Stop Letting Fear Drive The Story with Jenna Schutt

A crisis doesn’t just test your life, it tests your inner wiring. When the body becomes unfamiliar or the future stops feeling predictable, most of us discover we’ve been building our coping strategies on autopilot. That’s why this conversation with Jenna Schut hit so hard for us: she insists resilience is not a personality trait, it’s a practice you can train before you need it.

Jenna is a former cardiac registered nurse who later found herself on the other side of the hospital bed, facing chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant while raising two small children. We talk about the moment she realized “faith knowledge” isn’t the same as practiced faith, and how she began retraining her mind when fear and anxiety tried to take over. She breaks down her idea of the “joy reflex,” where peace and joy become a first response, and we connect that to neuroplasticity and the biblical concept of renewing your mind.

We also explore what changes when a caregiver becomes a patient: how presence, kindness, and not feeling alone can change everything in a hospital room. If you’re navigating chronic illness, medical trauma, caregiving, anxiety spirals, grief, or any hard season, you’ll leave with a simple framework: take the next faithful step, repeat it, and let those small choices become your strength.

If this helped you, subscribe for more, share it with someone who needs steadiness right now, and leave a review so more listeners can find the show.

Transcript

When Life Changes Without Warning

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Dear listeners, there's a quiet thing that happens to almost every human being eventually, like uh life without warning, hands you a session or kind of season that you didn't ask for and have no idea how to navigate, right? A diagnosis, a loss, a version of your own body that uh suddenly behaves like a machine you no longer recognize. And in those moments we discover something most of us manage to avoid thinking about for years. Almost all of our uh coping strategies, our inner steadiness, our uh I'd say, sense of trust in the world, we are assembled passively in the background on autopilot. So uh we never actually uh build them on purpose, and when the storm finally arrives, we find out exactly how much weight that quietly assembled the inner structure that can actually hold.

Introducing Jenna And The Core Idea

SPEAKER_00 1:18

So hey Delphine, welcome back to another powerful episode of Mind Meets Machine. I'm your host, Avek, and today the machine we are going to talk about is not outside us. It's it's I'd say mostly uh it's it's kind of two of them, really. That the biological one and the human body that holds us together until it suddenly doesn't. And the inner one, the architecture of resilience, we either build on purpose day by day, or are forced to assemble in the middle of a crisis when we needed it most, right? And we are going to talk about all of this with someone who has lived inside both the versions as a nurse and as a patient, and somehow come through it with a message that's worth a lot of people's time tonight. So please welcome my guest, Jenna Schut. So welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 2:14

Thank you so much for having me. I think that you did a beautiful job introducing the thoughts of what we train for and what we are ready for, is how we are going to practice and how we're going to act in the middle of crisis. And I really talk a lot about that. So thank you so much for the introduction.

SPEAKER_00 2:33

Thank you so much. And dear listeners, like before we delve deep into the discussion, I'll quickly, very quickly, I'll just introduce you with Jenna. So she is a former cardiac registered nurse and author and a speaker who helps people build the faith, endurance, and resilience in the hardest seasons of life. So she walked through chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant while raising young children, and now teaches a practical, faith-centered approach to staying anchored when life stops behaving the way you planned. Yeah. So her line that stayed with me, like and definitely want to spend this today inside it, and is that resilience can be trained, and faith can be your first response, not your last. Right? So I can't wait to discuss more in details about it. So, dear listeners, I'll not take much of time. Let's get started. Welcome to the show again. I'm really, really honored to have you here.

SPEAKER_01 3:32

Thank you so much. And I'll just talk a little bit about my story just

Sepsis And The Gap Between Faith And Practice

SPEAKER_01 3:36

to start with. And you kind of already mentioned quite a bit of the story, but I was a cardiac nurse before all of this started. And shortly after my second son was born, I ended up with a horrible infection, ended up in the step-down unit right next to the ICU, where they were telling me that I was septic and that I had organ involvement if I didn't get treated. So, really, my journey starts there because during that time in the hospital bed, I had lots of faith knowledge. So I had grown up in church, I had read all the Bible verses, I had been to the Sunday school, I'd been to the BBS, I'd been to all of those things, and I had that knowledge of faith. But what I quickly realized is there is such a difference between knowledge, faith, and practice faith. And I remember sitting in that room and calling my husband and saying, I'm so scared. I was in and out of consciousness. I had a less than one month-old baby at home and an 18-month-old at home. And I didn't want to not be there for them. And I remember him telling me what now I call the joy reflex and how to train that faith, peace, and joy to be that first response and not your plan B and not your last resort. And what he told me is what started that whole thing. And he said, I want you to get in the word and find those verses that apply to what you're going through. And then I want you to continually listen to healing verses, to people's testimonies, to teachings that talk about that. And what that is, is renewing your mind. And what we call that in the medical world now is neuroplasticity. So retraining your brain and those neural pathways, where they're going to go when the crisis comes.

