The Story Behind His Success with Guest Akeem Shannon

Akeem Shannon joins Tina and Serena this week to talk about his journey with mental health.  Akeem is an entrepreneur, a pitch pastor, dog dad, and motivational speaker and talks very candidly about the windy path that took him to being in the happy successful place he is today.  Listen in!

Akeem Shannon:  https://www.akeemshannon.com/

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Mental Health Resources:

Suicide Prevention Lifeline: The Lifeline provides 24/7, free and confidential support for people in distress, prevention and crisis resources for you or your loved ones, and best practices for professionals. Visit https://988lifeline.org/ for a chat option or call 988 in the United States.

Crisis Text Line: Our goal is to help texters move from hot moments to a cool calm. Sometimes, that means we give our texters a resource – like a breathing GIF to help them slow down or a link to finding a support group near them.

Website: www.crisistextline.org

USA text 741741

Canada text 686868

UK text 85258

Ireland 50808

NAMI HelpLine: The NAMI HelpLine is a free, nationwide peer-support service providing information, resource referrals and support to people living with a mental health condition, their family members and caregivers, mental health providers and the public. HelpLine staff and volunteers are experienced, well-trained and able to provide guidance.

To contact the NAMI HelpLine, please call 800-950-NAMI (6264), Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., ET, or send an email to info@nami.org.

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) Helpline            SAMHSA’s National Helpline is a free, confidential, treatment referral and information service (in English and Spanish) for individuals and families facing mental and/or substance use disorders. Available 24/7, 365 days a year. 1-800-662-HELP (4357)

Mama’s Comfort Camp: a peer support network where moms of all ages and stages, from around the world (and across the street) lift up each other. Our motto is: Moms don’t need more advice, we need more support. Our lovingly moderated forums are always on: 24/7/365. Find us on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mamas.comfort.camp/

National Parent Helpline® Call the National Parent Helpline® to get emotional support from a trained advocate and become empowered and a stronger parent. Available 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. PT, Monday through Friday. 1-855-427-2736 (4APARENT)

Transcript

Serena:  Hey everyone, I'm Serena, 

Tina:  And I'm Tina and we are the Mental Health Mamas.

(MUSIC)

Serena:  Welcome to No need to Explain. We're so glad you're here. 

Tina:  First, as always, a quick disclaimer. 

Serena:  We come to you not as mental health professionals or experts in the field, but rather, as parents with lived experience who are on a mission to normalize the conversation around mental health. 

Tina:  If you or someone you love is experiencing a mental health crisis, please seek professional support. You'll find a variety of resources in our show notes and on our website, www.noneedtoexplainpodcast.com. 

Tina:  There's no question that today's guest has some well-earned confidence.

Here's how he describes himself on his website. He uses just one word, invincible.

I will quote his website as a quick summary of how he describes his life. At 15, I was bullied for being different. At 19, I flunked out of college. At 23, I was committed to a mental hospital. At 28, I appeared on Shark Tank, scaled my business to eight figures, and convinced Snoop Dogg, I was a branding genius. What changed, me? Serena and I found his story compelling to say the least, and have invited him here today to help him fill in the gaps of his story. Akeem, welcome to the

podcast. 

Akeem:  Hello, mamas. Thank you so much for having me on the show today. I'm really excited to be able to speak to you about mental health and the journey that I've been on. 

Serena:  We are excited to have you as well. You're an entrepreneur, a pitch pastor, Inc. 5,000 CEO, dog dad, and motivational speaker. I'm sure there's so, so much more. You've accomplished so much, but for our purposes today, we really want to talk to you about you and mental health. Think about what has brought you to this point. That's a really big question. So maybe just tell us a little bit about your

upbringing and your young life. 

