IAM864- Director Finds Innovative Ways to Make People Better
Podcast Interview with Odelle Bowman
Odelle Bowman is an artist, award-winning nonprofit Director, and Entrepreneur. She is an affiliate with LifeVantage, a company that is a disruptor in the field of Neutrogenomics, developing all-natural components that turn on our DNA. LifeVantage’s goal and hers is to make people better and by so doing make the world a better place.
- CEO Hack: (1) Setting goals (2) Book – Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg
- CEO Nugget: (1) It's all about the relationships (2) It's the journey, not the destination
- CEO Defined: Being in control of my destiny
Website: http://www.odellebowman.lifevantage.com/
Full Interview:
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Transcription
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00:02 – Intro
Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.
00:30 – Gresham Harkless
Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Odelle Bowman of LifeVantage. Odelle, it's awesome to have you on the show.
00:39 -Odelle Bowman:
Oh Gresham, it's awesome to be here. I love sharing information.
00:44 – Gresham Harkless
No problem. I think you have a lot of information and share such a wonderful story. So I'm super excited about having you on. And before we get started, I want to read a little bit more about Odelle so you can hear about all these awesome things that she's doing. Odelle is an artist, award-winning nonprofit director, and entrepreneur. She is an affiliate with LifeVantage, a company that is a disruptor in the field of Nutrigenomics, or anti-aging if you know how to say that better, and developing all-natural components that turn on our DNA. LifeVantage's goal is to make people better, and by doing so, make the world a better place. Odelle, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?
[restrict paid=”true”]
01:24 – Odelle Bowman
Yes, I am. Awesome. Well, let's do it.
01:25 – Gresham Harkless
So to kick everything off, I wanted to hear a little bit more. I know I touched on your bio, but could you take us through your CEO story? We'll let you get started with all the awesome things you're working on.
01:35 – Odelle Bowman
Yeah, I was in the field of, nonprofit field for about 15, 20 years. My focus was always on making the world a better place actually, through using the arts. But from doing that, the arts and nonprofits tend to spend a lot of time doing things that they don't necessarily have the money for. So I worked lots of hours. And as a result of that, I ended up having an autoimmune disease. And all modern medicine could give me was prednisone, which is not a great thing. But I got off prednisone because I knew it was not good for me and I was dealing with a lot of pain. So I just exited my last nonprofit job, which I was very passionate about. But I could tell I was going through extreme burnout for having about 20 years of doing that work.
And the thing for people to think about is that nonprofits and their community are a blessing and they need all of our support. I just want to reiterate that now because we're in a time when they are getting less support. So going forward, I was in this mix of figuring out things. I was doing contract work for other nonprofits, writing grants, etc. When I was invited by a colleague in the community to come check out her Plan B, I was like, Okay, I'll go check out your Plan B. And as I was leaving to go to this meeting, my husband said, well, what's this thing you're going to? I said, well, I think it might be network marketing. And he went, Oh, you'll never do that. I went, no way would I do network marketing.
So when I returned from the meeting, he saw the look on my face, and he went, oh no, what happened? Cause he knows a look when I have an idea. That's what's now. Yeah, and I began to tell him what I experienced while I was there. This is when I was introduced to Life Advantage. They showed an ABC investigative report that was done on the flagship product, Protandim Nrf2. And that came about as the fact that a clinical study had just come out saying that it reduced your oxidative stress by 40% in 30 days, 70% in 90 days. And everybody thought that had to be bogus.
No, we're gonna go in and debunk them. They came out the other side and said, no, it worked, John Kenyotas had great results, et cetera. Well, I was sitting there and watching it and I went, Oh my goodness, if it does just a tiny bit of this, it probably would help me. I tend to be a yes person instead of a no person anyway. That's kind of how I encounter life. Yes. And that I'll figure out things. So I got myself on the product. And in 2 to 3 weeks, I had major results in my health and in feeling better. And I was blown away. And so my head went to immediately, who else could I help? Because I'm not the only one who has issues with levels of oxidative stress in their body. And for people that don't know, oxidative stress is the thing that causes most disease in people.