SPEAKER_00 5:44

So

Resilience As Training And Neuroplasticity

SPEAKER_00 5:45

definitely. I mean, thank you so much for sharing that. And here I think I should start with some, and it's not a negative, but definitely I want to start with a misconception, uh, Jenna, because uh I think it's the it's the one most people carry around their whole lives, uh, often without ever questioning it. So the dominant idea that about resilience in our culture is that it's something you either have or you don't, right? So some people are just I mean, just build strong, some people fall apart. And the line between the two is mostly genetic or I'd say temperamental or about the family you happen to be born into. But your entire thesis pushes back on that heart. So if you can just share share, like what do most people fundamentally misunderstand about what resilience actually is and what trainable really means when you say it?

SPEAKER_01 6:45

That's a great question because I think a lot of people do look at faith and peace and joy and resilience and endurance and all of those things as character traits, or they look at them as, like you said, you either have them or you don't, or you have something inside of you that's either going to be able to push you through these crises or you're gonna fail and be crushed under the weight of them. And I think what I really talk about is the fact that you can train your brain, you can retrain yourself into those things that you need during that crisis. So that resilience, that courage, that faith, that peace, and that joy. And what you're doing is you're pulling on what is already inside of you. So if you're a believer, if you believe in Jesus, if you have accepted him into your heart, then that those fruits of the spirit are already inside of you. But they're not forced on you. They are there, available, they're ready for you, and you have that responsibility to pull on those things. But how do you do that? And that is what the joy reflex is is training yourself on how to make those things your first response. And all of that really lines up with neuroplasticity, which is the medical term for what we call it now. But what the Bible says is renewing your mind, is not having anxiety, right? Is doing all of those things that the word says and has been teaching for so long. And now the science is backing that up. And so there's frameworks that I teach on how to do that in your own life and what that looks like, because it is very much something that you can do. And I like to use myself as the example, as the testimony of that, because I grew up with lots of anxiety. I grew up with lots of issues with thoughts and minds and spiraling panic and all of these things. And if you look at where I am now, I am a testament of the ability to train your brain to have peace and joy and faith in the middle of some of the most difficult circumstances. And if you ask those doctors that were around me during that time, they would come in and they would say, You always are smiling, you always have a positive attitude. Even no matter what we are telling you, we can come in and know that you are going to have a positive attitude. And that was not within my own self and my own capabilities of doing that, but that was really that inner strength and that inner fortitude that the Lord had put in me available. But then I had to be the one to draw on that, to pull on those things. And if you look in the word, it says, the joy of the Lord is our strength. So that is not just something that is circumstantial. It is not just something that is going to come when you need it, but it is something that's there when you need it. And you can train yourself to pull on that and to go towards that.

SPEAKER_00 10:11

Exactly, exactly. Correct. Uh and and the moment you yourself realized that resilience was not an innate quality that you had, or maybe didn't have, but something you did been quietly building all along.

Cancer, Motherhood, And The Next Step

SPEAKER_00 10:26

So, what was that recognition like?

SPEAKER_01 10:28

I think the recognition was something that wasn't just a light bulb moment. It wasn't like a something that I just switched on or switched off and suddenly realized. It was something that was built throughout the time that I was diagnosed through chemotherapy, through stem cell transplant, and raising young children during that whole time. So when I was diagnosed seven years ago, both of my babies were still in diapers. I had two very small children. And the realization of this before and after, where you're a mom, you are a caregiver, you are a wife, and then you get flipped into this after of now. I'm on cology patient, I'm a stem cell transplant patient, I am a survivor, I live with chronic illness. And to have that before and after switch, you don't realize in the moment what you're building, but then you look back on it and you say, look what the Lord brought me through and how he taught me in his word what to stand on and how to do these things that I didn't know I had the strength to do in the time. But he's he supplied that strength as I was willing to walk through it in him and through him. And I think that those are things that are so important to know. And a lot of things that I talk about is you don't have to walk up the whole staircase. So if someone was saying, I just want you to take the next faith step, which is something I say a lot, no one would look at a full staircase and expect you to jump from the bottom to the top in one leap. And a lot of times that's the pressure we put on ourselves in faith and peace and joy, that we need to just go from the bottom to the top without taking any steps in between. And if we don't, we put this guilt on ourselves, like we're not good enough, we're not doing it right, we can't be moving forward. But I like to say, just take the next step and then just take the next step after that, and the next step after that. And after a while, you'll look back and you'll see how many steps you have come just by taking the next faithful one, one after the other. And that's really what I teach in the framework that I talk about when I say that you can train yourself by taking the next faithful step at a time.

