"Half my face had collapsed."

Hey, how are you? And if you say you're fine, I'm going to assume you mean like the acronym, freaked out, insecure, neurotic and emotional. So have you heard the term lifequake? Well, in this podcast, we talk about lifequakes, those unpredictable seismic shifts that in time lead to profound personal growth and empowerment. Here, you can expect heartfelt stories that reveal both the joy and the discomfort of unexpected change. And I think you're going to like it here.

My name is Sean and this is Something Shifted. Today's story belongs to Lesego. 15 years ago, 2010, and half my face had collapsed. And I was like, okay, what's going on? My father died from a stroke. So part of my process is, am I having a stroke? What's next? I know, you're busy and planning what your family will eat isn't always top of mind. Well, that's why we love YouCook and I can give you 50 % off your first order.

YouCook has really helped us eat tasty, nutritious food and it saves me from spending time in the shops because they deliver all of the ingredients for my chosen meal kits right to my door. YouCook's always adding new recipes to the website and I've even picked up some new skills because of their easy to follow recipe cards. And because YouCook gives you exactly what you need for each recipe, you never waste any food. I love the convenience.

I love the variety and the flexibility of their meal kits because you can choose two, three or four different dishes to feed one, two, three or four people and stay in control of how much you spend. Everything on the website looks amazing. So choose from meal kits or ready-made frozen crafts. Weekend boxes, desserts, pizza, lunch boxes, wine. They've got it and you can have it for less. Go to youcook.co.za and use my code hash shift 50 and pay half price for your first order.

Go get it, shifters. That's youcook.co.za and use the code hash shift 50 at checkout to get 50 % off your first order. Do it today. If you've been listening to something shifted for a while, you've probably wondered about your own life quake. Well, have you pinpointed the moment that things changed radically in your life yet? For Lesego, there are two distinct moments when the ground beneath his feet gave way. When he was 15, his dad passed away.

And when he was 32, Lesego thought he was having a stroke. I can tell you exactly what happened. There was like a local kind of a retail cafe like down the road. Went there to buy the paper, the star. And at the time I was developing a bit of a smoking habit, but not fully acknowledged. So I used to, they used to buy like single cigarettes. So I bought a single cigarette and I lit it. And I just couldn't pull on the cigarette. And I thought, God. fake cigarettes.

The protocol I had at the time was to smoke the cigarette and then brush my teeth. And so I tried to, you know, kind of smoke the cigarette and then went to brush my teeth and looked in the mirror and half my face had collapsed. you I was like, okay, what's going on? My father died from a stroke. So part of my process is, am I having a stroke? As the second eldest of six kids and the firstborn son, Lesego stepped into a role that was never meant for him when his father died.

And then 15 years ago, Lesego woke up in a body that stress had changed. And so I'm this conversation with myself. Am I having a stroke? I'm like, but if I was having a stroke, would I be able to think about whether I was having a stroke? No. Like, so you've got your faculties, like, are working, the fact that you're having this conversation with yourself. Okay, so now you need to go to a doctor. There's nobody else in the house. You need to go to a doctor. Can you drive?

Yeah, I think I can drive.

Okay, but you need to shower now and get into a shower. I can't close my one eye. I then get swimming goggles. I put the swimming goggles on and I shower and I get dressed and I get into a car and I drive to my local GP. She's not there. There's a young doctor who's there in her stead in Locom and she freaks out. So she's not very reassuring. And she says, you've got bells, palsy. But then she then says for her to be able to definitively diagnose me as that, we need to run tests.

So they run the tests. Lesego goes to see an audiologist, an ENT, and they run a bunch of blood tests. The not knowing is exhausting. Eventually it's confirmed. Lesego has Bell's palsy. Bell's palsy is a strange condition to have. We don't really know what causes it. There is no test for it. You get to the diagnosis once your doctor rules out everything that it's not. It's an unexplained paralysis of facial muscles that is often associated with the latent effects of stress.

It begins suddenly and can get progressively worse over 48 hours. It can affect anyone at any age. It's not considered a permanent condition, although it can have long lasting effects. Most people start recovering within two weeks. Some take up to six months and in other cases it doesn't go away. There is no known cure for Bell's palsy. So, know, you cross your fingers.

treat the symptoms as best you can, and get down on your knees to pray you're not one of the rare cases for whom this will be permanent.

I mean, stopped interacting with the world more than anything because it became an irritation. You walk into a room and people literally gasp. And then you must explain what's going on. it's how they were responding versus how I felt. And the work of having to explain what it is. at the time, I can hardly even explain to myself what the hell Bell's policy is. now I'm playing doctor. Like I said, it's a strange condition to have.

It can happen in response to diabetes, high blood pressure, exposure to toxins, certain diseases or after a viral infection. When you lose control over your facial muscles, all of the things you never give a second thought to become really hard to do. You can't blink. mean, something that we're doing every minute, you just blink now and you just blink again. Your one eye can't blink. The big risk is that your eye dries out and causes like real damage to it.

