EP86: L.U.C.K. with Dr. Lisa Garner Santa, Professor of Flute and Artist-Performer

About the Guest:

Dr. Lisa Garner Santa is an esteemed flutist and professor with a trajectory that has brought her experiences both locally and globally. With a musical and teaching journey that began in the small town of Colorado City, Texas, Dr. Garner Santa evolved into a world-class musician whose career has quite literally taken her around the world. She is notably acknowledged for her performances and her influential role as a professor of flute at Texas Tech University. Additionally, she holds the position of Director for the Institute for Faculty Excellence at Texas Tech's Teaching, Learning, and Professional Development Center.

Episode Summary:

In this episode of "Becoming UnDone," host Toby Brooks welcomes the multi-facetted Dr. Lisa Garner Santa, whose passion for music and teaching has led her down a path adorned with both accolades and adversities. Dr. Garner Santa shares her introspective reflections on growth, pedagogy, and the artistic pursuit — from the plains of West Texas to the top echelons of the music world.

Dr. Garner Santa reveals her roots in a tiny West Texas town and how her early influencers cultivated her burgeoning talents, leading to pivotal decisions that directed her towards music as her life's work. Dodging obstacles and embracing opportunities, the episode encapsulates her resilient spirit. By intertwining insightful anecdotes from her life with practical wisdom, Dr. Garner Santa paints a vivid tableau of what it is to transform setbacks into milestones.

Key Takeaways:

• Lisa Garner Santa's initial passion for music was nurtured by meaningful mentorships and opportunities in her small-town upbringing.
• Her tenacity and self-belief led her to prestigious schools, international experiences, and to foreground performance as a career.
• Teaching emerged as a calling woven into her musical journey, influencing her deep commitment to students' individual growth.
• Lisa Garner Santa's resilience in facing academic adversity at prestigious institutions highlights the importance of self-advocacy.
• She embraces change and personal development, exemplified in her later pursuit of yoga, further enriching her teaching paradigm.

Notable Quotes:

• "I haven't left performing. It's just, it looks a little different than it did at the beginning." — Dr. Lisa Garner Santa
• "My coping mechanism was one that society rewards. And so that coping mechanism wasn't the same for all of my students, was a real turning point in the way that I teach." — Dr. Lisa Garner Santa
• "I've been working myself into a frenzy. And does anyone even notice? So I was on one of those downward swings in academia. So I was like, you know what? I'm going to become a yoga teacher." — Dr. Lisa Garner Santa
• "I came from this tiny town. I've gone to these schools. I haven't had classes like the classes that you're offering. I believe in my ability to do well at your school, and I would really appreciate an opportunity to prove that." — Dr. Lisa Garner Santa
• "Everything that you need to know, and you just have to believe it." — Dr. Lisa Garner Santa, in advice to her younger self

Resources:

• Follow Dr. Lisa Garner Santa on her journey through her position at

Transcript

[TRANSCRIPT]

0:00:00 - (Lisa Garner Santa): The next step in this journey is the application to get into the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, which is one of the top programs in the country, maybe the world. And at that time, Carol Wincenc was the flute teacher there, and she still teaches at Juilliard today. And at that time, she was commuting from Juilliard to teach at Rice every other week. And so I really wanted to go to that school.

0:00:26 - (Lisa Garner Santa): The performance part of the audition process went really well. I was accepted into the flute studio. The challenge came in the written exam. What I didn't do well on in the written exam were areas that I hadn't had a lot of instruction on. They said that I hadn't passed that portion of the exam. And so I wrote back to them, and I remember saying, I want you to look at my transcripts, and I want you to see the growth that's demonstrated in my transcripts. I came from this tiny town.

0:01:01 - (Lisa Garner Santa): I've gone to these schools. I haven't had classes like the classes that you're offering. I believe in my ability to do well at your school, and I would really appreciate an opportunity to prove that. My name is Lisa Garner. Santa, and I am undone.

0:01:29 - (Toby Brooks): Hey, friend. I'm glad you're here. Welcome to another episode of Becoming Undone, the podcast for those who dare bravely, risk mightily, and grow relentlessly. I'm Toby Brooks, a speaker, an author, and a professor. I've spent much of the last two decades working as an athletic trainer and a strength coach in the professional, collegiate, and high school sports settings. Over the years, I've grown more and more fascinated with what sets high achievers apart and how failures that hurt in the moment can end up being exactly the push we needed to propel us along our paths to success.

0:02:00 - (Toby Brooks): Each week on becoming undone, I invite new guests to examine how high achievers can transform from falling apart to falling into place. I'd like to emphasize that this show is entirely separate from my role as a professor, but it's my attempt to apply what I've learned and what I'm learning, and to share with others about the mindsets of high achievers. This is your first episode. I really hope you enjoy it. I hope you love it. And after enjoying this episode, I hope you'll dig back through some of the previous episodes where I interview high achievers who didn't let failure or setback stand in the way of their eventual victories.

0:02:34 - (Toby Brooks): And if you're a regular man, I'm thankful for you. I hope you know just how much you've meant to me in this journey. Becoming a podcaster has literally changed my life, and youre a big part of that. My deepest hope is that the show can encourage and inspire you on your own journey towards success. In the last episode, I realized after the fact that I alluded to a huge piece of news in my world without really specifying the details.

0:03:00 - (Toby Brooks): So let me fill you in. After spending the last 14 years at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences center as a faculty member and administrator, I recently accepted a job at Baylor University in Waco as the director of the Academy for Teaching and learning with a daughter who will be a senior at Texas Tech, a son who will be a freshman at Lubbock Christian University, and a whole community of friends here in West Texas who have become like family.

0:03:25 - (Toby Brooks): It'll be bittersweet to leave, but I'm excited nonetheless. And in the midst of all this, we've also celebrated my son Tay's conclusion of high school graduation, his last high school baseball game, this last band concert, and everything else that goes with it. Sprinkle in packing up my office and the house that we've lived in for the past nearly decade and a half, I think I've been holding up pretty well.

0:03:49 - (Toby Brooks): Fantana.

0:03:53 - (Lisa Garner Santa): Ron, where are you?

0:03:55 - (C): I'm in a glass case of emotion.

0:03:58 - (Toby Brooks): At any rate, enough about me for now. Today's guest is dear friend, doctor Lisa Garner, Santa, who shares my passion for great teaching. In addition to being a professor of flute and an artist performer at Texas Tech, she serves as the director for the Institute for Faculty Excellence, housed in Texas Tech's teaching, learning and professional development center, where our paths first crossed. Growing up in small town west Texas, not many locals emerged with dreams of becoming college professors, let alone world class musicians.