SPEAKER_00 13:02

Quite interesting. And trust me, I have to say I mean that this actually tracks because uh what you're just naming, I mean, gently, it's that the resilience is not a kind of personal trait, it's the architecture, and and like any architecture, it can be built on purpose with care before you need it, or it can be kind of assembled in the middle of a storm. So, yeah, so I mean thank you so much for sharing this that you shared.

Nurse To Patient And Learning Real Empathy

SPEAKER_00 13:28

And if you just go a bit deeper, because there's something genuinely rare about your perspective, you stood on both sides of the medicines as a cardiac nurse, uh you were one holding the hand, watching the family, reading the monitors, and then in a season you didn't choose, you became the patient. So inside the same medical machine, you used to operate from the other side of it. So if you can share from that, like what did you see from the patient side that you didn't fully see or maybe fully feel from the nurse side?

SPEAKER_01 14:04

I love that question because when I was a nurse, I took care of patients in some of the most difficult moments that they would have experienced. I took care of patients that were on comfort care, meaning they were at the end of their life, and we were just trying to make them as comfortable as possible. And I dealt with not only them as a patient, but their family members that were in the room with them while they were going into this transition. And I also was a cardiac cathode nurse, meaning I was in the room when patients were having, actively having a heart attack, and dealing with those patients' thoughts and concerns and fears during those times that are very intense. They're very scary. It's very fast paced. We're moving very quickly to try to help them as soon as possible, and to be the nurse on that side and say, I've got you. I'm here with you. I'm not going to leave you. I'm here to answer your questions. I'm here to make you as comfortable as I physically can while you are here. And then to have that flipped. And then I'm the patient in the bed who's having the nurse talk to me and reassure me. And you see things from a whole different light. And I think some of the things that you see more clearly is the empathy for the patient that's in the bed. And you have as much as you can have until you've lived it. And then you know what things make such a big difference. And that can be something as small as just a kind word or a smile or something as simple as just sitting with me during a rough patch or a rough time holding my hand, praying with me. I had so many nurses and caregivers that were just helpful in that way to just be with you. And there were days and many times when I was in the hospital for weeks at a time, and my family couldn't be there a hundred percent of the time. And so I was alone. And the nurses would recognize that and just be able to stay with me and let me know that they were there. And I think that those things are so important to have that feeling of I'm not alone. And so to go from the nurse trying to be that for my patients to the patient who needed that nurse is such an eye-opening experience. And I hope that I can put that into not only other caregivers, but also people who are in the bed too, that I've been where you are and I feel what you've felt. And I want them to know that there is hope, that there is something that you can do for yourself to train yourself to choose that joy and that joy is not circumstantial. You can have it in spite of where you are at. I've had it right there in the hospital bed, and you can have that too. It's accessible to you too.

SPEAKER_00 17:12

So if you can just say more about it, because I think a lot of people who are walking through a medical experience right now would benefit from understanding like what you wish someone on your old side had understood.

How Joy Becomes A Reflex

SPEAKER_01 17:26

Yes, I think that when I first started training this response, you don't know what you don't know. And so I had to learn that we don't choose joy because everything feels good, because our circumstances are great, because our circumstances are going to necessarily change. When I was diagnosed, I was told this is treatable, but this is not curable. There is no cure. I was told there is nothing that we can do to take this away forever. And to stand in that truth as a young mom and as a 30-year-old, when I'm being told this is extremely rare. Most people who have this don't get diagnosed, don't have it until they're in their late 70s. And all of these things are being told to me. And to say I had joy in the middle of that, which is what I can say. I can say that from the honest truth that I had joy in the middle of that. But it wasn't based on anything that I was being told in the natural. It couldn't be. Because look at the things I was being told, the things that I faced, the things that I went through. And to say that I still had joy in that. But how does that look? And some days joy looked like just listening to worship music in my hospital room. Some days it looked like being able to speak just one verse over my life, one thing that I was believing for. Some days I was so weak I couldn't do that for myself. And so I had people who loved me who would just sit there and read to me and talk to me and encourage me. And a lot of days it looked like deciding that fear was not allowed to lead me or narrate the entire story, that I wasn't going to walk this out in complete panic every day. And so joy through those choices, practiced over and over again, built that resilience inside of me. And it became not an emotion, but it became a trained response and a trained reflex. And that's why I call it the joy reflex, because if you think of a reflex, it is something that is done without thinking. And if you think of going towards something hot with your hand, well, your body is protecting itself. So immediately it's going to reflexively pull back away from that. And so training your brain, that neural pathway, training that to go towards joy is quite seriously training it to be a reflex. So going from a fearful thought, a panicked thought, and you train it to go towards joy, to go towards those peaceful things. So your brain goes there as a trained response. And it becomes that through training.

