloid was publishing those photos that were completely misleading. Because I just want to
say here and now, and I've said it publicly. TG and I both have, but we had been out of our marriages for many, many months. We both had our own places, we had divorce attorneys. Mine was actually close to being wrapped up when those when we were followed, when those pictures were taken, we just weren't public with our relationship yet. But this was not what it was sold to be. This was just them catching us in a relationship. It was not catching us in an affair.
But it didn't matter because that's how it was sold. So here I am standing at this podium and my phone starts just ringing, ringing, and I'm just like, what is going on? And I were walking out of there, like just everyone I'm handing taking pictures with people, and I walk out of there and I I couldn't have known at that point, but my entire world just completely collapsed. And oh the irony of me telling people how to
deal with adversity. I had no idea what I was about to just actually have to deal with for the next you know, two solid years. It was just one of those watershed moments that you will need.
Please explain to me how a false story can lose you your job, Like, how couldn't how can that happen?
Yes, I would like to know the answer to that. As well. I didn't think it could. Again. I think it was just an unbelievable confluence of events. But the problem was, we of course wanted to keep our jobs, and I think we were just like, please, this is We knew we did nothing wrong. We knew we didn't violate any any ethical boundary. In fact, I my parents, my family, they had all known that I was in
the middle of a divorce. But I just I really did feel and I know TJ did too, that once the truth came out, it was fine and we had I hate receipts, but we did. DJ's like, here's my new apartment. I've been here, I've been paying on it for three months, and you know, same for me. I was like, my marriage was over in the summer. We're talking about why is it there?
Why is that?
And I didn't problem. I did exactly, And we had every intention of going after the holidays. We were just going to get our family, our kids comfortable with it, and then we're going to go to ABC. We had our plan in place, and look, we were threatened. We've talked about this. We were threatened. We won't get into who it was, but someone wanted it to make it look the way they made it look. And once that happens, and we're talking to our our bosses and our network,
and they're telling us. We had a statement prepared to say, we're in the middle of divorces, you know, all of what we wanted the world to know. When those pictures came out and we were told that we could not put out a story, they didn't want us to say anything. They said, if you put out a statement, there'll be more stories. And so we did what we were told. We did what we were asked to do, and we
did not put out a story. The problem, we have learned now the hard way, is that when you don't tell the story, someone else tells it for you, and then it just builds and it builds and it builds, and once you've lost that narrative, you cannot get it back. It was excruciating not to be able to speak, not to be able to tell our side, not to be
able to say, is this a joke? And we actually believed and trusted that ABC would do the right thing, because once they did their investigation, they knew that they had nothing. So you know, we got fully paid. It wasn't you know, I'm.
Sorry to keep asking you questions about this, but I'm actually so interested, Like what happened between them saying don't put out a statement and everything.
They let us back on the air for several days. Yea, and the weekend happened and I was getting ready for work on Monday, and they something happened over the weekend. Someone made a decision and they just said we're going and I just said, please don't do this. If you take us off beer, this is now going to become because by the way, at that point, only a couple of tabloids were covering it. But when they removed us from the air, then it became just a juggernaut of
the story that we couldn't shake. And then they told us we were a distraction. They made it a distraction by taking us off the air. If they had just said we've done We've looked into it. Both Amy and TJ were clearly in the middle of divorces. We actually have proof of that, which we had and we support them, and you know, this is their private life. We support them. We hope you can wish them well. We certainly do. And if that had happened, you know, everything would have
been different. But you know what, I would just say, Clearly, there were lessons that I needed to learn. Clearly, I needed to go through this, and it's hard to acknowledge that in the middle of it, but I actually I knew it in the back of my head. I was like, this is happening for a reason. It was unthinkable, it was overwhelming, it was devastating, but I kept telling myself, I know that this is happening for a reason, and I am a completely different person because of it, and
I wouldn't want it any other way. What do you think The reason was that I needed I needed to reassess what was important in life. I needed to understand where I needed to grow, who I needed to become, and what I needed to let go of. There were things I needed to let go of that I wasn't going to let go of. They had to kind of be ripped from my clutches. And when they were gone and I felt like I couldn't breathe, I had to
realize I'm okay. I'm still okay, and I didn't think I would be, and I was, and I am, and I'm better than ever before. I am so happy, I am so in love with my best friend, and I get to wake up with him every day, I get to work with him every day. And when we kind of take a step back, we both looked at each other all the time, say, I still can't believe we're together. And it's not how we wanted it to happen. It's not when we wanted it to happen, but here we are.