It's linked to over 200 diseases. So I jumped in. I was still doing contract work and other stuff on the side while I was figuring this out. Over the process, I've now been with them for 6 and a half years, an affiliate with a company, and I'm more passionate than ever as we've developed new products. We've extended from 2 countries to 22 countries. I've seen positive growth. We're traded on a Nasdaq. And I've met hundreds of people and helped hundreds of people change their lives. And that's kind of an addictive thing. When you offer someone something and they embrace it and find that their life has changed because we all know that health is the number one thing that's most important even though in our culture we don't always keep it that way or operate that way, but it is the most important thing it affects every area of your life.
So this is where I've landed. I encountered lots of negativity from my friends and artists and non-profit people as I'd gone to the dark side, but because it wasn't an experience they had had. And I also feel as an entrepreneur that often as artists, people, artists embrace the notion that you should suffer for your art and that, you know, they grab the mindset that poverty is okay if you're creating art. And I don't believe that's a paradigm you have to accept. I think you could still be an artist and draw abundance into your life. No one else should have to take care of me but me ultimately. So the journey I'm still on is spreading the word and letting more people know that they can up-regulate their genes and get healthier. And we've developed more products along that line in the years I've been with them.
07:55 – Gresham Harkless
Nice. Well, I definitely appreciate that and your being mission-driven. Obviously, sorry to hear what happened with the nonprofit and how you developed that autoimmune disease, but it's great to hear that you've been able to help yourself and help out so many other people as far as doing that. Because I think a lot of times when you're so mission-driven, you really want to see and have that addictive personality to be able to help people. A lot of times you forget to help probably what might be the most important person, which is often ourselves. So the better we take care of ourselves, the better we're able to help so many other people. So I love that you do that. So I know you touched a little bit upon those products. Could you take us through a little bit more of that and what you feel is kind of either your or the business's secret sauce and what you feel kind of sets you apart?
08:38 – Odelle Bowman
Well, the secret sauce is that we have lots of science behind our products, that they have, there are 22 studies on PubMed.gov on an all-natural product, not on the ingredients that someone else did, but on our products. And there are 40 more studies in the works right now. So that's the secret validating thing that supports the notion that all-natural ingredients can make us healthier. For tens of thousands of years, people have been doing it, but now it's become a major focus of formal medicine. Our secret sauce is people are able to take control of their health by making a decision to do something about it for one thing, I found once people start taking our products and things shift, they start doing other things to support themselves and their health.
And our secret sauce is that we develop products that up-regulate you at the genetic level. Your body, It activates your body to heal yourself, not supplement it. It activates your body to heal itself. It gets rid of your oxidative stress. Another one, NERF-1, heals your mitochondria, which are the power pack energy of your cells. The third one is Protandim NAD, which helps your body create sirtuins, which by the time you're 70, not creating anymore. And the sirtuins kind of, you might say, are the garbage men of your body, they clean out all the cellular waste. So helps your body function better. I certainly from using the products feel a lot younger than my age.
And most people think that I'm younger than I am, just because of how I have the energy to do things that most people my age, you know, I'm 68, I'm going to be 69 next year. I don't feel like I'm that old. I don't carry myself that way. I don't quite look that way. And it's all from the products. And, you know, after I'd been on them a year or 2, I read it to people I hadn't seen a few years and they were like, Oh, Dell, what's up? You, wow. You actually look better than 10 years ago when I said, what are you doing? So our secret sauce is you can take control of your health with all-natural products that are cutting edge and where the future is going in medicine.
11:23 – Gresham Harkless
Nice. Well, I definitely appreciate you for sharing that and, of course, doing that to help so many people out. And as you kind of touched on as well, too, a lot of times we don't understand or know kind of the ramifications of the stress that we have and what can happen. So I appreciate you for making us aware of that, but also, of course, providing a solution for that. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?