0:04:27 - (Toby Brooks): But Lisa did, and in training and career that has literally taken her around the globe, she eventually found herself back in what she considers her dream job at Texas Tech. I hope you'll enjoy my conversation with the incomparable doctor Lisa Garner. Santa in episode 86. Luc Lisa, thank you so much for joining me today.

0:04:50 - (Lisa Garner Santa): Thank you so much, Toby. It is a pleasure to be here.

0:04:53 - (C): So I gather when I first hit you up for this, we really didn't know each other very well, and I'm used to seeing this in people in my kind of near orbit. They're like, you're a podcaster. Like, what would I come on and talk about? But the more I've gotten to know you and the more I've learned your story and how remarkable your journey has been and knowing where you come from. I'm really anxious to dig in and hear you tell your tale.

0:05:20 - (C): So I always start at the beginning with a little bit of an easy question. What did you want to be growing up and why?

0:05:27 - (Lisa Garner Santa): That's a great question. Yeah. So I grew up in West Texas. I was born in mostly raised in Colorado City. It's the way we from Colorado City say it, Colorado City, Texas. And my mother worked in a sewing factory. My father was in the army, and when he came back from the army, he was an architectural engineer. So he designed buildings, and that took him away from Colorado City. My parents got divorced, not an uncommon thing for a lot of families.

0:06:04 - (Lisa Garner Santa): And I shuffled quite a bit between my parents, but I would say the majority of my childhood was in Colorado City. And what did I want to be when I grew up? My mother was a singer songwriter and in a rock band with her dad and some cousins. And then the church was also a really big influence on my family, not only my mother, but also my grandparents. And so music was something that was always around in some sort of form in high school.

0:06:36 - (Lisa Garner Santa): Growing up in a tiny town, there were opportunities to experience so many different types of things. And so music was one of those things. And I started late. Most students in Texas these days start in the 6th grade. I was in choir in the 6th grade, we couldn't afford an instrument. Then in the 7th grade, the band director found an instrument for us, and it was a used flute. And so I started playing the flute and took to it very easily and excelled quickly and loved it and enjoyed it and stuck with it. But I was also involved in a lot of other things in high school.

0:07:20 - (Lisa Garner Santa): I was in theater, on the debate team, in spanish club, on the tennis team. And that was one of the, I think, great benefits of growing up in a small town, the opportunity to engage in all of these different activities that have the ability to inform each other. And I think that students who grow up in larger schools may not have the same sorts of opportunities. My coaches in tennis, Carolyn Walker, was incredibly supportive.

0:07:53 - (Lisa Garner Santa): My drama teacher, Carl Barrymore, who still leads community theater in Midland and Odessa, now was a huge influence on just helping me to express myself in creative ways. I wasn't the star on either of those teams, tennis or the drama team, but I gained so much from those teachers. Beau Merkit, Mister Murkit was my algebra and physics teacher, and he would walk into the classroom every class period, and not shout, but very exuberantly say, algebra is beautiful.

0:08:36 - (Lisa Garner Santa): He was just so passionate about teaching us how to solve problems, and I think that really made an impression.

0:08:49 - (Toby Brooks): I absolutely love this. Lisa spends the first few minutes of our chat recounting all the impactful people, mainly teachers and coaches and directors from her formative middle and high school years, who impacted her life for a musician and an educator. You heard her specifically call out a band teacher who not only helped plant the seeds for her love for music, actually tracked down a used instrument for her to play, and her love for teaching that was modeled for her through the exuberance and zeal of her algebra teacher, mister Market.

0:09:21 - (Toby Brooks): If you've listened to the show in the past, you've likely heard me talk about the landmark research that came out in the 1970s from teacher training expert Dan Lordy that described the apprenticeship of observation. Lordy described how we all spend literally decades of our young lives seeing what it means to be a teacher or a coach firsthand. As we're on the receiving end of this practice as students ourselves, what we know from 50 plus years of research research is that positive early experiences of students can lay the groundwork for successful practice later.

0:09:54 - (Toby Brooks): And while negative experiences don't automatically exclude us from future careers, they can sometimes create deeply held beliefs about teaching that are hard to overcome, even in light of strong evidence to the contrary. Even though Lisa grew up in a small town in rural west Texas, she was fortunate enough to have a group of excellent role models to help form her earliest beliefs about teaching, while also planting the seed for a love of music.

0:10:20 - (Toby Brooks): But after her first flute instructor moved away, she and her family would need to seek out other opportunities elsewhere, and it wouldn't be easy.

0:10:29 - (Lisa Garner Santa): So what did I want to be when I grew up? So originally, my senior year, I was all set to go to UT Austin. I had an academic scholarship to UT Austin to study computer science. Those colleagues who know me will probably laugh at that. I'm adept enough in technology to do a wide variety of things, but I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in learning code. But back in the day when we were using dos and writing code with, like, algebra, and I loved algebra, I was like, ooh, this sounds really fun. I'll do this. I imagine my life would be quite different now had I gone into computer science. Maybe I would be more affluent in financial ways than I am, right?

0:11:18 - (Lisa Garner Santa): But what ended up happening is so my first flute teacher was my band director's wife. Bill Shipp was my first high school band director, and he was a tech grad, a Texas Tech grad. And he took us every summer to Texas tech band camp. So I knew so much about Texas Tech before I ever arrived here. Kim Lee looks the same. It did as of last fall, as it did in 1985, but now it's under renovation, so that will all change. But his wife, Jamie Shipp, was my first flute teacher, and I didn't start studying with her until I was a sophomore in high school, so that's also unusual. These days, usually those who are more serious about their instruments will start taking private lessons in middle school.

0:12:01 - (Lisa Garner Santa): But being in a tiny town, we didn't have access the way that a lot of students do in larger cities. I studied with Jamie Shipp, and then they decided to leave Colorado City my senior year, which was really devastating for me, they moved to Brownfield. So that's down the road here and misses. Shipp was like, you need to study with Helen Blackburn. So Helen Blackburn at that time was teaching at McMurray University in Abilene, which was 75 miles from Colorado City.

0:12:35 - (Lisa Garner Santa): And so that meant that either she had to drive 75 miles to give me a lesson or I had to drive 75 miles to take a lesson. And she believed in my ability enough to make that drive. And I made many drives to Abilene as well. Took a lot of lessons in the Cooper High school band hall. But she was a WT grad, so she went to what was then West Texas State University, now West Texas A and M University. And when I told her that I had been accepted to UT and I was going to go study computer science, she was like, what are you talking about?

0:13:11 - (Lisa Garner Santa): You are not going to do that. You are going to go to WT and you're going to major in music. And I just, I had so much faith in her as a person that I followed her advice, and that's what I did.