Wow, that's incredible. So that all happened about the same time you found out you had breast cancer or was that before?
No, I mean I thought so I had gone through breast cancer in twenty thirteen. So I when I met Tej just as a friend, it was twenty fourteen. It was a year I had very short hair, my hair was growing back. I had just come out of I think I just started my drug therapy. I'd been out of Keemo for a couple months, but I met him for the first time. So, No, that was a journey I took with just and that was a tough That
was a really tough part of my life. And I went into kind of like hyper prove myself mode after that. So I started to climbing mountains Kiliman Jarrow and like literally like oh, I literally climbed two of the seven summits. I've run seven marathons all. I basically when I recovered, I just went into hyper mode of live like you're dying,
live like you're in a country music. I surrounded myself with just a huge swath of friends, just was living out loud and also avoiding the relationship I was in. So I was just putting myself into accomplishments even more than I already had at work. Now I was doing it every free second I had. I was training for a marathon. I was training for climbing Coziosko, climbing Mont Blanc, climbing Mount Baker. I had my kids climbing glaciers. We
were doing technical climbs in the French Alps. I was, yeah, I was running away. I was running away from the relationship I was in. I was running away from having to deal with any actual self reflection. I distracting myself from fear. And I can look back now and it was all cool and fun and amazing, and I don't regret any of it, but I can see it for what it was now. Yeah. Mom used to always say,
can't you just be still? And there's a reason why I was never able to be still because I was just searching for something outside of me, and every time I found it, it ended up disappointing me, and I had to Actually, it sounds so cheesy, but I actually had to start just being quiet and being still with TJ. Yes, we travel against we have fun, but I am so still I am and it's hard for me still sometimes.
But this has been the most beautiful, reflective, incredible amount of like spiritual growth and self growth I've had in my entire life.
It's so beautiful how the things that challenge us the most end up teaching us the most about ourselves.
You only learn when you're uncomfortable. If everything's great, you're not going to change. In fact, you might be a little cocky.
Yeah, talking about your breast cancer situation. You initially felt really resistant to doing that on air, mammogram I read that, but you did it anyway because they asked you to do it.
Yeah.
I mean, looking back, how do you process the fact that a moment of professional obligation essentially saved your life.
Yeah, And honestly, I've always said I can never I can never be mad at ABC News or regret being in the profession. I'm in because it absolutely saved my life. No, I was not going to get a mammogram at that point. I think the recommendation was fifty. I was. I had just turned forty. My mom is one of nine, my dad is one of six. I have so many and so many I actually cannot even tell you how many first cousins I have. And at the time, I had all my grandparents alive. So I always kind of was.
I prided myself on our good genes and I no one had breast cancer. It just was not even on my radar. And so when they asked me to get a mammogram, I was. I just said, this is I'm not the right person. I have no connection, no one has cancer in my family. I'm really healthy. You know, I'm not your girl. And that's when Robin Roberts told me, you're exactly the person who should do this because you
think you don't need it. And she's like, and I'm sure you're fine, But she was like, if you walk into that mammogram or the Mammo van that they had in times.
Realy one Mammo Van live.
In the middle of the show of Good Morning America, she was like, if you walk into that, Mamma Van and you get a mammogram on live national television. I guarantee you you will save well life. Some woman will make her appointment, she will go and she will find her cancer because of you. That was impossible for me to say no to. At that point, I was like, Okay, I'll do it. I just know. I was sitting here telling Robin I have no connection to the disease, and
meantime I have. I have two malignant tumors in my right breast. I have a positive note and I'm sitting here telling her I don't want to do it, and I just say thank god I did, because yes, that led to a stage two breast cancer diagnosis and I had a double mistectomy. I had to do six rounds of chemo. My auncle score came back moderate for recurrence. So I was on the opposite of hormone replacement therapy for eight years. I was on tmoxifen, which is a
rapidly aging drug. Yeah, at forty I went into menopause. You know that's I know people go they hate their period and they complain about their period. But I have to tell you when it's taken from you. At forty and you're told you cannot have children. You know you're done. It is. That wasn't the scary. That wasn't the worst part, obviously, just being afraid and concerned about having cancer and recurrence. But it's just another layer of just it part of
your womanhood, your feminine way. It's a lot to take on at any age. But you know, and I have a really good your friend who was diagnosed at twenty eight. She's one of my best friends. She's Stage four for seven years now. That is static thirty five, dealing with stuff that most young women never could imagine, and so is she is an absolute inspiration to me every day and constant perspective. We complain about all the little things
in life. Guess what, people every day out there are fighting for their lives to get one more day, to get one more week, one more moment with the people they love.
