Inspirational Interview: Fiona Disegni, CEO, Rentez-Vous
Katrina Starzhynskaya , CEO and Founder, Health Mastery and Retreats, author of 3 books on health, nutrition, and following your life mission.
- Above is the short version of the interview.
- For the Full interview (23 minutes) Click here.
- Below is the transcript of the short version.
Rebecca Rachmany, CEO, Gangly Sister: So why don’t you introduce yourself?
Katrina: Sure. Nice to meet you Rebecca, and thanks so much for having me here. My name is Katrina Starzhynskaya. I’m an entrepreneur and author and I’m a health expert. I help people recover from some kinds of degenerative illnesses.
Rebecca: Great. So how did you get into this field? What inspired you to go into this field at all?
Katrina: While I was in school, I became sick overnight. Overnight I woke up with a mysterious disease. Half of my face was paralyzed, half of my body was numb, I was in excruciating pain. I ended up in the emergency room, of course. The doctor’s didn’t know what was wrong with me. I started going from doctor to doctor and they told me nothing was wrong with me, that it was all in my head. . One day I was so ill I was rushed to the emergency room in an ambulance and after spending 12 hours doing all kinds of tests, I was about to be released home again without any known cause for my symptoms, a doctor told me I could have Lyme disease. Lyme disease is caused by a tick bite, a deer tick bite. Because I live in New York City and we have no deer in the city of course, the doctors told me that was not possible and all my tests were negative.
So to make a long story short, it took me about 3 years to heal myself. And I spent close to 200 thousand dollars on resources and treatment. That was my main thing that inspired me to write and publish my book and help people to recover from Lyme disease and all kinds of disease.
Rebecca: So what do you suggest to somebody who knows they have this passion, and they’ve been brought up like you that they should toe the line and get a good education and get a good job, but they know they want something else? What do you suggest to those people? How can they just take that first step?
Katrina: That’s a great question. I think that those people need to do a little bit of research and find people who already reached their goals. So find role models and find out what those roles models or people have done to achieve their goals and just model them, step by step model them.
I do believe in mentorship because I do have a lot of role models and mentors for myself. This is how I personally grow. It’s not necessarily to hire someone or to have a coach. You can have a coach just by reading books, and listening to audio books, and there is so much free information nowadays on line. You can find information on youtube, or inspirational videos, so there is no excuse not to have mentorship like virtual mentorship.
And also it’s very important to surround yourself with positive, like-minded people. Unfortunately, so many people around us, even our friends and family members, they are in a state of fear that if we become successful we would change and they don’t want us to change, so they will always pin us down and tell us we should not daydream or we should not dream so big. We should be realistic, they like this word “to be realistic” or they would tell us it’s not possible. So it’s very important to surround yourself with like-minded, positive people, and model your role model.
Rebecca: Can you tell me something that, you know, a failure that you might have had and how you recover from that? Because I think as business people, not everything you try works, right?
I hired a very expensive business marketing team that was supposed to build the whole marketing campaign and the whole structure. And I invested all the money I had, and I actually borrowed money. In the end, it was, I wouldn’t say a scam, but those people didn’t deliver anything they promised. And they said, “Well, unfortunately, we are not an expert in health and wellness or your product isn’t good, that’s why people don’t buy it.” So I didn’t have any results but I lost all my money. I was almost about to quit. So that was one of the biggest failures.
Rebecca: What did you tell yourself after that? Like, at first I told myself all these bad things. What did you tell yourself to get back up?
Katrina: Well, I told myself that every failure is really not a failure. It’s just an obstacle on my way to success. I thought, well, this is my worst obstacle and this is my biggest one and I know that everything else is going to be, even if I have more obstacles they are going to be much smaller. It is going to take me much longer than I anticipated, however, if this is my goal and my dream to be a big business, no matter how long it will take I just keep proceeding and attempting to succeed and it did work out eventually.
Rebecca: Well, that’s a fantastic paradigm and I’ve never heard anyone say it just like that, which is: The worse you feel, the more you can be sure that the other obstacles are going to be easier than this one.
Katrina: That’s exactly how I felt.
I believe in every business you get people who are very satisfied with your services and people who are not satisfied. And apparently, usually those people that are not satisfied, when I check them out, they are not satisfied with anything in their life. It is just their nature.
Rebecca: You said you like to try things and take risks. What was one of more crazy things you tried, and you thought, this isn’t going to work, but it did. Like, something you thought was never going to work but it worked.
K. I was told that since English is not my first language, and I was good in math, and physics, I was told in school that my writing skills are not good and I should never write anything. So when I was writing my book it was more like, just writing a blog and I gave it to my family members so they would learn about my healing journey. And it was a great success. People just know and love my books. Now I get speaking engagements with my book and stuff like that. That was like a crazy thing that I thought would never work out. And actually I’m launching another book, in a few weeks. Now I understand that it was meant to be and it’s really easy. When people told me I would never be able to write, that was, you know, not sure. I should never listen to what people say. And nobody, actually, should listen to negative people.
Rebecca: this is your third book. Can you tell me a little bit about it or is it secret?
Katrina: No, it is not secret. This is actually about my life journey, so it will have all kinds of stories of how I opened the business, what happened, what I did wrong, my mistakes and how people can avoid those mistakes. But the main aspect is on mindset and self-discipline,
About the author
Rebecca Rachmany is the CEO of Gangly Sister. As a high-tech entrepreneur with more than 25 years of experience, Rebecca is a partner in the Microsoft Ventures Azure R&D Accelerator. She has served over 100 high-tech companies and startups in their marketing efforts.
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