0:13:25 - (C): That's incredible. So refreshing. So many times I hear from athletes or artists or entrepreneurs who they had the opposite a voice saying they were less than or they couldn't, or they take that opportunity to try to prove others wrong. But to have someone that influential in your life really speak that into existence for you, that had to have been exciting and maybe a little daunting, depending on where you were at the time.

0:13:54 - (C): That's tremendous. So you end up at WT. And I know my daughter's dealt with this as a vocal performance, but you're a music major, so the assumption is you're going to teach high school band, right? And that's going to be your career at that stage of the game. What were your career aspirations as someone majoring in flute for your bachelor's degree.

0:14:17 - (Lisa Garner Santa): Yeah, that's another great question. So I, I wanted to go into performance, and I don't, I'm trying to think, why did I want to go into performance? Because I love playing. I loved playing. And I, as a high school student, I didn't have a lot of experience teaching. I was a drum major in high school. I did end up being a drum major for three years in college. So I guess there's teaching involved in that.

0:14:40 - (Lisa Garner Santa): But my sophomore year at WT, I took my first course in education. And that's because even though I wanted to go into performance, that the story was, and I think still is, oh, you need to have a backup plan. Right. Performance is so competitive, it's so difficult that you need to have some sort of backup plan. And so the traditional backup plan at that time was music education. There are a lot more options now for students.

0:15:07 - (Lisa Garner Santa): I really don't think that we need to be encouraging people to become teachers who aren't passionate about teaching. I am passionate about teaching, but that's something that has grown over time. But I took my first education class at WT. It was not a music education class. It was a general education class. And I had such a strong aversion to that class, I was like, I don't know what this is, but this is not fun.

0:15:34 - (Lisa Garner Santa): This is not enjoyable. So I ended up dropping that class. And they were still saying, you need a backup plan. You need a backup plan. So wt had then a degree. It was called music business. I think they now call it music industry degree. So I did a double concentration in performance in music business. And I liked that. I liked my business classes. I liked particularly the marketing classes, which has come in very helpful as someone in music performance.

0:16:04 - (Lisa Garner Santa): I enjoyed my economics classes, accounting. I actually did well in accounting, probably because of Bo Merkit. Yeah, mister Merkit at Colorado City, my algebra teacher and his passion for algebra. So accounting is algebra in that regard. One side has to equal the other, right? So I nailed that class. Yeah. And business was fun. I enjoyed my business classes. And part of that degree plan included an internship.

0:16:32 - (Lisa Garner Santa): And my interest after taking my business classes was in arts marketing. So I was like, yeah, I want to do that. I want to go into arts marketing, maybe work for an orchestra or an opera company. And so I started calling around to different organizations in the United States, and they were like, are you coming out of the American Symphony Orchestra League, which is a training program for arts management in the United States? And I'm like, no, I'm coming with a degree in music business.

0:17:00 - (Lisa Garner Santa): And they're like, oh, we only take interns from AsOL. And I was like, oh, okay. And I was disappointed. And I just kept getting that same message every place that I called in the United States. And so I was like, okay, I guess I need to look outside of the United States. So I made some calls, and I ended up having a phone call with Stacia Smales. And she was the then marketing director of the London Symphony Orchestra, and she was an American who happened to be working there at that time.

0:17:33 - (Lisa Garner Santa): And she said, absolutely, we'd love to have you as an intern. And so I ended up working for six months in the marketing department of the London Symphony Orchestra for my internship. Little student from WT.

0:17:50 - (C): That's tremendous. So I have to think at this point, you saw some individuals who were aspiring professional musicians at WT, and certainly faculty members. But being immersed, was that your first real experience in orchestra on that level, or had you toured or at least listened to other places, or was this literally your very first start?

0:18:14 - (Lisa Garner Santa): Yeah, that's a great question. So one, I was very lucky. I had, I was recently visiting with a colleague about the word lucky. An influential performer described lucky to him as living under creative karma. And so in that regard, I have been very lucky. So when I moved to canyon to start my studies at WT, there was an opening in the Amarillo Symphony. So even as a very young student, I had opportunities to play in professional orchestras.

0:18:48 - (Lisa Garner Santa): So I did that through my undergraduate studies. I was the piccolo player with Amarillo Symphony in second flute for a long time. And so I had gained experience there. Was that comparable to the London Symphony Orchestra? What is comparable to the London Symphony Orchestra? They're unique in so many ways. One is that the orchestra members are actually the stockholders in the orchestra, which is different.

0:19:14 - (Lisa Garner Santa): And they also do so much contemporary music and also film scores. Just an incredibly rich experience and overwhelming in some ways, coming from west Texas, where there's so much openness, physical openness, moving to the east side of London at that time, which is, it's all expensive living in London, but it was less expensive on the east side and commuting into the city center to the barbican every day, which was pretty congested. Buildings are close together, there's clouds everywhere. You never see the sun.

0:19:47 - (Lisa Garner Santa): So it was physically very different, culturally so different, even though the language was English. And the first two weeks, I was in tears almost every day when I went over, when I went, I don't know, maybe I'm just adventurous in this way, but I didn't know exactly where I was going to live. I didn't know exactly what I was going to be doing. I just knew I was going to be working with this amazing organization.

0:20:10 - (Lisa Garner Santa): I ended up renting a room from Kathy Nelson, who was then the program manager for the orchestra. That was a rich experience, just getting to know her and a little bit of how that side of the organization worked. And they really just welcomed me into the marketing department. I was doing campaigns for ticket sales, organizing group tours. I had tickets to every concert that the LSO did during that six month window, I think I went to 22 concerts in six months.

0:20:42 - (Lisa Garner Santa): And then, because we were located in the Barbican and I had been in theater, right? I loved theater. It's also the home of the Royal Shakespeare Company. So I went to, I don't know, over a dozen RSC productions. And, yeah, it was an incredibly rich experience. But what I learned about myself is that, yes, I can be good at marketing, I can be good at the business side of this, but I want to be on the stage.

0:21:11 - (Lisa Garner Santa): I want to be creating. I want to be creating rather than selling. And so I decided to go back to school.

0:21:19 - (C): Yeah, that's tremendous. I think for a lot of artists, there's this personal, almost a war, where you have to wear yourself down. And the world is so apt and prompt to tell you that this is a fool's errand to pursue a career in the arts or professional sports. Elite performers, oftentimes they have to overcome adversity and naysayers from outside. But there's also a fair amount that can start to seep into your bones, and that imposter syndrome is very real.

