Kelly Rutherford – Holistic Wealth With Keisha Blair – Podcast Interview Transcripts
Welcome to the holistic wealth podcast. I’m your host Kisha Blair, wife, mother of three, author of Holistic Wealth, and Founder of the Institute on Holistic Wealth. The show will showcase various experts in the key pillars of holistic wealth each week we deliver the best information on how to become holistically wealthy and live your best life.
Keisha Blair: Welcome to the Holistic Wealth podcast and I’m your host Keisha Blair and today I have a special guest with me, it’s Kelly Rutherford. Kelly needs no introduction, but I will just celebrate her achievements by letting you know what she’s achieved over this iconic career that spans three decades. Kelly has played iconic roles such as Lily Vander Woodson on Gossip Girl and Megan Lewis on Melrose place. She is known for her television roles such as Sam Whitmore on Generations as well as other iconic appearances such as on one of my favorite series, Jane the Virgin, and so many others. Kelly is an advocate of multiple women’s and children’s charities including Step Up Women’s Network and Healthy Child Healthy World and she is currently a member of the Board of Directors for Free Arts New York.
Keisha Blair: Kelly welcome to the show we are we’re so excited to have you on.
Kelly Rutherford: Thank you so much for having me you’re most welcome.
Keisha Blair: So now that I’ve basically introduced you and your iconic career can you tell us how you got into acting and how you knew it was your purpose and calling?
Kelly Rutherford: There were a lot of things that I was interested in and it just seemed like the one thing that it would continually interest me and I could sort of continue to learn you know it was one of those things not that you don’t learn in every business but for me all the things that I was sort of interested in it made sense.
Keisha Blair: Kelly any advice for those listening in on how to find their purpose in life especially throughout this pandemic you know when people have lost so many jobs and people are wondering what their next move is and people are wondering what’s my purpose do you have any advice in terms of how you found yours and how others can find theirs?
Kelly Rutherford: Yes, I think if you make a list of the things that you love, it really helps. I mean I think so much of the time we’re focused on other things instead of really focusing on what we love and who we like to work with and the things that we like to do. I mean if you were to say what do I wish I could do and be paid for right what sort of business would I start, I always joke around saying I wish I could be paid to putter, because I putter around and fussed around all day long right like I was always like puttering organizing and doing this and it’s you know I’m sort of joking but it’s also just something I love to do right so any anything that you really love to do that you focus on you will align with so I think this has been a really interesting time for most people to sort of get quiet think about what’s working and what’s not working in their life right so there’s opportunity in it as well to refocus.
Keisha Blair: Absolutely! And of course I have to ask about Gossip Girl, what were your favorite moments in the show? when were there times for you on the set when you were just excited about the role and the whole feel of it?
Kelly Rutherford: Yeah, it was such a gift to be a new mother and also be playing a mother on gossip girl and everything I loved I loved the fashion I loved the relationships that they wrote for us that the parents weren’t perfect and they were still figuring it out along with the kids and it was very human in that way and to be able to see that playing out at the same time was great. I loved filming in New York city and it was such a nice cast of people.
I loved I just loved the way the writers wrote the characters and the relationships with humor and humility and fun and outrageousness at the same time I thought it was very real I think a lot of parents watched with their kids which was cool yeah I know for sure and I loved it as well.
Keisha Blair: I feel like I’ve watched you on Melrose place, I’ve watched you on Jane the Virgin, on Dynasty and of course on Gossip Girl, so for me I feel like I’m talking to you and I know you so much so I’m just wondering because so many women especially moms because I remember the days of juggling work with being a new mom and even breastfeeding and I remember that you were breastfeeding while shooting gossip girls how did you juggle that and show up every day to be your best and put your best game forward was that hard?