SPEAKER_00 20:25

Amazing, amazing.

Faith As The First Response

SPEAKER_00 20:27

And uh also if I if I ask uh like uh if if I turn directly towards the line of yours that I can't stop thinking, faith can be your first response and not the last. So that's a quietly powerful one because so much of the way the world talks about faith, it treats like it is as a thing that you reach for when nothing else worked. And the last and the last drawer is in the cabinet, and uh you are putting it in the very first drawer. So from there, if you can just share like what does faith-centered but kind of uh practical actually mean to you.

SPEAKER_01 21:10

Yes. So I think it's really important to say that when you treat faith as a last resort, it's very similar to me as trying to learn how to swim when you're already drowning or swim when there's a giant storm and there's all these huge waves that are pushing against, right? Trying to learn how to swim in a crisis. It's so much more difficult to learn how to swim then than it is when you're in the calm waters. And so when we do that with faith and we have this look at I'll use it when I need it, I'll build it when I need it, we create this difficulty when we actually do need it because we are already drowning. And we are trying to train this thing that we don't have yet. So my advice and my framework is to train your faith now. Train it now and make it a response and make it something that you go towards in the calm and in the storm. And so when there is those storms, when there's that diagnosis, when there's that financial crisis, that grief, those relationship issues that come up. And everyone's going to have a different reason to need their faith. And I like to say that because it's not just for healing, it's not just for hospital rooms, but it's for your own house. It is for car rides. It is for anything and everything that you need it for. But when you train it as this is my first response, it's what I'm going to go towards first. It becomes so much easier to reach for in the hard times. It's something that you will go for as your first thing and not your plan B. Not when everything else has failed, when there's no other hope, I'll reach for it. But reach for it immediately and walk in that peace and walk in that joy and walk in those things that is available to you when you have that ready and able to meet you in those places.

SPEAKER_00 23:29

Exactly. Yeah.

One Concrete Practice For Hard Days

SPEAKER_00 23:31

Yeah. So if you have to give one advice, one concrete advice to the listeners today, what that could be.

SPEAKER_01 23:50

So I know that my mom watched me go through many, many things. She was one of my biggest caregivers, and so is my husband. And it is one of those things where when you are watching someone else go through it or you're going through it yourself, what is going to stick with you? And I want people to know that you don't have to wait for a crisis to train your faith, to train your resilience. And these small choices, these one steps, the next faithful step, those choices that you practice right now become those pathways that you will reach for later. And that you don't have to have guilt or shame if fear shows up. Because fear may be your first feeling, but it doesn't have to lead and it doesn't have to be the final authority over your life and over your situation.

Where To Connect And Get Free Tools

unknown 24:56

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 24:56

That's okay. And uh if listeners wants to connect with you, what will be the great medium to connect?

SPEAKER_01 25:02

Yes, you can come and connect with me through my website. It's jennashoot.com, first name, last name.com. And I have all of my links to my social media. I have access to free faith tools that you can access at any time. And I have a subscriber email list that will send free monthly devotionals right to your inbox. And my heart is really to help those that need it, those that want to grow their faith, those that are in these situations that don't know where to turn or what to do. And I love to speak into those people and say that you can look at me and look at my story and know that it is possible for you too.

SPEAKER_00 25:47

Exactly. Yeah. Amazing. Jen, I mean, thank you so much. Genuinely, it is really, really great. And I'd say, I mean, the willingness to take a season that passed everything off you and turn it into something that helps the next person is one of the most generous things a human being can do. And definitely the listeners are going to feel it, and so will the people who find your work because of this

Final Takeaways And Share With Someone

SPEAKER_00 26:11

episode. So everyone of you who is listening right now, maybe you'll be listening later. If something here moved you, then just sit with it for a moment before you move on. Especially if you are in the middle of your own hard season right now, the kind that doesn't have a clean storytelling yet or storyline yet. And Jenna isn't asking you to be a kind of inspirational, she's asking you to start training today, even quietly, even small. That's the doorway. Right? So share this with uh someone in your life who's walking through a hard medical chapter or any hard chapter, they will definitely know it works for them. And with this, hope this is your host, Avik and this is Mind Meets Machine. We will meet you here back soon. Until then, train the resilience before you need it. Anchor the faith before the storm. The future of future, you who uh will walk through something hard one day will be grateful that you started there. So thank you so much.