0:21:52 - (C): And so being immersed in that environment had to have been terrifying. But at the same time, it steeled your resolve to say, I'm going after this. So you end up heading to Florida State to pursue a master's degree. At this stage of your journey, what was the end game or the ultimate goal in your mind? Where were your wildest dreams taking you as you headed to Tallahassee?

0:22:17 - (Lisa Garner Santa): That's. Yeah, my wildest dreams. I think. I don't know. I think I was maybe putting just, like, faith in the unfolding of it all, and also the fact that the person I was dating at the time was going to Florida State. Let's get honest about it. That's probably what was really going on. That relationship did not last, but it was the perfect place for me to be at that time. So I studied with Charles Delaney, affectionately known as Charlie.

0:22:49 - (Lisa Garner Santa): And he was such a wildly different teacher than Sally Turk, who I'd studied with at West Texas. And he really had a very high bar, which I was not afraid of or intimidated by, but I don't know how prepared I was for that. So the size of the flute studio at Florida State was huge. We had over 40 flute majors. So as a teaching assistant, it worked out really well because I got to teach a lot of majors at that time, which kind of fed my early teaching experiences in a very positive way.

0:23:28 - (Lisa Garner Santa): I was working with students who were really interested in evolving their musicianship and who were dedicated to music education. And so that was a fun population to work with. It wasn't like I was having to teach students just for their upcoming so on ensemble, which is fun, too. I don't want to miscommunicate that, but it was a good experience. But the types of.

0:23:51 - (C): Ooh.

0:23:52 - (Lisa Garner Santa): So I'll give you an example. We would have technique assignments. Many were related to Delaney's daily dozen. There were these twelve exercises that we had to do in every key. And the graduate class would sit in a circle, and he referred to it as the magic circle. And he would turn on the metronome, and then he had a knob, like, mounted. It was like a dial mounted on his wall. And he would walk over to the dial and he would turn it up.

0:24:24 - (Lisa Garner Santa): And it was the pressure knob. Pressure knob. And so the goal was to play the exercise on whatever key as you went around the circle. So the first person would start usually on c, so he would say, okay, Garner, you're starting today. So I would get c major on whatever the exercise was. And then whoever's next has to come in exactly in time with the metronome in D flat. And then the next person comes in exactly in time in D. And you would go around the circle until all of the keys were done.

0:24:57 - (Lisa Garner Santa): And it was like there was so much embarrassment if you were the one who broke the circle. So I don't know how serious he was about not breaking the circle, but we imposed that upon ourselves as students. Nobody wanted to break the circle. It would be the one breaking the circle. But that really taught us how to be really present and focused and accurate under pressure, which is a skill that you have to have as a performer.

0:25:24 - (Lisa Garner Santa): And sometimes the exercises were easy, like scale exercises that we practice all the time, but sometimes they were really hard. I remember having to learn or memorize the entire second movement of the Bach c major, which is a. A big double tongueing movement, and the whole movement, if you play it fast enough, is about a minute and a half long. But you had to play that whole thing in whatever key landed on you, so you had to play it in all twelve keys, which was really challenging, and you had to memorize it. It all had to. Everything that we did was from memory.

0:25:59 - (Lisa Garner Santa): That pushed me in ways that I had not previously been pushed, and I really, I appreciated that. My technique became very strong during that time. My sound became much bigger and more complex during that time, and my sense of humor grew because he was also a very funny person. He loved to tell jokes and loved to tell stories.

0:26:24 - (C): That's great. So it sounds like it's full steam ahead. You finished your bachelor's degree. You're teaching at the collegiate level, continuing to grow as a musician. What, if anything, did failure play in your role up to that point? Or was it just really a lot of victories and wins?

0:26:44 - (Lisa Garner Santa): Yeah, I'll share this. So the next step in this journey is the application to get into rice, the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, which is one of the top programs in the country, maybe the world. And at that time, Carol Wincens was the flute teacher there, and she still teaches at juilliard today. And at that time, she was commuting from juilliard to teach at Rice every other week. And so I really wanted to go to that school, and I had my education, my WT, and an FSU state schools, and I didn't grow up with the pedigree of studying with an orchestral player or someone who, at least when I was studying with them, was purely an orchestral player or coming from a conservatory atmosphere where music theory, music history were taught in a much more interwoven way.

0:27:50 - (Lisa Garner Santa): I had a lot of survey classes that kind of skimmed the top of some subjects, but not really. I don't know the level of academic rigor. While it was high, it was not as high as it was at rice. So part of the entry process was taking written exams, qualifying exams at a lot of schools. And I did well on the theory exams. I didn't have any deficiencies there, but I did have some deficiencies in the music history component, and they were in things like Renaissance and medieval music, which had just not been a part of my experience.

0:28:32 - (Lisa Garner Santa): WT is big music education, huge band program. Same thing at Florida State. They have a great orchestra, but it is very kind of band oriented. So a lot of contemporary music, not a lot of medieval and renaissance music. So I didn't do particularly well on those portions of the exam. So there were two parts to the audition experience at rice. One was a performance audition, and the second part was written exams.

0:29:01 - (Lisa Garner Santa): So during my performance audition, or in preparation for my performance audition for Carol Winson's, I had prepared what was then up on their website, which was actually the requirements for the previous teacher there, Albert Tipton. So I prepared that list. What was not on that list was the Mozart concerto and g major, even though it's a standard piece for us. But I hadn't really prepared it for the audition. I'd prepared lots of other things.

0:29:32 - (Lisa Garner Santa): And so I went into the audition, and Carol was like, I have to hear Mozart. And I'm like, mozart wasn't on the list. And she's like, well, I'm sorry, I can't admit you unless I hear Mozart. I was like, okay, can I borrow the music for 30 minutes? She said, you got it. So she gave me the flute part, and I went and practiced for 30 minutes, and I came back and I played Mozart. The performance part of the audition process went really well.

0:30:04 - (Lisa Garner Santa): I was accepted into the flute studio. The challenge came in the written exam. What I didn't do well on in the written exam were areas that I hadn't had a lot of instruction on as an undergraduate or a master's student at FSU, and those were the areas of medieval music and renaissance music. I just hadn't had a lot of dedicated instruction on that. And as someone who plays primarily the modern BAME system flute, I hadn't even played any of the music, really.

0:30:42 - (Toby Brooks): While it's now a familiar story for Lisa to recount, pretty matter of factly, what's missing here is undoubtedly the emotion of it all. So let's recap, just to see it through her eyes. Lisa picks up the flute late by today's standards, using a donated instrument given to her by her middle school band teacher in the 7th grade, she gets lessons from her high school band teacher's wife. The first couple of years of high school, she shows immense promise, but she's thrown a curveball of sorts. When her band teacher and flute instructor move, she's referred to another teacher who is, by all accounts superb, a highly skilled college professor who just happens to live some 150 miles away. Round trip, Lisa's prepared to leave music behind at the end of high school and head to UT Austin as a computer science major, until that new instructor all but insists that she pursue music at West Texas A and M opportunities with the likes of the London Symphony Orchestra and a master's degree in Florida state followed.