Kelly Rutherford: Yeah it was a lot I used to go to work and I would worry about certain things and then what happened was I had kids and I was breastfeeding and doing everything as naturally as I could that’s just what made sense to me growing up just to sort of stay aligned with nature we all do what we do and what we have the bandwidth to do as mothers you know and I respect all of that but for me it was important to do that at least do my best to be aligned with nature yes but anyway yeah so I was doing that and working at the same time and it was it was a lot to juggle I mean it really became where being in my dressing room and having a moment to myself became my escape in a way or for my whereas it used to be I’d sit there and be like oh my gosh you know and stressed and worried about my lines and when you’re younger you know the time to worry about other things and yeah and what happens is as other things become a priority in your life as well like children you don’t stress about all the little things you used to stress about you actually just enjoy them you think okay I’m here and I think it made me more present in a way because I kind of had to be with my kids when I was with my kids and had to focus at work when I was at work I had to focus you know because I wouldn’t have had let’s say all the extra time to prepare at home because I was with my kids so I’d be hyper focused at work in terms of preparing as I went so it was interesting it definitely shifts your perspective.
Keisha Blair: Yeah no for sure it does and I know that you love spending time in nature as well and I know with covid19 so many of us have been just at home have you gotten a chance to spend time in nature at all recently?
Kelly Rutherford: I have two dogs so I get up in the morning and walk with them and you know I was living in New York City for a long time now I’m in lea for a while but there’s so much more nature here you know places to hike and get out and walk around. I should do more of it actually I’ve just been super busy but I do love to hike and be in nature.
Keisha Blair: For sure, I do too, and it’s one of the ways that I clear my mind it to practice mindfulness which is my next question because I know that you try to practice gratitude and mindfulness and it’s one of the things I want to ask you about in terms of your daily life how do you build that in especially during a stressful time like COVID-1 9, where so many of us are just worried about our health and our family members. How do you build that in?
Kelly Rutherford: The thing is we can’t control everything right, the only thing we can control is how we respond and our thoughts and the thing that I found useful is just to try to find a neutral space so that you can be objective and anything that is a distraction just try to eliminate. We over complicate things sometimes, myself included, right, instead of simplifying our lives and I think you know we have to look at how many ways in which we can simplify our life and make all day a meditation. How we do that is we turn off the TV, and we turn off all the news and the magazines, there’s just so much information out there that we’re not listening to our own information that’s trying to come through and guide us to tell us the next step and learning to trust ourselves.
We’re trusting all these outside sources so the thing is to do your best to eliminate distractions. I never turn on my television. It’s not even plugged in and I don’t listen to music. If I’m the car a little bit or I’ll put on a meditation mix that I listen to but other than that a lot of those things take you away from your own intel and so you know mind fullness I almost think it’s the opposite I almost think we need to stop filling our mind with all this stuff and find a neutral place and an alkaline place and an alignment with our own home frequency and that frequency will I always say most of the time it just feels like love like pure love you know like unconditional love, whatever that is for you is your home frequency.
Keisha Blair: Those are amazing words it reminds me of a previous podcast episode that I had, my guest on that episode spoke about manifesting abundance and that’s exactly what she said about getting into this state where you block out everything and focus.
Keisha Blair: I know that you’ve done vision boards and you talk about positivity and positive thinking. A lot of what you’re saying reminds me of that. Do you think the act of creating the vision boards and really thinking about what we want and meditating on that do you think that’s useful how has it been for you in the past when you’ve done your vision boarding like do you have any tips for listeners and how it may help?
Kelly Rutherford: Yeah, I mean it’s different for everyone right some people may respond to a vision board. Other people may enjoy writing affirmations or writing you know lists of what is abundant in your life. I used to do this exercise that I just assumed I had everything already like what if I have everything that I want, material love, you know material things, let’s say or the loving relationship so the thing is to create this ideal world for yourself and then just sort of assume you already have it, so within your being because your body doesn’t know the difference right the frequency you’re giving out is very different.
So you want to align with whatever that thing is that you want by being it or by saying okay who am I if I have all these things and I have this great relationship and I’m being creative and I I’m in perfect health and I don’t have to you know if I’m not worried about all this stuff who am I? Because so much of who we are is all of that stuff right and it takes up so much of our time and energy and it’s really a distraction from who we really are because if we have all these things your body gets calm. Your nervous system calms down, and you’re relaxed, you think oh good I’m not striving for anything. Nothing’s lacking and that’s the place you want to be when you’re creating, is nothing is lacking you’re not striving there’s nothing to strive for or attain right so it all ends the same way here on earth supposedly you know where we go from here. I believe we go back to love we come from love and we go back to love and we’re having this human experience and we are learning about polarity here on this planet and choosing between these polarities that’s why I say it’s so nice to be able to find this neutral place to create from and it’s I always say it sounds boring but neutral is sort of where you’re aligned and you’re really seeing things for what they are.
