Finding your why—in life and in finances—with cancer survivor and disability advocate Brenna Huckaby Credit Talk

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Host Victor Cruz introduces Credit Confidence, a new podcast that helps listeners learn about the importance of credit, how to manage their credit score, and empower their financial future. In this episode, he sits down with Brenna Huckaby, a five-time world champion para snowboarder, cancer survivor, disability advocate, motivational speaker, and proud mom of two, to talk about her path from cancer to financial security and how mental health can influence financial decision making.
A life worth fighting for
Brenna tells Victor she was a freshman in high school when she received her cancer diagnosis and lost her leg. She had dreams of becoming a college gymnast and was well on her way to achieving that goal, but now she had to change the future she’d imagined for herself. “It was more than just losing my hair, losing my friends, losing my leg,” she says. “It was also about losing the passions and the future that I thought I was going to have.”
After Brenna was cancer-free, she was determined to work hard in her second chance at life. “I knew that I wanted to live a life worth fighting for,” she tells Victor. That meant finding new goals and new passions to pursue. She found them when she was invited on a ski trip with her hospital. The goal of the trip, she says, was to achieve something hard—ski—so that she could go back home and live an ordinary life. On the trip, Brenna was drawn to snowboarding, which she found more challenging than skiing. Soon, snowboarding became her new passion. Within three years, she was competing and succeeding at the sport’s highest levels.
The Golden Method
Brenna was winning snowboarding competitions and finding great success. As Victor points out, it took a lot of discipline and diligence to overcome her challenges to reach that level of success. To help others do that same thing, Brenna developed the Golden Method and shares it as a motivational speaker. 
The Golden Method is a six-step process for overcoming adversity that starts with Grieve: “I allow myself the opportunity to grieve the life that I thought I was going to have, the opportunities, the moments, whatever it is. I just allow myself to grieve that experience. And then I go to the O, which is Observe what worked in the past.” For Brenna, that was athletics. The L stands for Love yourself enough to take care of yourself and to advocate for yourself. D stands for Determine your why—find something greater than yourself to push for. For Brenna, that was all the people she lost to cancer. E is for Enjoy the process, and N means (K)Now Your Worth. 
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Achieving success as an athlete was not the end of Brenna’s adversity because, as she tells Victor, disabled athletes typically don’t make a lot of money. But when Brenna became pregnant with her first daughter at age 19, she says, that needed to change. She needed to make money, and that created a lot of stress for her that manifested physically. She developed red nodules on her leg and developed peripheral blindness. She couldn’t eat dairy. Brenna says the only cure for these symptoms was to eliminate stress, and to do that she began to see a therapist. 
To achieve her financial goals, Brenna created a budget and began to make smarter spending decisions: “I've learned most of the spending that I have had has been because I'm trying to achieve a look of success because I think that's what I need to have in order for people to take me seriously,” she explains. “And so I've had to really work through that, figure out what my priorities are.” 
In terms of advice for others, Brenna sums it up this way: “The biggest thing just comes down to knowing yourself and living for yourself.”