So you walk around with all of these eye drops all the time. So that was the, if there was some sort of physical manifestation or sensation or was the constant need to be aware of the fact that like your eye is getting dry just purely because you're not blinking. Sometimes Bell's palsy can cause hypersensitivity to sound. can cause drooling, excessive tearing, loss of taste, headaches, obviously it changes your facial expressions.

And even being on the phone is difficult because you have to hold your lips together because just to be able to speak properly because people can't just understand what you say on the phone. And when you bite into something, your lips have a role into getting your food into your mouth and now half your lips aren't functioning. And so you're of like chewing with one, biting with one. Like it's that kind of weird stuff. Our relationship with our body is often visual. Right?

So you don't feel fat until you look in the mirror. You kind of like okay with it until you do that. Lesego started a course of steroids, went for physio and electrotherapy. But something had started to shift for him, even after the first couple of days living with this condition.

In a day is like this realization that, I'm not the same. I need to put an eye drop into blink to ensure that I, you my eye stays okay. And I need to kind of like eat from the side of my mouth. And when I frown and look at myself in the mirror, only half of my face is frowning. So it's, it's things like that. But in the moment, I guess it's a nature of life in the moment, things feel bigger than they actually are.

The first week was me trying to just get on with life and having these awkward interactions with people and frustrations about being on the phone and trying to speak to this person about work related stuff. And I think towards the end of that first week, I was like, this is, this can't work. That was the irritation. But, but also I think there was a real understanding that I need to figure out what happens next. So that was the opportunity to then reflect. So what happens next?

Lesego started taking himself for walks in the park. It was how he escaped the confines of his living space, released his mind, and tried to take stock of where he was, how he got there, and where else his life could potentially go. because I guess it was an acknowledgement that the life I had before just, I couldn't go back to it. A lot of the stress was coming out of a desire to not even disappoint others, but not to disappoint myself. So I had a very, I mean, I had a very, I think I still do.

Some people might say a highly exaggerated sense of self. I think I can do really amazing things. And I was going through a time where I wasn't doing amazing things. And I wasn't enjoying what I was doing and I wasn't actually making a lot of money doing the thing I was doing. time, Lesego was working as a creative producer in Johannesburg. There was a time I was working, for example, in the South African Music Awards.

You build an army for a particular mission and you oversee that and at the end of it you have an event or you have a well shot TV commercial, drama series and then the team disintegrates. I that's the nature of a lot of that media entertainment space. It's a lot of freelancers. So you build teams and then execute it in. very mercenary in nature. The thing that I had a full passion for, which is filmmaking, was just a source of frustration. this is such a human condition.

Why do we stay when deep down we know we need to go? We stay in careers, in relationships, in spaces where we need to contort ourselves to fit in instead of acknowledging when we don't have room to grow here anymore. think the one gift that my father gave me was this highly exaggerated sense of self, you want to call it confidence in self. I've never felt less than.

I've never felt like I walk into space and the people in that space are better than me. They might be different. They might know certain things I don't know, but I don't have an inferiority complex. That sense of self-worth is an amazing gift to receive. But the thing I have learned is that our best gifts can become our undoing if we don't manage them intentionally. Sometimes you can run the risk of not being realistic about what you can do in a given situation.

Sometimes things aren't working out and your enthusiasm or your passion, your work ethic just can't fix them. You can't put yourself under immense pressure to make yourself proud, to make others proud. For Lesego, that gift of confidence from his dad was also connected to the first seismic shift. The loss of his father and the impact a loss like that has on a boy transitioning into adulthood. death of my father.

It's like, you know, like we talk about BC and AD, for me it's like nothing was ever the same. I was 15 years old when he passed away, raised by my mother from then on. So very close-knit family. I suspect that close-knitness was magnified by a loss of a parent at that age. I'm number two of six. I've got an older sister, but you know, we live in a society that we live in, incredibly patriarchal society. So I'm the oldest boy. So that always has its own set of, I guess, specific requirements.

And I also think I was quite impatient to grow up. you know, at 15, I think I imagined myself to be older than I actually was when I look back at it. You know, my father's estate has been wrapped up and all these. clue strings and I got quite immersed in that, for example, became incredibly involved in my siblings education. I look back and I think what the hell is going on?

You know, I would sit and look at my sister, my siblings reports, school reports, and have a whole session with my mother about who's performing, who's not performing, what is performing. And not to say I was like, you know, shooting the lights out myself, but I think there was a, there was a sense of. is wanting all of us to survive that moment. Sometimes that first quake sets us on a path that is so different to the direction we were travelling in that we spend years in survival mode.

And we get used to survival mode, to the point where we thrive in survival mode. But we don't realise that in survival mode, we're running on fumes and we become threadbare. He says to himself, Sean, knowing that this has been his own story for the past nine years. Psst! We make this show as a labor of love and because we believe stories about possibility are what the world needs to hear.

We'd love it if you left this show a five star review and followed something shifted on Apple podcasts, on Spotify or wherever you listen to good podcasts. Go ahead and share it with someone you love too. Now where were we? Sometimes, it's only when the second quake hits, like Bell's Polsey, that we get woken up and we have the awareness to evaluate what components of our survival toolkit don't serve us anymore. so with his one eye open, because unable to blink.