0:31:43 - (Toby Brooks): And while the journey had been anything but easy. Lisa's knowledge, musical skill, drive, and determination meant that up until now, she hadn't really encountered much in the way of failure. So she took a big swing and auditioned for the Shepherd School of Music at prestigious Rice University, hoping to train under acclaimed flutist Carol Winsons, who was teaching at both rice and juilliard at the same time.

0:32:08 - (Toby Brooks): Today, Wincens is a Grammy nominated artist whose legend has only grown since Lisa first met her in hopes of getting in at rice. But she didnt get in. Lisa's experiences up until then had been tremendous. They weren't exactly in line with the more classical rep employed at Rice. And although she did well on the performance side, she didn't do as well on the other portion of the exam, and she was rejected.

0:32:34 - (Toby Brooks): Perhaps you can recall being turned away from something that was a big reach for you. The emotional churn of the experience usually sends me into a shame spiral, an angry rant along, sometimes both. But not Lisa. You've heard her say she was lucky already, more than once in this interview. But as you can see in this moment, her luck is largely of her own making. She didn't take no for an answer.

0:32:59 - (Lisa Garner Santa): And so I wrote back to them, and I remember saying, I want you to look at my transcripts, and I want you to see the growth that's demonstrated in my transcripts. I came from this tiny town. I've gone to these schools. I haven't had classes like the classes that you're offering. I believe in my ability to do well at your school, and I would really appreciate an opportunity to prove that. So they accepted me into the program. But my first semester, I did not have a scholarship because they wanted me to prove myself.

0:33:36 - (Lisa Garner Santa): And so I went in and I proved myself. And after that, then everything was paid for. So after my first semester, I had everything paid for at rice. I applaud them for hearing my plea and for giving me that opportunity because they didn't have to. But I also calling up the London Symphony and saying, hey, I want to come do an internship. It took a little bit of maybe, I don't know, maybe I was naive.

0:34:07 - (Lisa Garner Santa): And so I thought anything was possible because that's what we're taught in West Texas. Ask for what you want. And I did. I just, I believed in asking for what I needed, and they responded. And so it worked out. So I failed that exam, or at least parts of it. But I had the courage to say, believe in me. Anyway.

0:34:31 - (Toby Brooks): We'Ll be back after a quick break. This episode brought to you by Forte are you looking to prioritize the mental wellbeing of your employees? Look no further than Forte, the comprehensive mental wellness platform designed to empower everyone in your organization to thrive both professionally and personally. It provides employees with unlimited access to certified guides for 30, 45 or 60 minutes confidential audio calls. That's not all. Forte also offers a wealth of wellness content, including newsletters, e courses, challenges and webinars led by industry experts.

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0:35:47 - (C): You said naive. I'm thinking brave. And how much bravery it took to go to WT at the insistence of a teacher or to load the car and drive 15 1618 how many ever hours east to Tallahassee? To London and it's all bravery. And yeah, when we're young, there's a dose of naivety that helps with the bravery, helps it go down, but it's still bravery. And how remarkable. As you're talking, I see glimpses into your teaching practice. I've seen you teach your gifted teacher. You work in the teaching learning professional development center at Texas Tech and even those early formative experiences in your high school algebra class about the energy and the enthusiasm. And so you've seen great examples of good teaching in high school. You have a fun, I'm seeing the pressure knob dial up, and that's a fun way of adding some stakes to what you're doing.

0:36:45 - (C): So you end up getting in a brave move. What did you have to lose? You end up and you bet on yourself and you win, you prove yourself. But as I've heard, my most recent guest, he was an aviator in the marines who ended up in basically their equivalent to top gun. And he said the Hollywood version is the Navy SeaLs and these special forces operators. The training is so hard. But he's like, the training was the easy part.

0:37:12 - (C): Like literally everything after the training was the hard part because they're shooting real bullets at me. I'm like, you're not training to do things, you're doing things. And so you graduate with your doctorate, you head off into the real world and have to now turn this into a career. What was that transition like?

0:37:32 - (Lisa Garner Santa): So, again, I was very lucky that living under creative karma piece. So in my last year at Rice in the coursework, so I took three years to do the coursework and was AbD and was like, oh, my God, what am I going to do? I've taken out so many student loans. I don't have a job. It's so competitive. I just started applying for every single job that was out there, even if I didn't perfectly fit the job.

0:38:02 - (Lisa Garner Santa): And I applied for a job at New Mexico State University that was originally listed as flute and double reads. I did not know anything about playing the oboe or the bassoon, but I applied for the job nonetheless and ended up taking the interview. And this is where, like, the every single connection along the way can be meaningful. So the director of bands at the time was Ken van Winkle, and he was a WT grad. So we had this WT connection, and I felt good about the interview, but they were also looking for someone who could do flute and double reads. And I think that's a really difficult combination.

0:38:46 - (Lisa Garner Santa): The embouchures are so different. So they ended up hiring me, and I did learn on the job how to teach oboe and bassoon fundamentals. I had to teach the beginning woodwind methods class for music education majors, and that included the basics of oboe masoon playing. But I was curious about it and interested, and so that curiosity helped me to meet that assignment. What I also had to do was teach music theory, which, again, I was pretty good at music theory.

0:39:19 - (Lisa Garner Santa): What I had absolutely no knowledge about, they assigned me the history of jazz. I am a classically trained fluke, one of the things that Carol Winstons would also often have us do if we're playing Mozart concerto rhythm is so crucial. So she would have us practice with the metronome on the offbeat. So when I came in to teach the masterclass, as part of the interview, someone was playing Mozart G major, and their rhythm wasn't as tight as it could be.

0:39:57 - (Lisa Garner Santa): And so I did this thing where I was snapping on the upbeat just to check their time. And I guess from that they thought, ah, she must know something about Jen. I still ended up teaching this class, and it was incredibly overwhelming for me because I just didn't know anything. But I learned so much, and my musical life is so much richer because of that experience. The first time I taught it, and I taught it for a few years, it was just staying literally, like, a day ahead of the students.

0:40:28 - (Lisa Garner Santa): But that repertoire, not only jazz rep as a whole, but all of the different eras and styles. It's just so amazing. And now I'm married to a jazz pianist. I think he was very impressed with my knowledge of jazz on our first date. I'll just say that I don't think you would meet many women who would know as much as I did at that time, but that was really. That was really challenging. And then in terms of flute playing, you were talking about the teaching influences in our lives and how we are always absorbing new knowledge about teaching and learning.