11:54 – Odelle Bowman
Well, I think what makes CEOs more efficient is they're being able to set goals and make changes in their own habits so they're more effective. And there is this amazing book, and I actually, a blessing, heard him speak for 45 minutes last week. His name is BJ Fogg and he's written the book Tiny Habits. He has a new approach to creating new habits for yourself. And when you break down goals, there are always multiple things that add up to you attaining those goals. And they're usually attached to habits that you have.
12:41 – Gresham Harkless
I love bad hacking. And so I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. And it might be something if you were to hop into a time machine, you would tell your younger business self.
12:53 – Odelle Bowman
I would tell her or any entrepreneur, it's all about the relationships. People sometimes get focused on what they want. They'll try to skip past the relationships and people are the core of everybody's success. And also it's the journey, not the destination.
13:17 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're open to different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So Adele, what does being a CEO mean to you?
13:28 – Odelle Bowman
Being in control of my destiny. That someone, my day is my day, and how successful I am really is up to be. I'm turning the wheel, I'm making the wheel run, and No one to look to but myself if I'm not going forward, and with that comes freedom I can do my work when I want to do my work. I can work as late as I want or not. I can take the day off.
14:07 – Gresham Harkless
Odelle, truly appreciate that definition. I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you want to let our readers and listeners know and of course how best they can get a hold of you and find out about all the awesome things that you're working on.
14:22 – Odelle Bowman
I want people to think outside the box. Think about the possibilities that are out there in defining themselves and what they do for work in the time of COVID, people are feeling limited I think and some people are feeling trapped when actually I think there's a real opportunity to reinvent yourself. If anyone wants to get in touch with me, I'm Odelle Bowman on Facebook, and my email is an easy one. It's Odelle.Bowman@gmail.
15:09 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Odelle, we will have the links and information. I'm in the show notes as well for people to follow up with you. But sometimes the same necessity is the mother of invention. So sometimes when you need to find a way, that's when those ways come about. But I think that we often forget that we don't necessarily need to be against that wall, so to speak, to be able to make those changes and adjustments. We can do that right here and right now. So I appreciate you for reminding us of that as well. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.
15:38 – Outro
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.
00:02 - Intro
Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.
00:30 - Gresham Harkless
Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Odell Bowman of LifeVantage. Odelle, it's awesome to have you on the show.
00:39 -Odelle Bowman: Oh Gresham, it's awesome to be here. I love sharing information.
00:44 - Gresham Harkless
No problem. I think you have a lot of information and share such a wonderful story. So I'm super excited about having you on. And before we get started, I want to read a little bit more about Odelle so you can hear about all these awesome things that she's doing. Odelle is an artist, award-winning nonprofit director, and entrepreneur. She is an affiliate with LifeVantage, a company that is a disruptor in the field of neutral genomics, or anti-aging, if you know how to say that better, and developing all-natural components that turn on our DNA. LifeVantage's goal is to make people better, and by doing so, make the world a better place. Odelle, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?
01:24 - Odelle Bowman
Yes, I am. Awesome. Well, let's do it.
01:25 - Gresham Harkless
So to kick everything off, I wanted to hear a little bit more. I know I touched on your bio, but could you take us through your CEO story? We'll let you get started with all the awesome things you're working on.
01:35 - Odelle Bowman
Yeah, I was in the field of, nonprofit field for about 15, 20 years. My focus was always on making the world a better place actually, through using the arts. But from doing that, the arts and nonprofits tend to spend a lot of time doing things that they don't necessarily have the money for. So I worked lots of hours. And as a result of that, I ended up having an autoimmune disease. And all modern medicine could give me was prednisone, which is not a great thing. But I got off prednisone because I knew it was not good for me and I was dealing with a lot of pain. So I just exited my last nonprofit job, which I was very passionate about. But I could tell I was going through extreme burnout for having about 20 years of doing that work.
