In 2013, the FBI arrested Molly Bloom and confiscated her assets due to illegal activities related to her poker business.

In 2018, she attended the Academy Awards after her bestselling memoir, “Molly’s Game,” earned an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay.

Bloom shared her amazing turnaround story during the 2019 CUNA Lending Council Conference Sunday in New Orleans.

The one-time world-class skier found her way to high-stakes poker after a brutal injury on the slopes derailed her Olympic dreams. “I tripped on a stick—sometimes that happens in life,” she says.

Bloom’s boss at the time, the owner of a popular Hollywood club, hired her to serve drinks at a poker game attended by some of Hollywood’s A-list actors.

She ultimately took over that game and others, making millions of dollars along the way—until everything came crashing down.

“In a moment, it was over—like tripping on a stick,” Bloom says.

She blames herself for the fall. “What stopped working was me. It started to become about greed—more wasn’t enough. I started to lose contact with my family and friends, and I was drinking too much. The train started to wobble off the tracks.”

At the age of 33, she moved in with her mother. “I got clean, sober, and accountable,” Bloom says. “It was a tough pill to swallow, but it was the start of my new life.”

She realized her greatest financial asset at the time was her story. And the rest is history.

Bloom, who’s now writing a book about overcoming obstacles, cites three ways to achieve a state of continuous growth:

1. Change your mindset with meditation. Doing so causes positive changes in peoples’ brains, she says. “Meditation has made me more confident, composed, and happy.”

2. Stay true to your character. Bloom suggests conducting a daily character review to gauge how you measure up. She aims to adhere to her goal of being unselfish and brave.

“This way, you stay in a constant state of expansion and growth,” she says. “This improves your self-esteem and confidence.”

3. Act. “There’s no substitute for action,” Bloom says. “ I didn’t know how to write a book—and it was terrible at first. But I kept writing.

“If we do these three things, we have a shot at surviving this world.”

►Click here for more conference coverage from CUNA News, and get live updates on Twitter via @CUNA_News, @CUMagazine, @CUNACouncils, and by using the #LendingCouncil hashtag. Learn more about the CUNA Lending Council, a member-led professional society for credit union executives, at cunacouncils.org.