Keisha Blair: it’s just amazing hearing you speak and the wisdom and you know Kelly as you’re speaking my mind was thinking about Hollywood when you spoke about the distractions and your career spans decades in Hollywood and that’s a place with so many distractions how did you manage to kind of block all of that out to basically achieve the things you’re talking about in terms of blocking out the distractions?
Kelly Rutherford: I think that the sooner we learn that we can’t please everyone that we can’t be at the whims of everyone all day long, you have to really decide from the time you’re a kid. I’m not going to be at the whims of what all these other kids are doing and saying and being because they’re just probably reacting to what their parents are doing at home or what a TV show that they saw. We’re all responding to the intel that we know we’re given right so the key is not to be at the whims of things and to really cultivate your own person and who you are and what you love and by focusing on what you love and expanding that you feel more comfortable being you like you know if you know what you love you know what you want to do then it doesn’t really matter what other people are doing you will align with the people that are interested in doing the same things you are.
I think Hollywood is a thing it’s definitely a thing right – I’ve worked in L.A. and all over you know, many different cities, in New York but I haven’t really been in the scene too much. When I was younger, I was because I was just starting out and going out to different events but then it becomes about work right, you’re going to an event because you’re there to promote your show or you’re there to do something and I would always just go home after that and travel or do other things I was really interested in. I think as an actress, you bring so much more to the part when you’re living a life outside of Hollywood, because what you’re bringing is more interesting and real by just living your normal life and meeting people outside of Hollywood that do different things than you do and so most of the people I know are or a lot of the people I know, they can be connected in some way but they definitely have careers that aren’t based in necessarily in Hollywood.
Keisha Blair: For sure.
Kelly Rutherford: So I just found it more satisfying for me because after a while it’s like anything I guess if you’re an executive and you do perfume you know, you’re interested in what other people do that’s all I think for me it just became about this. I love my business, I love my people in the business there comes a point where you’re interested in what the rest of the world is up to you know, what other people do.
Keisha Blair: For sure, and I’m just wondering if there’s anyone any other actors out there who’ve been a key influence on your career because you started out in the business quite young and had this amazing career that spanned three decades, and I’m just wondering about the influences – people who you thought were just major influences and impacted your career. Just wondering about a few of those and wondering if you could tell us about a few of those or one person if it’s one person?
Kelly Rutherford: Yeah there were so many. I mean there were many actresses, there’s so many you know. I mean I loved actresses like Katherine de Niro and Grace Kelly, and you know those are the films that I was watching at the time because I started what 30 years ago, and so there were great actresses obviously like Susan Sarandon and Meryl Streep and all those fabulous women that sort of led the way but I was interested in women in general like Martha Graham who was a dancer and I would read biographies of women that I thought were fascinating and spiritual women. I love the women that were spiritual. There was a wonderful artist named Beatrice Wood who was a ceramicist. She hung out in Paris and then like at 50 decided to become a ceramicist and became very famous for being a ceramicist but she went and studied with like J. Krishnamurti and all those people so there’s a variety of women.
Keisha Blair: I’m sure and so many talented women in the business too who’ve impacted film in general in my book Holistic Wealth, as you know as widowed at a young age just eight weeks after I gave birth to my second child and so in the book I had this line about the art of recovery from disruption and it’s talking about like basically how we get over these life altering setbacks. I feel like you’ve mastered that art. You’ve overcome some challenges in your life and I think that you’ve taken the view basically that your life is so much greater in terms of your impact on humanity than let’s say any one struggle or any one challenge and for those of us who’ve been through those types of setbacks I think that’s the point that we reach to at some point after we’ve gone through the challenges and the pain and the grief. Can you tell us how you overcame those challenges that you faced in your own life especially your challenges with what happened with your kids and that must have been of course for a mother the most painful thing, so I’m just wondering if you can tell us a bit of what that process was like for you and how you came through that?