And the thing for people to think about is that nonprofits and their community are a blessing and they need all of our support. I just want to reiterate that now because we're in a time when they are getting less support. So going forward, I was in this mix of figuring out things. I was doing contract work for other nonprofits, writing grants, etc. When I was invited by a colleague in the community to come check out her Plan B, I was like, Okay, I'll go check out your Plan B. And as I was leaving to go to this meeting, my husband said, well, what's this thing you're going to? I said, well, I think it might be network marketing. And he went, Oh, you'll never do that. I went, no way would I do network marketing.
So when I returned from the meeting, he saw the look on my face, and he went, oh no, what happened? Cause he knows a look when I have an idea. That's what's now. Yeah, and I began to tell him what I experienced while I was there. This is when I was introduced to Life Advantage. They showed an ABC investigative report that was done on the flagship product, Protandim Nrf2. And that came about as the fact that a clinical study had just come out saying that it reduced your oxidative stress by 40% in 30 days, 70% in 90 days. And everybody thought that had to be bogus.
No, we're gonna go in and debunk them. They came out the other side and said, no, it worked, John Kenyotas had great results, et cetera. Well, I was sitting there and watching it and I went, Oh my goodness, if it does just a tiny bit of this, it probably would help me. I tend to be a yes person instead of a no person anyway. That's kind of how I encounter life. Yes. And that I'll figure out things. So I got myself on the product. And in 2 to 3 weeks, I had major results in my health and in feeling better. And I was blown away. And so my head went to immediately, who else could I help? Because I'm not the only one who has issues with levels of oxidative stress in their body. And for people that don't know, oxidative stress is the thing that causes most disease in people.
It's linked to over 200 diseases. So I jumped in. I was still doing contract work and other stuff on the side while I was figuring this out. Over the process, I've now been with them for 6 and a half years, an affiliate with a company, and I'm more passionate than ever as we've developed new products. We've extended from 2 countries to 22 countries. I've seen positive growth. We're traded on a Nasdaq. And I've met hundreds of people and helped hundreds of people change their lives. And that's kind of an addictive thing. When you offer someone something and they embrace it and find that their life has changed because we all know that health is the number one thing that's most important even though in our culture we don't always keep it that way or operate that way, but it is the most important thing it affects every area of your life.
So this is where I've landed. I encountered lots of negativity from my friends and artists and non-profit people as I'd gone to the dark side, but because it wasn't an experience they had had. And I also feel as an entrepreneur that often as artists, people, artists embrace the notion that you should suffer for your art and that, you know, they grab the mindset that poverty is okay if you're creating art. And I don't believe that's a paradigm you have to accept. I think you could still be an artist and draw abundance into your life. No one else should have to take care of me but me ultimately. So the journey I'm still on is spreading the word and letting more people know that they can up-regulate their genes and get healthier. And we've developed more products along that line in the years I've been with them.
07:55 - Gresham Harkless
Nice. Well, I definitely appreciate that and your being mission-driven. Obviously, sorry to hear what happened with the nonprofit and how you developed that autoimmune disease, but it's great to hear that you've been able to help yourself and help out so many other people as far as doing that. Because I think a lot of times when you're so mission-driven, you really want to see and have that addictive personality to be able to help people. A lot of times you forget to help probably what might be the most important person, which is often ourselves. So the better we take care of ourselves, the better we're able to help so many other people. So I love that you do that. So I know you touched a little bit upon those products. Could you take us through a little bit more of that and what you feel is kind of either your or the business's secret sauce and what you feel kind of sets you apart?