0:41:05 - (Lisa Garner Santa): And that first job was really the awakening to what a good teacher can do. And that awakening came with some suffering. And the hardest lesson, and I'll often tell my students this early in our study, is one of the hardest lessons I ever learned, was that my students are not me. So regardless of where I came from in a tiny town and whatever my economical or family dynamic was, and I think that you're interested in, what is this resilience piece? Why do some people have it and some people don't? I was lucky, so I had that, and I had a tenacity and level of persistence that served me well, and not everyone has access to that. And it's not a good, necessarily or a bad thing.

0:42:09 - (Lisa Garner Santa): I think it's related to the way we respond to our upbringing and to the cultures that we're born into. And I don't know that it's something that's taught. I think we land upon something that is more accepted by society. Working hard is accepted by society to a detriment. Right. We can work ourselves into illness, where self care or emotional expression sometimes isn't rewarded in the same sorts of way by our current society.

0:42:45 - (Lisa Garner Santa): So my coping mechanism was one that society rewards. And so that coping mechanism wasn't the same for all of my students, was a real turning point in the way that I teach.

0:43:02 - (C): Yeah.

0:43:04 - (Lisa Garner Santa): How do we meet students where they are rather than where we would have been or where we were at that point?

0:43:10 - (C): And that's so freighted with. There's a racial piece to that. There's a socioeconomic piece where I view everything through my own lens. And if you're different from me, I pass judgment on you because it doesn't align with my perception of right. And I've learned over the years that is. That's privileged incarnate. I need to meet my students where they are, not expect them to come to where I am. And maybe that's different in grad school and particularly in doc programs, but for an undergrad, they're still sorting through who they are as a human being, and I can either be the impetus to help them love learning or to drive them out of the enterprise altogether.

0:43:51 - (C): And I think that's important. I want to come back to that because that is a perfect segue into your yoga experience. So don't let me forget that. But before I go there. So you've got this doctorate and career in academia. Seems like a logical place to go with this. But you spent time in the Amarillo orchestra. You spent time in London. Where were those goals or dreams or those ideas of performance as a full time professional?

0:44:23 - (C): Did you just stuff those away, or did it get overshadowed by the teaching side of things?

0:44:28 - (Toby Brooks): I'm curious to know.

0:44:29 - (C): Did a dream die or did a new one sprout?

0:44:33 - (Lisa Garner Santa): No, that dream continued to live and still does. So when I was teaching at New Mexico State, I was very engaged as a performer. I performed with El Paso Symphony. I was the principal flutist in El Paso opera, El Paso ballet, El Paso chamber players. I was actually in an early music ensemble, right? So that was something that I learned to appreciate. At my time at Rice, I was gigging almost every night in El Paso.

0:45:01 - (Lisa Garner Santa): There were months at a time where I would not have a day off, where I wouldn't teach until four or 05:00, grab a quick bite to eat, get on the road, drive to El Paso for the evening rehearsal. Concerts on the weekends, start over on Monday, and took a lot of energy. We call it paying your dues. I don't even know if I believe in paying dues anymore, but it certainly gave me tons of experience learning lots of repertoire in short amounts of time.

0:45:33 - (Lisa Garner Santa): Yeah, I went through so much rep in those five years at New Mexico State playing in those ensembles. And again, I had paid my dues. I practiced a lot in graduate school and as an undergraduate, but a lot in graduate school. I don't want to toss it all up to good fortune. I was a serious student. I was talking recently with someone, I don't even know what. Music happened in the nineties because I was in school. Like, I didn't even know. I didn't even really know Nirvana until I had a son. And he started listening to Nirvana, and I'm like, who is this? This is awesome. He said, mom, how can you not know this? And I'm like, because I had my head buried in Stravinsky and Shostakovich and Erin Copeland. And then I was also learning the history of jazz.

0:46:15 - (Lisa Garner Santa): When I first started teaching this, I didn't have time to listen to Nirvana. I was a pretty focused student and very serious student.

0:46:25 - (Toby Brooks): As a professor for the last 20 plus years, I certainly get what Lisa is saying here. On one hand, there's the gratification and the satisfaction of being in the classroom or the lab. The connections I've made over the years with students have been incredibly rich and rewarding. There's a desire in my soul to teach, and there's no way I could feel fully complete without it. On the other hand, that professor life, for me at least, comes at a cost.

0:46:52 - (Toby Brooks): I left full time clinical practice as an athletic trainer quite a while ago. Being a professor of athletic training and being an athletic trainer are two entirely different paths. And while I've been able to do some event coverage and also treat and take care of my friends and family family over the years, it usually comes in the form of nights and weekend side hustles, and it still isn't the same as full time work.

0:47:14 - (Toby Brooks): For Lisa, her start in academia was exciting and busy and fulfilling, but she still wanted to do more than just teach music. She wanted to play music. So she immersed herself in every imaginable opportunity in the nearby El Paso art scene. And eventually that added work opened the door for opportunity to return even closer to home. Here's just a little sneak peek of Lisa on the flute.

0:47:56 - (Lisa Garner Santa): Yes, those performance dreams lived on, and it's actually through the active performance that I ended up at Texas Tech. So I was playing, playing in my last year at New Mexico State University in the Santa Fe pro Musica chamber ensemble, which at that time didn't have a conductor, which I will say I enjoyed quite a bit. The musicians were the leaders. It was a giant chamber ensemble, and they were on tour that winter in Colorado. And so on the bus.

0:48:24 - (Lisa Garner Santa): The trumpet teacher from Texas Tech at the time, Will Strider, was also in the orchestra, and I was asking him questions. So how's the search going at Texas Tech and having grown up in West Texas and, I don't know, Texas Tech just seemed like such a big idea to me. It was, like, so big. I had so much reverence for it. He thought, it's going pretty well, but you should apply for this job. And I was like, really?

0:48:50 - (Lisa Garner Santa): And I was also thinking, after having been in England and Florida and then New Mexico, do I really want to go back to West Texas? And so I called some mentors, and they were like, oh, yes, you absolutely should apply for this job. So I did, and I came for the interview, and I had such a great time. I loved the student. Hemley looked the same as it did when I had gone to bandcamp. It felt very comfortable. It felt easy. It felt like, this is like coming home.

0:49:20 - (Lisa Garner Santa): To me, this is like coming home. And I remember after the day of the interview, just going back to the hotel room and crying because I knew change was coming. I felt it. And I went back to Las Cruces, and I think that was maybe, like, on a Thursday or Friday. And the following Monday, I got a call with a job offer to come to tech. And, yeah, I took it. And so I gave up several regular performing opportunities in El Paso.