Akeem:  Yeah, growing up, I've given a pretty traditional two-parent household. Mom came from a very Christian background. My grandfather was a minister. My dad just very traditional, black, American dad. As far as social issues are conservative, relatively conservative. It was a good upbringing. You had great parents, but it was not a household where you talked about mental health. It was one of those things where it's like, you just just be tough. You can be tough and you can go and do it. It was not an environment where I ever knew what anxiety was or depression. I never heard those words growing up. And I remember being in grade school and thinking that my stomach would hurt going to school and not realizing

until I got older. Oh, wait a minute. I think I was having anxiety, even as a kid. But I know what it was. I didn't have words for it. I just thought I had a stomach ache. And so, yeah, it just, it wasn't a environment that was conducive to mental health because my parents just, even though they didn't grow up that way. 

Tina:  Akeem Shannon, you are telling a story that many people tell, right? Many people tell that. So that's kind of a little glimpse into the beginning. So I would

say, when you became aware of first starting to struggle with your mental health, what did that look like for you? Like, so you had stomach ache as a kid and you're saying now you can reflect back on that. But when you really started having that awareness, what did that look like for you?

Akeem:  You know, I didn't realize it until, you mentioned earlier that I was in that psych hospital.  And it wasn't until I was around, you know, mental health professionals that I learned, oh, this is anxiety and this is depression. And just to tell you the route that I went on to learn that, you know, I faced a lot of difficulty, you know, up until maybe the age of 22 before I knew any of these things. So, you know, when you talk about dropping out of college, that was a direct result of not understanding my mental health. It's going through anxiety and depression and college, it cost me to lose my scholarship, you know, then I lied to my parents about my praise and go back up to the school anyway. And here I am sitting in this dorm room all alone for an entire semester.  And I'm staying up all night, sleeping all day. And I mean, I was just in a dark, deep, dark pit of eating cheese and crackers and not telling anyone in my entire life, you know, how it was feeling. And at the time, I was just like, oh, you know, I'm just nervous to tell my parents, but no, there was a lot more going on during that time. And fast forward a few years later, I remember I had this Thanksgiving weekend and I had this massive panic attack.  And I didn't even know it was a panic attack. I was watching a Liam Neeson movie where he talks about, you know, when you die, it's not the your life that flashes before your eyes, but it's the remembering of all the regrets that you have. And I just have this overwhelming sense of anxiety that continued day after day. It became debilitating to the point where I couldn't sleep at night.  I had insomnia for nearly 10 days where I didn't rest at all. And eventually, one of my boss at work was just like, Akeem you, you're not well, like you're a top sales performer and you are just not well, you must leave. And so I went to go see a therapist, which eventually led to me, you know, being committed into this hospital. And as I started going, you know, three times a week, you know, spending time there hearing all these tools or other people's stories, everything started to clip together. Like, oh, this is what anxiety is. This is what anxiety tech is. This is what depression is. And then I started just remembering all the times through my life where this was happening. And for me, it was honestly very liberating because all of a sudden things started to make sense. And it also for me was very hopeful because it was like, hey you can now solve these problems because you know what they are and you're you're learning tools to be able to move forward.

Serena:  Hmm. So it sounds like you've struggled with your mental health for most of your life. Do you have any sort of sense of what was behind it or what kind of triggered it?

Akeem:  Yeah, you know, so for me, that night when I had that massive attack, thanks to Liam Neeson.  You know, at the moment, I didn't know, but when I first went to a therapist, I spent, you know, out of our hour, I spent 58 minutes talking about how I was stressed at work. And in the last two minutes, I'm like, oh, by the way, you know, I'm gay and no one knows. But anyway, uh, working with us. So, you know, my entire life up until that point, you know, I had had these feelings that, you know, I am gay, but I didn't want to be gay, you know, I didn't want to tell my parents that I didn't want to move to the world that way. I was in sales. I didn't want to affect my job. And I believe at the time that if I have this truth known about me, then my entire world will change and all be for the worst. And so because of that, I hid that part of myself, not just from others, but I tried to hide it for myself. And eventually my body and my brain was just like, we can't take this stress any longer. And therefore, you know, all of these, you know, really difficult, um, mentally driven ailments started coming over me. And it was really that warning sign for my body to say, hey, this is way too taxing on us for you to move like this. Uh, and, you know, I had I had some of the tools I had now been, you know, I probably would have lived entirely different life. But it was, you know, when I, I remember I was going to see my therapist. And one of the big things for me that I was very terrified, I was, you know, growing up in a Christian household, you know, is very frowned upon, constant hearing about how this is the worst sin imaginable. And I was terrified that, you know, if I was to tell my parents that disappear, you know, we're going to disown you, you know, we won't be your parents anymore.  And the therapist that I went to happened to be a Christian woman. And I remember when I told her,