Kelly Rutherford: I think a lot of it is again focus right because I think once you’re over the shock of it which is I think what most of us feel initially and at least that’s what I felt initially was just that it was even possible that that could even happen was just so beyond my scope of belief which I think is what most of us feel in the moment when something’s happening that we’re we feel so out of control with whatever it is, whether it’s our health and whether it’s personal things our family things our financial things and so I think once I was over the initial shock yeah it was you know it broke my heart really. I mean when you have your heart broken on any capacity it takes time to recover and heal. What helped me a lot was getting over any blame or being the victim so those two things are really what keep us stuck or what were keeping me kind of stuck. I felt was feeling like I was a victim of this situation or the system or whatever it was that you know and blaming even though I was justified on both counts. I mean nobody would have argued with me if I said I’m blaming these people and I’m a victim of this situation. I wouldn’t have gotten an argument but for me personally the only thing that started to make sense was how do I get my power back as a human being as just a person? And how can I be there for my children?
I mean, it became about love and empowering myself with another mindset that wasn’t blame and victim. It was like well what does it look like and most of that came from the energy of love which is why I talk about it so much, because it’s the most healing energy that I know of that I can find or that I’ve found. It just became about – look I love my kids and however I can show up for them I will, even if I show up and I’m a mess, and I’m crying or I show up and I’m you know have two dollars in my pocket, or I show up and I’m not sure you know you just have to keep showing up and letting them know that all you want is to show up for them the best way you can. I think that you know when you’re honest it’s like they receive it differently you know and I was able to be honest and emotionally honest.
I would ask them how can I be the best mom for them, like how can I under these circumstances be the best for you and I and it became about, how do I stay healthy you know, so that when this, at some point, is hopefully resolved, when I was in the midst of it that I’m going to be healthy mentally, physically, spiritually healthy for my children so that I can watch them grow up. So these all became factors in all of it, but it’s almost like you have to step away from it, when you can, that doesn’t mean you don’t have your pity parties, which are justified, it just means that most the time you’re thinking okay what can I be grateful for? What can I be grateful for in all of this? What can I appreciate in all of this? What can I look for that’s good? and that’s when things started to shift too when I stopped resisting it, and fighting it and going up against it, and looking at all this the bad stuff that I felt was going on or the negative stuff and refocus. I wouldn’t allow myself to talk about it anymore and that started changing it too you know or when I did talk about it, I talked about anything I could find that was an upside.
Keisha Blair: Yeah absolutely. I felt every word because it’s so true that after the initial shock, then it’s getting through it, and then switching the mindset and realizing, which is so funny Kelly you said that because realizing that it’s about your spiritual health and your physical and emotional health which is so much of what Holistic Wealth is about and what I realized myself too. So with the travel restrictions Kelly, and COVID1- 19, have you been able to see the children a lot? Has that been scaled down a bit more, just because of what we’re going through?
Kelly Rutherford: I was just there for six weeks and it was amazing and yeah you know I think we all have found our place do you know what I mean? I think there’s still a lot of healing, like all of us you know. I don’t know anyone’s childhood that they don’t have to recover from a little bit even if it’s perfect um maybe even more if it’s perfect. So life is a process we’re brought up in this world with these ideas of things and sort of told certain things and we have to find it ourselves you know? And I’m really all for us each seeing each other as divine, and looking for the good in each person and looking for the good in each situation because that’s what shifts a human collective that’s what’s going to shift our consciousness because we judge and we’re quick to find things to fault each other and it’s like if you’re a child and your parent does that you don’t listen to yourself and you’re not sure what’s what anymore you know? And so I think we’re all feeling like a real need to be seen and heard and loved and being able to learn.
