Resilience and Triumph: Overcoming Life-Altering Challenges with Kijuan Amey

When life suddenly changes, it can feel like everything is falling apart. You might wonder, Where do I find the strength to keep going? Resilience is about finding that courage inside yourself to face the hardest moments and keep moving forward no matter what. In this episode of Actions Antidotes, we are joined by Kijuan Amey, founder of Amey Motivation—a U.S. Air Force veteran, speaker, author, and resilience coach who shares his powerful story of resilience following a life-changing motorcycle accident. Kijuan recounts his background in the Air Force, his transition to civilian life, and the fateful day in May 2017 that altered his life's trajectory. He discusses the immediate aftermath of his accident, the extensive medical procedures and recovery process, and how he overcame the physical and emotional challenges to regain his sense of self-worth and purpose. Kijuan’s journey from being in a medically induced coma to becoming a motivational speaker and author of Don't Focus on Why Me offers valuable lessons on resilience, the importance of a supportive mindset, and finding direction after a dramatic life event. If you’ve ever faced a major setback or want to build your ability to bounce back from life’s ups and downs, this episode is for you. --- Listen to the podcast here: Resilience and Triumph: Overcoming Life-Altering Challenges with Kijuan Amey Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you all about resilience, and resilience can mean a lot of different things, but if you go about your life long enough, eventually, you’ll have some sort of event, some sort of event happen to you, whether it be something like losing a job, losing a key family member, losing a good friend, and, in this particular case, an accident that can happen anytime you’re going about your day to day life that can really change your life’s trajectory. My guest today is Kijuan Amey and he has a story about an accident as well and his resilience around it. He is an Air Force veteran and a motivational speaker. --- Kijuan, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for having me here, Stephen. I truly appreciate you having me on to speak about my story on your platform. Well, thank you for your willingness to share your story with my audience. I know we’re all trying to be better people in one way or another or trying to achieve something, and it is a real big deal when something specific happens to you, so tell us a little bit about where your story begins. This was May 5, 2017. I was, at the time, in the United States Air Force Reserve. I did four years active and I said, “I’m done with this.” I wanted to get away from that lifestyle, shall I say. And I think I made the best choice for me, personally. Other people, they love the active duty world, but I made the best decision for my life, and then not only just to be a reservist but to also go to school full time so I was pursuing my bachelor’s degree because I also wanted to become a pilot ultimately, and the job that I was doing in the Air Force was in-flight refueling and that’s where you refuel planes in midair. Amazing. To me, hands down, I think the best enlisted job I’ve ever heard. I don’t care what anybody says. So just amazing to see another plane fly up to you, right behind you as you’re flying in the air and you can refuel them, and I just call it a flying gas station, basically. So, quickly, how did that work? Because I’m trying to picture it in my head now, the idea that one plane is flying and another one is kind of coming up. Does someone have to actually jump out of the airplane and connect it the way we fill up our cars at the gas station? Yeah, no, if we had army guys on the plane, we would make them do that. But, no, we don’t do that. Okay. Yeah, no, so we have this thing we call the boom and what you do is you lower it, basically like the nozzle at the gas station, you lower it down and I can control it from the inside of the plane. Oh, so you’re remotely controlling it. I’m literally in the KCN-35 that I was flying in, which is a Boeing 707 body type so you can get a picture. That plane, I can walk to the back of the plane, just like you would do on any commercial airliner, but there’s a crawl space that I had to go into so you stepped down two steps and you get in the middle, literally the middle of the airplane, and lay down on your stomach, and what we say is we lay down on our stomach and pass gas. And so I controlled the boom with my right hand, with the ruddervator control stick, and I extended and retracted it with the extension lever –– telescope lever, there you go, that’s the name of that. And so the plane comes up to you and you’re flying that thing around, whether it’s a fighter, another tanker, because some of them can be refueled, they’re also air refuel capable. You can have cargo planes such as a C-5, C-17, or the C-130 come up behind you, or even some reconnaissance planes like the AWACS or you can have a bomber, a B-1, B-2, B-52, because that’s actually what our plan was made for, the B-52, to carry out missions for the Cold War. That’s literally what those plans were made for. They were to be exhausted, glide somewhere, hopefully. That’s literally how those planes were built. They were built to exhaust all gas into this bomber for it to make it over to Russia and then it was going to glide wherever it could. Oh, so we can make it all the way across from the US or from like a naval base in Germany. Yeah, the bombers would make it from what we gave them, because they couldn’t take off with all that gas with the payloads that they were carrying, which means all the bombs that they’re carrying. So we would give them gas in the sky and they would take all of our gas and we would just be like, “Well, guys, it’s been real. Hopefully we make it somewhere.” And then, yeah, so then you had to like find a place to land, usually. In regular times, yes. But if the Cold War actually would have happened, like they would have actually turned keys and shot off those missiles, there was nowhere to land. Oh, I see. That would have literally been the end of the US. Wow. Yeah, no, the fallout was going to be real. That was it. If you’ve ever seen those, I guess depictions of Hiroshima, yeah, it would have been way worse. We also have what we call probe and drogue adapters, which is a hose that connects a basket, or Iron Maiden is what we call it, but it’s a huge basket. That thing’s massive, and it’s for like those Navy guys and the Harrier, which is a Marine plane. But those guys, they use a probe, which is like a –– how can I put it? It’s literally something that kind of wants to poke into something else. You have the basket and then probing that and it seats and cups it and so that’s how they get their fuel is through that versus what our planes do, we just –– we basically poke them. Oh, yeah. We poke them instead of having –– the Navy guys try to poke us because they miss. But, anyway… So, yes, so you have that job, sorry to put everything –– Yeah, no worries. And my thought process, because we were getting ready to switch planes and get new ones that I didn’t want to be a part of the air refueling boom operator side of it, I didn’t mind flying it with the boom operator side –– they were basically putting computers on the plane. Oh, yeah, yeah, one of those. Why would I want to look at a computer screen and I’m on the plane? Yeah. I mean, they’re putting computers everywhere right now so –– I’m like this is stupid. What can go wrong with cameras, right? Like, really? But, anyway, they’re still having problems with that plane, to say the least, and it’s been out for a while now. Yeah. So that’s when you decided you were done with that job and going to the reserves. I mean, honestly, my ultimate goal is to become a pilot anyway, because they make the real money. And so I wanted to make the six figures. I went to school to get my bachelor’s in computer information systems with a specialization in systems analysis and integration, which is a long way of saying, “Hey, you know how to code and build user interfaces.” That’s really all the same. And so they just know how to make it cute. Yeah, yeah, it is but all those words. Yeah, fancy, fancy-schmancy. And then I also had my own business. I was the CEO and founder of Kiwi Enterprise, which was where I did website design and management, which is I learned that in my degree. Social media marketing, I actually learned that online. And photography, I learned that through YouTube University. So I’m very, very self-taught and I also love to learn. I never stop learning, even ’til today, I just do not stop learning because –– I love that YouTube University –– –– there’s so much. There’s so much out here to learn. Yeah, there’s always something to learn. And I’m not saying I want to learn it all because, good Lord, I think my brain would explode, but what I’m saying is I like to keep my mind busy. And that that brings me to another side topic. Sorry, we keep going off on tangents –– Yeah, go ahead. –– with your story but I read some things about the difference between pursuit of learning and the pursuit of entertainment. And, obviously, there’s a lot of things, and sometimes we just need to be entertained, because sometimes we need to give our brains a break and just watch a funny show or something like that, like there is some sort of correlation with success, with people who at least have some level of drive for learning with their spare time in addition to the standard drive for entertainment. Absolutely....