08:38 - Odelle Bowman
Well, the secret sauce is that we have lots of science behind our products, that they have, there are 22 studies on PubMed.gov on an all-natural product, not on the ingredients that someone else did, but on our products. And there are 40 more studies in the works right now. So that's the secret validating thing that supports the notion that all-natural ingredients can make us healthier. For tens of thousands of years, people have been doing it, but now it's become a major focus of formal medicine. Our secret sauce is people are able to take control of their health by making a decision to do something about it for one thing, I found once people start taking our products and things shift, they start doing other things to support themselves and their health.
And our secret sauce is that we develop products that up-regulate you at the genetic level. Your body, It activates your body to heal yourself, not supplement it. It activates your body to heal itself. It gets rid of your oxidative stress. Another one, NERF-1, heals your mitochondria, which are the power pack energy of your cells. The third one is Protandim NAD, which helps your body create sirtuins, which by the time you're 70, not creating anymore. And the sirtuins kind of, you might say, are the garbage men of your body, they clean out all the cellular waste. So helps your body function better. I certainly from using the products feel a lot younger than my age.
And most people think that I'm younger than I am, just because of how I have the energy to do things that most people my age, you know, I'm 68, I'm going to be 69 next year. I don't feel like I'm that old. I don't carry myself that way. I don't quite look that way. And it's all from the products. And, you know, after I'd been on them a year or 2, I read it to people I hadn't seen a few years and they were like, Oh, Dell, what's up? You, wow. You actually look better than 10 years ago when I said, what are you doing? So our secret sauce is you can take control of your health with all-natural products that are cutting edge and where the future is going in medicine.
11:23 - Gresham Harkless
Nice. Well, I definitely appreciate you for sharing that and, of course, doing that to help so many people out. And as you kind of touched on as well, too, a lot of times we don't understand or know kind of the ramifications of the stress that we have and what can happen. So I appreciate you for making us aware of that, but also, of course, providing a solution for that. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?
11:54 - Odelle Bowman
Well, I think what makes CEOs more efficient is they're being able to set goals and make changes in their own habits so they're more effective. And there is this amazing book, and I actually, a blessing, heard him speak for 45 minutes last week. His name is BJ Fogg and he's written the book Tiny Habits. He has a new approach to creating new habits for yourself. And when you break down goals, there are always multiple things that add up to you attaining those goals. And they're usually attached to habits that you have.
12:41 - Gresham Harkless
I love bad hacking. And so I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. And it might be something if you were to hop into a time machine, you would tell your younger business self.
12:53 - Odelle Bowman
I would tell her or any entrepreneur, it's all about the relationships. People sometimes get focused on what they want. They'll try to skip past the relationships and people are the core of everybody's success. And also it's the journey, not the destination.
13:17 - Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're open to different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So Adele, what does being a CEO mean to you?
13:28 - Odelle Bowman
Being in control of my destiny. That someone, my day is my day, and how successful I am really is up to be. I'm turning the wheel, I'm making the wheel run, and No one to look to but myself if I'm not going forward, and with that comes freedom I can do my work when I want to do my work. I can work as late as I want or not. I can take the day off.
14:07 - Gresham Harkless
Odelle, truly appreciate that definition. I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you want to let our readers and listeners know and of course how best they can get a hold of you and find out about all the awesome things that you're working on.
14:22 - Odelle Bowman
I want people to think outside the box. Think about the possibilities that are out there in defining themselves and what they do for work in the time of COVID, people are feeling limited I think and some people are feeling trapped when actually I think there's a real opportunity to reinvent yourself. If anyone wants to get in touch with me, I'm Odelle Bowman on Facebook, and my email is an easy one. It's Odelle.Bowman@gmail.
15:09 - Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Odelle, we will have the links and information. I'm in the show notes as well for people to follow up with you. But sometimes the same necessity is the mother of invention. So sometimes when you need to find a way, that's when those ways come about. But I think that we often forget that we don't necessarily need to be against that wall, so to speak, to be able to make those changes and adjustments. We can do that right here and right now. So I appreciate you for reminding us of that as well. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.
15:38 - Outro
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.
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