and I was like, I have to tell my parents. And the warm reception that I received from her, you know, being the very first person in my entire life I had ever said this to the first time I ever said it out loud. Um, you know, it gave me just that little bit of confidence to go and tell my parents. And I'll be honest, that conversation was very difficult, you know, with my parents, but it was so liberating. Um, because it, it allowed me to realize that because I had not dealt with this portion of my life and it had really not addressed the mental health applications of hiding this part of myself, my entire creativity and being was being limited by the mental gymnastics I was playing in my brain every day to pretend and to act out this character

that I thought everyone wanted me to be. And so I learned through this process that, hey, you got to do you, no matter what everyone else thinks. And I think that can apply to anyone in their life. And it definitely ended up applying to me in terms of my entrepreneurship journey because I went and did things that people would have thought were impossible if I had told them they would have said you were crazy. But because I now had this confidence, you know, within me

to trust myself and to love myself, it changed the way I moved through the world entirely.  You know what I mean? 

Tina:  I love that. I love that mental gymnastics. I've never heard that before.

And I love that. So I'm going to just do a little bit of, um, you know, back up and go forward here a little bit. So part of our mission on this podcast is to normalize things. And I think part of what you are normalizing. So you don't mind revealing how old you are, right? 

Akeem:  No, no, yeah, 31. 

Tina:  So you're 31.  So you're a young person. And what year was it that you came to terms with the fact that you were okay? And still we're feeling like the world wasn't ready for that. What was the year? 

Akeem: I mean, about I was like 21, 22 years. 

Tina:  Yeah. So that's not very long ago, right?

Akeem:  No, not at all. 

Tina:  So I just want to put a frame around that and say that still is happening to this moment, right? There's still people out there, whether they are 12, whether they are 16, whether they're 21, whether they're 55, right? Who are coming to terms with that in their life?  And it might not be being gay. It might be something else. And I would say this, people do mental gymnastics all the time, trying to navigate things in our lives without feeling them causes us to do other things in our life. You said you're eating cheese and crackers, right? There are people that do other things that are probably as more destructive than that in their world when if we were to normalize in more normal ways, embrace ourselves and have others embrace us and get the help that we need. I just want to normalize that in a very normal way,

right? What you experienced from tummy aches when you were little to the stress of wanting to tell people who you really were, right? Who you really are in the family that you were that you're in right now, right? So I don't know. Does that all make sense?

Akeem:  Oh, it makes absolute sense. You know, I think that, you know, I see some of the things that are happening on the news, you know, today with kids and it's just like, man, it's hard enough to be a kid as it is. And then to have people tell you that, you know, to live your truth, to try to to lift that mental health burden off of your shoulders. They're not okay with that. I mean, it's very scary. And you know, I feel very fortunate for the time that I'm in, you know, that I was able to do that. I feel very fortunate for my family that they're loving and, you know, kind people and, you know, that they accepted me and treated me, you know, just as they always

had. But, you know, it is, it is something that has to be normalized. And yesterday I was on a panel and it was a leadership and entrepreneurship panel. And one of the, one of the CEOs on the panel talked about about how he had anxiety attacks and literally every single CEO on the panel, including myself, all then dived into how being, you know, you see people who run businesses and all you hear is the shiny, oh, they're so great. You see all these billionaires and none of them ever talk about how difficult it is to live with that stress and the mental stress that you have to go through on a daily basis to constantly build yourself back up and tell

yourself that you can do it and you can keep going. No one talks about it at all. You've never heard Mark Zuckerberg talk about the mental health issues that he's gone through building Facebook.  But I can tell you from my little tiny perspective, it's massive. But when we don't talk about those things, it makes us all feel like, Oh, well, something must be wrong with me because they're fine when that's not actually what's happening. 