It's so helpful for you to put that in perspective for people, because we forget, Oh what I forget? Yeah, we forget. We start complaining about things and not you know, leading with gratitude and get caught up in the all the day to day minutia.
Yup, we all do it. And I'm telling you, even as a cancer survivor who is constantly reminded. You know, when you've had a double misectomy and you've got scars, you've got these like hard rocks, you have no feeling like you're I feel like I have two foreign objects like sewn onto me, Like your chest never feels the same. It's the strange sensation. So in a way, like just from that sensation of the double mistectomy, you it's always
on the back of your mind. You know that you're a cancer survivor and it and you'd think that that would just always put me like in a you know, a mood where I'm not going to complain about someone cutting me off, or it's raining, when I want son or son, sonny or whatever, I forget. I have to remind myself that, hey, I'm here, I woke up. It's good. I'm good. Yeah.
Man, Okay, So from that diagnosis, you learned how to let go of control, and you actually wrote a book about it Better I did. It's called Better What does control? What? What does?
Do?
You still feel like you've let go of control?
I still struggle with it every day. So it's funny. I know the line on my book because I did. You. I have to let go of control when you have a cancer diagnosis, because when you start being invested in the outcome, and that's all you're thinking about is the outcome. Will I live? Will I die well? And then you have to kind of get to a point where saying, yeah,
I'm gonna die, We're all gonna die. I don't know if I'm going to die of breast cancer or if I'm going to die of something else, but accepting that and recognizing that you actually can't control ninety nine percent of what happens to you. And so that did start me on that path. But Jenny, I am still having to learn how to let go of control every day in little moments, Arguments with TJ, arguments with my daughters. Wait, why do I need to win right now? Let them
I actually love. I don't know if you've read s Mel Robbins, but yeah, definitely, I tell myself that let them, let be, let it be what it is. So I'm on the journey. I hope I can get to a point where I can say that I have totally let go of control. I'm I'm still working on it.
Yeah, I don't think you need to worry about that being the end goal for you. I think, you know, stop controlling if you can let go of control.
Right, is not going to control myself to not control anymore?
Oh man, Amy Roebuck. Before I let you go, what was your last I Choose me moment?
I would say my therapy session I had a week ago. I was feeling I was feeling anxiety, I was feeling like I didn't have my shit together, and I said, I'm I'm going to I'm going to talk to my therapist. And look, I walked out of that room. I do it on zoom, and I felt lighter. I felt, I felt relaxed. I felt because I felt I was. I know I'm on the path I need to be on, and I know I'm not always going to stay on it. I'm going to fall off it, but I know I
how to get back on it. And so yeah, I chose me in that moment because it wasn't what I wanted to do, but I knew it was an investment in who I want to become. And so yeah, that was my last I choose me a moment.
I love that. That's a beautiful moment. Good for you, hopefully somebody out there listening will yes listen to that and it'll resonate with them. Well, thank you so much. I'm so happy we got to chat today, like actually talk without TJ and Dave around.
I know, I know, Jenny, thank you. I loved it talking with you two, and I love your podcast. I love how empowering it is.
Wait, we didn't talk about that we have a podcast together.
Yes, I do part two.
I do part two.
I don't because we don't get it right the first time a lot of us Nope, but the second time.
Or the second time fingers crossed for the third time for both of us, that's the job. Thanks Samy, Thanks Jenny, you guys. I'm very excited to share that my book I Use Me Chasing Joy, Finding Purpose and Embracing Reinvention is coming April fourteenth, and it would mean the world to me if you would pre order a copy or the audiobook wherever you get your books. And yes, I am definitely narrating the audiobook. So it's going to be so fun.