There’s room for mistakes you know what I’m saying it’s like we’re all fumbling and figuring it out and none of us are going to have all the answers or say it right all the time or do it right all the time but I find that the more we acknowledge when we do each of us, that things get better, and we rise together, so we’re now given this this time to realize how much going forward I think we are going to need each other in a way that’s very authentic that’s becoming golden. People that are coming from an authentic place and a loving place and it’s about money yes but if we’re doing what we love and finding things we love and connecting with what we love, we prosper, and we all do to win.
Keisha Blair: Absolutely! Just switching gears a bit. I know you have your own jewelry line and I’ve been interviewing so many female entrepreneurs and so I wanted to hear a bit more about how that’s going and how it got started?
Kelly Rutherford: I’m not really doing much with the jewelry anymore. I started years and years ago just with a friend and then she kind of didn’t want to do it. She wanted to do her own thing so I kind of continued to do it and it started out as like mother daughter thing. Very affordable gold jewelry hearts and stars and moons. So I still have some of the jewelry so I’ll do private events here and there but I’m not really doing it on a large scale so I wouldn’t say it’s a business of mine per se but I am coming on now and getting more into business in the sense that I’m being a Creative Director, which is something I’m working on now, which is really fun and developing something else within our business to connect film with fashion and art and all these things. So I’m taking basically all my interests and the things I love and creating with that in terms of business now which is really interesting to me.
Keisha Blair: Yeah that’s amazing! That sounds amazing and so is there anything else on the horizon that’s coming up that you can tell fans about what to look out for, what they can keep an eye open for? I know you just mentioned that project, is there anything else yeah well in terms of acting?
Kelly Rutherford: I don’t know what’s going to happen now everyone’s just kind of I mean there are productions that are up and running but I think I’m open to doing that as well I just think right now it’s a bit funky you know so I just started with these young guys on this this new endeavor it’s a streaming service and to put really cool authentic content on it’s going to be really fun and all the podcasts and these original series that we can stream so if that’s kind of more in the direction I’m moving and really loving creatively and sort of using all my resources and in a different way you know so that’s I think a natural progression you know is to be more in the directing side of things maybe whether it’s in uh for a business or around the film medium as well.
Keisha Blair: For sure and Kelly just to wrap up I just wanted to see if there are any last words? I know it’s been a tough time for everyone dealing with COVID- 19 and being on lockdown and not seeing family and friends some people have actually lost family members too and I’m just wondering before we leave if you have any parting words of wisdom to the audience?
Kelly Rutherford: I think the simplest thing and the easiest thing is, well it’s two things, it’s one: I always say just keep love in your heart, I mean if you can do that it’s huge you know and compassion and love for yourself, love for others, patience with yourself, patience with others, and also just do your best. I’m hearing a lot of everyone’s quite overwhelmed and I think the thing that we can all do each day, is have a day and get up have our coffee our tea or juice, and have a day and really just do the best we can do that day and that’s it. If you can go to sleep at night and say, “you know what I did the best I could today, whether I got it all done, I didn’t get it all done, or whether it was done perfectly”. There’s so many changes going on. There’s home schooling going on, there’s zoom meetings going on, there’s so much. There’s so many things. There are so many moving parts and changes going on and I don’t know that this is going to be like over tomorrow so just for longevity of our energy and it’s also like where are you putting your energy? It’s like how do we get centered? How do we raise our consciousness?
This is what’s important now is our level of consciousness. So sovereignty consciousness, love and just saying you know what we never get it all done. That to-do list, we’re just going to keep adding to it and that’s what we realized so today just do what you can and with love in your heart, to the best of your ability, that’s what we can do that’s what we can control right?
Keisha Blair: Absolutely! wise words so thank you so much Kelly for being here you are indeed a gift to the world. Your positive message of love and hope will inspire millions around the world regardless of what life-altering setbacks we go through. I think you’re great proof actually that we’re really here to impact the lives of others and as you mentioned through love and through our daily lives just focusing on that and getting to that level of consciousness which is amazing and so I want to end with that and thank you so sincerely for joining us on the program today Kelly.
Kelly Rutherford: Thank you so much. Thank you Keisha, thank you so for having me. I feel the same about you!
Keisha Blair: Oh thank you so much! that’s so nice!
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