Serena:  Yeah, that's it. It's such a great point. So you talked before about, you know, wishing you had tools earlier in your life to be able to manage your mental health. So I'm curious if you could reflect on your toolbox a bit. And like, what are some of the tools you have in there that support you? 

Akeem:  Yeah. So number one, you know, therapy was huge for me, especially early on, being able to go see my therapist every week and work through some of those long deep-seated issues that I had never had the chance to work through.

So for about about three years, I went to therapy first weekly and then bi-weekly.

And then when I felt, you know, within myself that I graduated from that point, I would go every occasional time. But I felt that I had a lot of tools to deal with things, you know, internally in the moment. And some of those looked like meditation. So I try to meditate every day. I'm not perfect. But when I'm definitely when I'm not feeling well, I use that to help myself reset and to really gain perspective about, you know, what is causing me to feel the way that I feel. I'll also get rid of the shame associated with feeling anxiety and depression. I think oftentimes we can say like, why are you feeling bad? You should feel good. You shouldn't feel this way. And I'm like, no, it's okay that I feel this way. Just why do I feel this way? And as I start to dive deep into understanding why I'm feeling the way I am, then I can work through

the pathway to actually address the issues at hand. Also, I'm a big believer in gratitude and just taking a moment to be grateful for, you know, the things that I have, whether it's just the fact that my heart is still ticking and getting me up every day that my lungs are working, that I'm breathing, that I get to experience this amazing thing we call life in this incredible universe, you know, to all of the accomplishments that I had and the progress that I make and looking

back a year, our five years, our 10 years and saying, wow, look how far I've come because I think, you know, as we sometimes get bogged down in the day-to-day life, we can really get down on ourselves because we think that we're not we're supposed to be or we're not happy about the way that we're feeling. So I think that really focusing on gratitude and finding things to be grateful for is really helpful. And then the last tool that I use a lot is I really focus on my breathing, especially when I'm doing meditation. I found that, you know, taking really deep breaths and

then short, quick breaths and really just like calming my body. For me, it always just,

no matter what's going on in my life, it can allow me to feel good in that moment. And when I'm able to capture that moment, I can then hold on to it. And when I do that, it puts in perspective for me, all the things that I'm looking at and maybe fearful of are worried about, I can put them into perspective and to that moment. And I remember just one last antidote. I remember being maybe about 19 or 20 years old. This was before I, you know, gone into the mental hospital. And

I remember my mom when she got a traffic ticket would just, she'd lose it. She'd be so upset, crying, just so upset. And I remember I got my first few traffic tickets. And I'm just breaking down.  And then one day, it's probably like my third or fourth traffic ticket. I had a lot when I was yet, I hear that third or fourth speeding ticket. And I remember looking at her, I'm like, king, this is a 60-dollar ticket. In 10 years, you're not going to even remember you got the ticket. Why are you getting so

worked up and stressed out learning your day or even your week over the fact that you got this ticket?  And that was like one of those first times I was able ever able to have perspective about a moment and a feeling. And so I try to go back to that a lot to say, hey, let's try to give some perspective to this moment. And a lot of times that really helps pull me out of whatever I'm feeling as well too. 

Tina:  That's awesome. Thank you for sharing those. I think it's important when we share things with others. And maybe that just helps somebody put one more thing

in their toolbox. So I am curious about you as a black man seeking out mental health care.  And you talked a lot about your Christian upbringing, right? You talked about your family being conservative. I'm wondering about that aspect of your life, because what we hear from people is when people have different backgrounds, I'm white. I don't know what that feels like, right?  What does that feel like? And how is that different for you?  

Akeem:  And just to clarify, do you mean as a mental health aspect? 

Tina:  Yeah, no, I would say, okay, so I would say seeking mental health care therapy. Like, how is it different for you?  Is it, I mean, you talked about your, so I'm just going to say like, you're being gay and Christian, like there are relationships with that. I don't know how the black culture embraces mental health because that's not my culture. I don't know. I don't know what that's like. And we've heard from others, but I'm just curious what your perspective is on that.