0:49:48 - (Lisa Garner Santa): Taking the job in Lubbock, it wasn't like I could commute from Lubbock to El Paso every night. But I eventually did end up playing in many ensembles in Lubbock, including the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra, which I did for seven years, and decided after I had my son, in the weeks of rehearsal, he would reach for his dad and not for me. I was like, I think I need to focus on family right now. I left the orchestra at that time, but since then, I've done Lubbock Chamber orchestra. I do a lot of chamber music.

0:50:19 - (Lisa Garner Santa): I've subbed in LSo many times, and I do a lot of recital performances and concerto performances with different ensembles and things like that. So I haven't left performing. It's just. It looks a little different than it did at the beginning.

0:50:35 - (C): Right. I would say one of the many things that I love about you and your Persona is your centeredness, your balance. You certainly are passionate about music, but you're passionate about being a good teacher of music and being a yoga instructor. When did this enter the equation? It's certainly part of your self care. I have to think that it plays a role in making you a more versatile and more well rounded musician, because, let's face it, your instrument is an extension of your body, and if your body isn't in condition, then the collective instrument isn't as good as it could be. So talk me through how that entered into your journey.

0:51:14 - (Lisa Garner Santa): Yeah. So the yoga started in either late 2002, early 2003, after the birth of my son. My son was delivered via emergency c section. He was Frank Bridge, and I had been working with a prenatal massage therapist, Janice Finsky. She was so fabulous, and she was really helping me. I had a very difficult pregnancy, a lot of pain in my pregnancy, and so she helped me through that, and she also taught yoga classes out of her home, but I wasn't really going to her for yoga. I was going to her for massage, but then I had the c section, which is trauma to the body in a significant way.

0:51:59 - (Lisa Garner Santa): And so I asked her, I said, do you think that yoga could help me heal from this c section? She was like, why do you want to apply yoga? Why don't you want to just do the law? She was a little suspicious because I think that was the beginning, very early beginnings of the. The trend, right? The trend of yoga. Like, on the cusp of the trend. This is, like, before hot yoga, before goat yoga, all the other yoga and mimosas. This was like. But the popularity of yoga, it was still really early, but she could sense that she wanted to work with people who were in it for the right reasons. And so I started taking classes out of her home. They were small, three to five people in a class was lots of individual attention. It was mostly restorative practices. So slow moving, holding poses for long periods of time.

0:52:49 - (Lisa Garner Santa): And I love it. I fell in love with it. And I studied with her for a few years, and then she moved to Port Angeles, Washington, because she wanted to be a place where she could hike. She was in her sixties at the time and wanted to keep herself active and healthy and felt that Lubbock had its challenges in that regard. And so she moved to the Pacific north, and I was left without a yoga teacher. And so I returned to an old form of fitness, which was running.

0:53:21 - (Lisa Garner Santa): I started running when I was in college and had done that, I don't know, up until my pregnancy. And so then when she left, the yoga went out the window, and I went back to running. And it's efficient. Running is efficient. You get a big bang for the buck. But I was seeing a new massage therapist, and she was like, Lisa, I don't know if the running's serving you, because she also knew how, quote unquote, hard I worked.

0:53:48 - (Lisa Garner Santa): So I hinted at working as a coping mechanism for me. And it really was. It was a way to avoid some of the challenges that I had in my family upbringing. And it was a way that was met with a lot of achievement, a lot of success, a lot of recognition. And so it was meeting needs, work equaled, needs met. So I was continuing to work a lot, and then I was running issues. I think that you might maybe need to find another yoga teacher. There's this new person at the Y. I think you might enjoy her teaching.

0:54:21 - (Lisa Garner Santa): And Stephanie Stuttler was her name. She was very young. She was, I think, 28 years old. And I went to her classes. And I remember that very first class in the Y, the old why on 33rd and just off Boston. And there was something about the class and the way that she taught that class that left me sobbing at the end of the class, I was sobbing. You know, the body holds a lot. The body holds so, so much memory.

0:54:49 - (Lisa Garner Santa): And so something had been released, and I was like, this is amazing. So I started going to her classes, and then I started taking private lessons with her. I started teaching classes at the Y, and it was amazing to me. So with what we do in academia or as a music teacher, we work with students every semester for, I don't know, from their freshman year until their senior year if they're an undergrad. So that's anywhere from four to six semesters.

0:55:20 - (Lisa Garner Santa): You develop this relationship over time and growth over a very long period of time. And then they go out into the world either to study performance as graduate students or as music educators, and they go into the field, and then maybe six to ten years later, you get a note. You get a note in the mail. I've been doing this long enough to know the pattern now, so it takes kind of ten years for them to say, oh, thank you.

0:55:47 - (Lisa Garner Santa): This impacted my life in these ways. And then you can really see the impact, and that's so fantastic and worth celebrating. My first yoga class, I went in to teach the class, and people come in and they're frazzled from whatever happened on that day. And you lead them through. If a class is structured well, you lead them through an experience, and by the end of the experience, you see the transformation immediately, that hour and a half, and they walk out looking, sounding, and feeling different than the moment they walked in. And I was like, whoa, this is so powerful. But there was also, like, this immediate gratification to it in academia.

0:56:38 - (Lisa Garner Santa): You've been in it long enough to know that there are these cycles where it's like, oh, I'm loving what I do. I'm making a difference. This is wonderful. Students are amazing and awesome. And then there are the other sides of academia that involve paperwork and policies and our own, my own, I can only speak for myself, my own sense of, do I even matter? I'm working myself into a frenzy. And does anyone even notice?

0:57:07 - (Lisa Garner Santa): So I was on one of those downward swings in academia. So I was like, you know what? I'm going to become a yoga teacher. So I went off and I did yoga teacher training. Palo center for Health and Yoga. Amazing place. I did the immersive program where you live there for a month, and it was absolutely transformational. Had a flute teacher, a flute mentor at the time, Leon Bise, who taught at Rice after Carol Winston's for many years. And her son in law was one of the administrators of the Korpalo Institute.

0:57:38 - (Lisa Garner Santa): And so while she wasn't a yoga teacher herself, she knew enough about Korpala to know what I was getting into. And she said, lisa, you understand when you come back from there, you're not going to be the same person. I was like, that sounds a little scary, Leon, when you. But, okay, you know, I'm ready. I'm ready for some transformation. I'm ready to grow. Growth isn't a value for me. So, yeah, I want to do it. What I didn't know is that across the street from the Korpalu Institute is the Tanglewood Institute, which is the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

0:58:20 - (Lisa Garner Santa): There's that luck again. And at that time, the time that I was there, Kopralo was very in the middle of a huge study of the impact of yoga. They were doing control studies on yoga's impact on dancers, musicians and athletes. And so I talked with their director of the center for Extraordinary Living, which sounds like a dream job, Stephen Koch. At the time, he was gracious enough to give me a meeting, and we talked about some of the early findings of that study. And I was like, this is what I meant to do. I meant to take these practices to musicians. So then I came back to tech, and I started a yoga for musicians class that evolved into yoga and the creative arts philosophy and practice undergraduate core curriculum class.