Lesejo had to wrestle with these questions more than a decade after his dad died, as he was walking around a park with a collapsed face, dealing with what was right in front of him and way behind him. There were a few questions I was trying to answer. I had decided that I don't want to live in Johannesburg. That I knew for sure. I found Johannesburg incredibly extractive and transactional in terms of just how people interacted with each other.

And that, I think that was a big part of kind of depleting my, do you sound very warm and fuzzy, depleting my soul. I was thinking of leaving the country, but I, incredibly close with my family and an idea of not having proximity of some sort with them just yeah I just didn't feel like I had the emotional energy to do that. At the time one of my sisters lived in Cape Town and always enjoyed Cape Town.

The question around where to next was then answered and then the next question is what are you gonna do in Cape Town? I'd always had a thing for hotels, everything about hotels. The real estate component of it, the design component of it, the brand and storytelling component of it. I thought, well, Cape Town and hotel industry. And that was the answer. I want to live in Cape Town and I want to work in the hotel industry.

Contracting Bell's palsy became the unlikely catalyst that gave Le Serreau the opportunity to reflect and something significantly shifted. Fortunately the Bell's palsy only lasted about a month and Le Serreau was lucky enough to make a full recovery. He tells me if you look really closely at his face you can still see a slight droop on the one side. But while his external recovery was And near perfect, the internal shift was permanent.

He uprooted his life, relocated to Cape Town and jumped into a completely different career and ultimately anchored himself in a marriage. think probably in terms of relationships with other human beings has probably been the most instrumental in as a learning experience, as a journey of learning. I think my relationship with her is definitely number one. I think what the gift, if you want to call it that, of Bell's Palsy is an appreciation of mortality.

You suddenly realize that it's not that difficult to die. And that life is not guaranteed. So if you're this person who thinks that they can do some interesting, amazing, consequential things, having that kind of experience sets off a timer in you. You realize that if you want to do things, you better do them. Maybe that's the thing you need to hear today. At the time of releasing this episode, we're already two months into a new year that feels like it only started last week.

And I'm so aware of how quickly life goes and that the only way things will change is if we stop for long enough to realize that they need to change. came to appreciate the importance of happiness. I mean, it sounds very airy-fairy, but I think a lot of people are so focused on success, whatever that is for them, because the thinking is that one of the end products of that is happiness. And that's often not the case.

If anything, for lot of people, the pursuit of that success is like the mind of unhappiness. they just, as they dig for that diamond at the bottom of the hole, they are digging themselves into a hole of unhappiness. And so I came out of that appreciating the need to be happy because you're happy. My sisters are gonna be my sisters and my brother's gonna be my brother until I leave this world. My mother's my mother until that happens. My wife is my wife until that happens.

Those relationships are a lot more important than any spreadsheet. And so Lesego's dad's passing shifted him into making the most of his confidence that he can do anything. Bell's Palsy shifted him back to doing things he enjoys doing, at a pace he enjoys doing them, so that he has time with the people that matter. Bell's Palsy reminds him of the power of the gift his dad gave him.

And so if you go back to this notion of having an exaggerated sense of self or ultra confident, I believe that at an individual level, I can make an impact. Not even we, I can shift things. And if I can find 20 people who believe that they can shift things, suddenly there's a multiplier effect. But I know that I can make change and I've seen myself make change in myself, in those around me. And because I have that, it can only translate into optimism, Cultures optimism and rational optimism.

I'm... innately an optimistic person. went for a jog the other day and I was feeling a bit down, demotivated, struggling and I listened to a song by the brand new heavies called You Are The Universe. What are the lyrics? arguably cheesy. If you can conceive it, you can achieve it. And that's why I believe in you and I believe in me. So that's kind of like the refrain in the song.

Lesego Majatladi lives in Cape Town with his wife and enjoys taking time to cook delicious three course meals and take leisurely strolls. I hope you take a stroll today, a time out, to slow down and think about what you want. Because if you can conceive it, you can achieve it. And here on Something Shifted, we believe in you. and impossibility. Thank you for listening to this episode of Something Shifted.

We make this show as a labor of love and because we believe stories about possibility is just what the world needs to hear. We'd love it if you would share this episode and be part of that shift for someone else too. I'd really love it if you left this show a five-star review and followed Something Shifted on Apple podcasts or Spotify. You can also leave a comment if you're using Spotify mobile. I read them all and respond and I might even give you a shout out in the next episode.

and don't forget to use my code hashshift50 at checkout when you place your first order on youcook.co.za and you'll get 50 % off. Join my mailing list 321 shift and you'll start the week off right with three things for your mind, two things for your body and one thing for your soul. Every second Sunday, you'll automatically go into the draw for giveaways. and have first dibs on tickets to live events too. All the links to all of the things that I've mentioned are in the show notes.

Big thanks to my executive producer, Ruenda, and of course to you for believing in possibility. My name is Sean, and this is Something Shifted. Bye.