Akeem:  Yes. So, you know, I think that in my household in a lot of black households, you know, going to a therapist or dressing mental health concerns, if seen as a weakness, right, it's like, well, you only need to go to a doctor or something broken. And so by going to seek mental health, it's the admission that something's broken, at least that's the way it's looked at. Rather than saying, hey, you exercise to be healthy, you go and address your mental health with a practitioner to be healthy. It's not seen that way. And that is changing as it's changed, you know, in the culture

at large over the past, you know, 10 to 15 years, but it's definitely lagging behind the slower.  And I think a lot of that does come back to the Christian roots because when you look at the legacy of slavery, which then led into a lot of black Americans being Christian, there was this, you know, it's very hard. It was very difficult. And people just lived through absolute atrocities.  And so for you to say, your mental health is messed up because you're stressed about something is like, well, you know, people been through works, you know, so you should be fine and they

were tough and they didn't have that. And the only thing they needed was Jesus. And so Jesus got them through. And so I think that it's one of those things where some, for some people, not only is it, well, you must be weaker, you must be broken to go seek mental health, but it's also for some people, almost like a judgment on the power of their faith or the power of Jesus or the power of God, because it to them, it seems like you're admitting that, well, Jesus can't help you. God can't help you. The church can't help you. And that is the, you know, that is a, a, a existential threat to, to long hail deep rooted beliefs. And so I, I often equate it to, you know, when they first realized the world was round and the church was killing people who

were saying the world was round because in their mind they're like, well, we've been telling people the world's flat. And if the world's round and, and we're also not in the sun doesn't revolve around us, it revolves around the, we were all around the sun, all these things then break down these beliefs that were tied to faith. And I think that the same thing applies is specifically in the black community to mental health. And like I said, this is changing and is changing fast.  My parents have changed a lot over the last 10 years. I've seen it change, but it's still,

it's still there. And I do see it. So I think that does make a difference because now,

not only do you have the shame of feeling bad, but you have the shame of going to get help. And so that is a very dangerous place to be in. But the last thing I want to acknowledge too is, is there's also this fear that exists, you know, particularly within the black community separately, you know, from any type of faith issues. And that's because, you know, in our country, particularly in the health system in the medical field, black people have been subject to experimentation, exploitation, whether you see things like the Tuskegee experiments that were happening, you know, whether they're injecting sickle cell in the people's blood and, you know, all these things. And so people like my grandfather, he was alive for all that. He knew people that went through that, that were experimental. So he has a big fear of going to the doctor,

because he knew people that were castrated, who were experimented on, women who had their ovaries removed, these people went to his church. And so he would see these things happening, and it gives him a fear. And so I think that that kind of bleeds over to all aspects of the medical field for certain people. And it's just one of those things where that trust was broken.  So there's a lot of layers, you know what I'm saying that are there. And I think that ultimately it leads to a lot of hesitation. 

Serena:  Yeah. It makes perfect sense. Yeah, absolutely. So I can imagine where we're coming to the end of our time here. And I want to make sure people know where they can find you. 

Akeem:  Yeah of course. If you want to see a little bit more about my crazy journey called life and how I deal with some of these issues, you can follow me at Akeen Shannon, that's AKEEMShannon, or visit my website, akeemshannon.com 

Tina:   Awesome. And we'll put that all in the notes. So Akeem Shannon, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing bits of your story and for your vulnerability. And we thank you for being a leader, a young leader in the mental

health, normalizing mental health in the world. We appreciate it. 

Akeem:  Thank you so much for having me, Tina and Serena.

Tina:   And so podcast friends, we are as always grateful for all of you listening and supporting us. You can help us out by visiting Apple Podcast. Leave us a review while you're there. Please subscribe and share the podcast with others. You'll find more content on our website www.noneedtoexplainpodcast.com. You will also find us on all the socials and we would love to hear from you.

Serena:  And this is your gentle reminder to take good care of yourself while you're also taking care of your people. 

Tina:  Thanks so much for listening. 

Serena:  Bye.