Turning the Bad into Good with Meghan Holder- Episode 82

How many times have you experienced a bad situation and it it spiral everything downward into a cycle of negativity. Letting it take you on the downward spiral is a good way to get nowhere fast. Plus you’re going to feel any better and it’s not going to help you move on. Instead, take that bad and difficult situation and turn it around. Use it as as a launching pad to do good and great things! In this episode, I chat with Meghan Holder on how she turned a tough situation into one that is now impacting hundreds of lives and improving the environment! So if you are interested in growing, improving, and impacting the world, keep reading!

Meghan Holder is an amazing person and loves to help others live their lives to the max! She does so many different things, but her main focus is helping people get through different things in order to live their best lives. She works in financial services, she is the director of operations for a Christian bookstore, she does house inspections after disasters, and she also makes a podcast! There is also a lot of volunteer work that she does including helping at an animal rescue, beach clean ups, and more! Now that’s a ton, but all of them have the same theme of helping other people and giving back, trying to make the world a better place.

Growing up Meghan always loved nature, it was instilled in her to be a steward of her environment. Her household was always pretty generous and hospitable. Now Meghan is out at the beach multiple times each week, and since she hates litter, she always does her best to pick it up when she sees it, even if it wasn’t hers. In the past few years, she’s realized that there are many different people that have her same viewpoint and vision to make the world a better place. It is very important to find those types of people and hear different experiences.

Her podcast is all about turning negative experiences into positive things. Even though something may seem bad, there are lessons that can be learned, and it can be looked at in a different way to make it not so bad. Meghan started the podcast in 2020 when everybody was quarantining, to try to make the point that yes, the world might seem pretty bad but there are good things that came out of that time. You can make the best out of every situation instead of being stuck in the mud. The positive might seem small, but it’s still there.

So how do you go about finding the positive? Meghan says sharing is very important. Share your experiences and other people may be able to connect with those experiences. Details of the experiences may be different to some degree, but your experiences can resonate with other people, and you may be able to connect with them through those experiences. One story that Meghan has is when she lost her mom ten years ago. It was very unexpected and for the three years after it happened, Meghan went through the stages of grief. She drank and did drugs. It was very difficult to get out of that. You have to make a conscious effort to do so. It took about four years; she went to therapy and did many other things to try to better herself.

Every year around the time her mom died she decided to do something that made her happy. So, she took a trip, often near a beach. She visited St. Augustine, Florida and decided that’s where she wanted to live. Now in order to honor her mother she organizes a beach clean up around the anniversary of her mother’s death. That has been happening for the past three years. The past year she had about 100 people show up. Knowing that yes, not having her mother here sucks, but knowing that something good is happening really helps.

If you are struggling and don’t think that you are capable of turning into something good, Meghan would say, take a few breaths and ask yourself what you really enjoy doing. Then let it sit there for a little while and figure out how you can expand it outward. For example, if you enjoy horseback riding, find a horse farm near you and see if they offer lessons and if you could volunteer there. Try taking the focus off of you and finding a way to hear different people’s stories and get a different perspective or possible solutions to the problem.

Meghan is impacting and changing people’s lives locally, and with the podcast even internationally. Her podcast had its first international guest back in January, and she hopes that she’ll be able to travel with her cohosts across the globe to interview people in person someday. She is trying to expand the beach clean up by making an app that will challenge others to clean up trash wherever they live. If you would like to connect with Meghan you can find her on Facebook at Meghan A Holder and on Instagram @meghan_a_holder. I would love to hear what you think about Turning the Bad into Good! Please send me a message on social media @Jonesinfor or email me at spencer@spencermjones.com.