0:59:15 - (Lisa Garner Santa): And so I did those classes for a long time, and that was incredibly rewarding.

0:59:22 - (C): Yeah, that's super cool. As you're talking, I was reminded of a quote I came across this week. There's no doubt you're a high performer. You've achieved on a global level, and I certainly sense that there's a perfectionist spirit within you. I read a quote that said, there's protection and perfectionism. And as a perfectionist myself, I know a lot of times it's rooted in me wanting to be my best. But if I really get vulnerable and honest about it, it's rooted in some insecurity, and that comes from a deep place, and it's probably just me. But if you could go back in time and speak a word of encouragement to young Lisa in the town where you grew up, knowing what you know now about your journey, what would you tell her and why?

1:00:21 - (Lisa Garner Santa): I would tell her that it's all going to be okay. That you can trust yourself, that everything that you need to know and you just have to believe it. Yeah, that's a really a powerful question. And I think connecting with younger versions of ourselves, whether that's the middle school Lisa, who is just learning how to play the flip and put it together, or whether that was the. You know, I didn't share a lot of the drama around flute playing.

1:01:11 - (Lisa Garner Santa): There could be lots of drama. Your daughter's a soprano, right? So you.

1:01:15 - (C): She's Metso met.

1:01:16 - (Lisa Garner Santa): Okay. You know, enough about drama in music that even when you're met with adversity or the longing for acceptance, that that need ultimately is met when you learn to love and accept yourself.

1:01:44 - (C): Yeah, that's well said. I also have to wonder, what if that band teacher had come to you with a snare drum instead of a flute?

1:01:53 - (Lisa Garner Santa): My God, I would have been so happy because I wanted to play the drums, because my mother played the drums in this band. I have these amazing photos of her, this very classic 1960, dressed with her drumsticks and her drum set. And I totally wanted to play the drum, so I would have been all over it. They would not let me play the drums because I. So there you go.

1:02:16 - (C): The same thing. She got stuck with a baritone in middle school. She wanted to play the drums as well. And that, I think that cut her band career short. So that's what drove her to choir. I want to say next, the last question. This is always an interesting one for an actual musician. I love music and the emotions that it can convey in ways that words can't. If we were to watch a montage of your life, what song would you choose to play in the background and why?

1:02:45 - (Lisa Garner Santa): Oh, prince, let's go crazy.

1:02:47 - (C): There we go. I love it. People either they either agonize over that question and they can't come up with it, or it's right there at the surface. I love it.

1:02:59 - (Lisa Garner Santa): Have fun. Life is short.

1:03:02 - (C): Fantastic. Last one. I promise this is it. What? For Lisa Garner, Santa remains undone.

1:03:09 - (Lisa Garner Santa): It's a really timely question. So I don't feel like I'm done for sure. But I am at a stage in the academic career. I'm at a later stage in the academic career as a full professor, someone who the positionality to work for positive change. I think that my focus is beginning, not beginning, continuing to shift toward making change beyond the not. There's no just every student that we work with is a gym. Right.

1:03:52 - (Lisa Garner Santa): But going beyond the impact in the classroom to make some changes that can be, I don't know if deeper is the right word, but different that have maybe a broader reach, they may not even be as visible. When we start looking at policy and procedure and how that enhances or challenges progress, I think there are opportunities there for those who can to act. So that's where I'm feeling some of my pull right now. So I was talking recently with student disability services and one of the big differences between k through twelve is k through twelve is very success focused and the university is very access focused.

1:04:55 - (Lisa Garner Santa): So we make sure everybody has access, but that doesn't mean that everybody's gonna be supported in finding success.

1:05:03 - (C): Right?

1:05:04 - (Lisa Garner Santa): And I think we can do better than access. Yes, absolutely. Access. But I also think that we can do better in helping every student find a pathway to success.

1:05:19 - (C): Yeah.

1:05:20 - (Lisa Garner Santa): Well, those are, those are some of the undone's for me. Yeah.

1:05:23 - (C): Yeah. That's great. Lisa, it's been a tremendous conversation. I can't thank you enough for agreeing to pop in and allow me to probe at your journey. It's been a fantastic one and I sincerely appreciate your openness and your candor today.

1:05:40 - (Lisa Garner Santa): Thank you, Toby. And it's wonderful to spend more time with you and to get to know more about you as well. I really enjoy our time together.

1:05:47 - (Toby Brooks): Awesome.

1:05:47 - (C): Same here.

1:05:48 - (Lisa Garner Santa): My name is Lisa Garner Santa and I am undone.

1:05:54 - (Toby Brooks): I'm thankful to Lisa for dropping in and I hope you enjoyed our conversation. For more info on today's episode, be sure to check it out on the web. Simply go to undonepodcast.com eph to see the notes, links and images related to todays guest doctor Lisa Garner Santa. You know, if youve got a great story that we can all be inspired by, or if you know of one, id love to hear about it. Surf on over to undonepodcast.com and click that contact tab in the top menu and drop me a note.

1:06:22 - (Toby Brooks): Coming up, weve got the incredible story of former college and professional football player Brad Brennan. Also, ill be switching up the format a little bit, working in some documentaries of the people, places and music that have inspired me. Along the way, in a new docuseries called the Climb on Deck, I'll have the story of former McDonald's All American, first overall NBA draft pick, legendary Charlotte Hornet Larry Johnson, as well as the incredible story of the 1990s r and B group high five.

1:06:48 - (Toby Brooks): With some luck, maybe I'll convince LJ or some members of high five to join the show. Either way, stay tuned. This and more coming up on becoming undone. Becoming Undone is a nitro hype creative production written and produced by me Toby Brooks this episode brought to you by Forte. For now, I'm a one person show relying on AI tools from descript, decipher and opus clip to create, produce and deliver the best show I know how. To. You, my cherished friends and listeners.

1:07:32 - (Toby Brooks): Follow the show on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn at becoming undone Pod and follow me obijbrooks on x Instagram and TikTok. Check out my link tree at UNCTR dot ee Tobyjbrooks Listen, subscribe and leave me a review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartradio or wherever you get yourself your podcasts. Till next time friend. Keep getting better.